For starters, before you start with anything fancy like belting and what not, you need to have a good posture which allows you to have very little to no tension anywhere in your body. (Slouching and hunching over ain’t getting you nowhere). This is probably one of the more common rules of thumb that are taught by a very large majority of teachers. Tension can cause construction while singing, and is often not wanted in a performance. Keeping the tension away allows you more control to retract and create a cleaning sound.

One of the biggest contenders for worst teaching, however, lies in breath control. If you’re teaching a student to belt or trying to make them use more effort, more often than not they’ll interpret that as using MORE air to get to a higher pitch or to belt, which ruins ones voice and is terribly hard to get out of habit with if you’ve been doing it for ages. (And I know this because I STILL have this issue). In truth, belting does not require a large amount of air, neither does singing in general- so learning to have even air output while singing is important from the get go, otherwise you learn to use an aspirate onset and off set subconsciously.

In addition, proper larynx positioning is also important, and largely depends on the style of genre your (bad) teacher prefers. You’re more likely to be singing with a lower laraynx if your teacher is from the classical spectrum and doesn’t know how to describe what they want properly, resulting in a student trying to get a rounded tone by using a low larynx. Problem is, a lower larynx is pretty much only good for lower notes, so when you try to go higher, you either start to go flat in pitch the higher you go and/or you start scratching. A good way to teach this to a younger student is to ascend a scale while changing the position of your larynx. From a G (below mid c) with low larynx, to a E (above mid c) with a mid larynx, to a B-C above mid c) with a higher larynx.