Completely failed by beginner piano class at the end of the year
I teach high school music, and two of my classes are a beginner piano class. My classes are mixed grades but I have mostly seniors in both. This year I felt the best I've ever felt teaching this class; I had a good balance between working on written theory/understanding music reading and practicing the skills on the keyboard. By March these classes were the most "advanced" I'd ever had; they were much more self sufficient and were able to read notation and practice with improvement on their own without me needing to breathe down their neck constantly. The majority will sit and do nothing in class unless explicitly told otherwise, but once I realized that they're not going to do any work unless I almost physically herd them to their keyboards and/or tank their grades (which I HATE doing but they give me no choice) I could get them to stay pretty consistent playing basic songs with two or three chords in the left hand and more "complex" rhythms (eighth notes, dotted half notes,etc).
I decided to try and extend their learning and get them building major/minor chords, learning to read them in root/1st/2nd inversions, and play pop progressions i.e. "All of Me" by John Legend. We spent about three weeks learning to read and build chords in root, how to invert, and then how to read those inversions on sheet music. We completed worksheets and I showed them one by one how to place their hands on the keyboard for each chord and how the inversions help move to each chord without changing the entire position. It was going well...until it wasn't.
Admittedly, I gave them about a week where their only objective was to practice. They had options to play All of Me, or Memories by Maroon 5, or the standard 12 bar blues chord progression in C Major. Somewhere in that week of individual practice many of them seemed to completely forget how to do any of it. They're not stacking chords from bottom to top and acting like they have zero clue what they're looking at when looking at a chord, they ignore accidentals even though I've laid it out plainly for them, they'll try to play chords by bending their fingers and hands in crazy ways and them complaining that they can't play it...I'm at a loss. Music is not easy and it won't come naturally to everyone, but I feel like I've given them literally everything I could to learn and succeed and they've strangely either forgotten completely or are just not worried about actually doing it and are just trying to press buttons so I get off their back. I don't know if it's just the end of year or what, but I feel like I somehow destroyed all progress by trying to switch it up. None of them are going to go off to continue to play piano as far as I can tell, I know most of them are in the class because it's required to take an arts credit, but the rapid decline makes me feel like any progress this years was wasted. Just bummed.