The Art of Teaching

The Art of Teaching is different from, say, the art of painting, or the art of playing an instrument, different from the art of tuning a piano, or the art of making a beautiful home.

If you mess up your painting, you’ve got a messed up painting. If you mess up on your instrument, you messed up a piece of music. If you don’t do a good job tuning that piano, then you’ve got a messed up piano which is annoying and can be expensive to fix.

When you mess up in your teaching, you are messing with a human being.

So, why is it that people who know how to play their instrument but have NO training in regard to teaching are let loose on pupils?

Recently, I had the opportunity to observe some poor and inexperienced teaching. One of the two teachers had a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching, in addition to a frenetic and somewhat chaotic personality (and teaching style). While this teacher was without a doubt very experienced, the lesson itself was not a very promising sign of things to come: it was crammed full with irrelevant information (way too much theory that would not be applicable/useful for several weeks), redundant information (without checking with the student what he already knew, this teacher “taught” concepts with which the student was thoroughly familiar already), and way too little actual instruction on the instrument. The student was not given sufficient time to try out the new concept and then make sure that it was sufficiently understood to be taken home and practiced for a week.

The other teacher had a much more pleasant personality and some day will probably be a good teacher. At the moment, however, this one has neither the experience nor the training to teach a beginning student. After grousing about how inexperienced this teacher was, I came to the realization that it was not inexperience but the obvious lack of pedagogical training which made the lesson unsuccessful.

We all start out “inexperienced”. None of us are born with experience. There’s a first time for everything. There’s a first time a physician performs an exam or a surgery. There’s the race car driver’s first race.

What sets these people apart is the fact that before their first “real” thing they did spend time, usually a very long time, observing their masters, and then learning to practice their craft, usually under the guidance of their masters.

For some reason, people think that as long as you can play an instrument, you can teach. I actually once overheard the wife of the head of a music department at a university tell one of the professors something to the effect of “I don’t understand what there is to learn about teaching: you gotta love kids and you gotta love what you do.” There. She said it. What more could there possibly be to it?

There are, of course, “natural” teachers, just like there are “natural” psychologists, people who have an instinctive, intuitive, “feel” for people. But think of the training a psychologist has to undergo before she is allowed to practice her craft!

My wish list for pedagogical training of any future teacher of musical instruments includes:

•mandatory lesson observations of different masters in their field, more than just once or twice please;

•study the art of teaching their particular instrument: while there is some flexibility, there is usually a certain order in which things need to be learned (master addition before you attempt multiplication) or else you end up with an unreliable foundation;

•study the teaching literature for their instrument: just because you grew up with a certain method doesn’t mean it’s the best;

•teach many, many lessons under the supervision of your teacher/master. In the beginning, this should take the form of observing your teacher’s lesson (of another student) and taking over for 5 minutes to teach a certain concept. Over time, you grow into teaching an entire lesson, more time and you’ll be creating your own lesson plans.

In short, some form of apprenticeship.  Think about a physician’s first surgery. Regardless of how simple the surgery, the physician has most likely observed this surgery many, many times, then, with more training (reading about it, studying all aspects of it, passing tests to prove she understands all aspects of it), assisted in this surgery before she ever gets to touch a patient without supervision.

Of course, you say, well, with surgery – you have to be that careful.

But why should a student’s learning process be different from surgery? As a teacher who gets transfer students, I see all the time the damage a teacher with insufficient training can do to a student who doesn’t know any better.

I dream of a world in which we hold (the training of) teachers of musical instruments to the same standards as physicians, psychologists, and other professionals in charge of human development and health.

(Originally published Nov 19, 2009)

 

What I have learned

I have been teaching for a while now, and like most piano teachers, I heartily regret the first ten or so years of my teaching career – I had no idea what I was doing. My degree is in Performance and Pedagogy, so I thought I knew what I was doing, but like most piano teachers coming straight out of college, we tend to teach beginners up to intermediate students the way we were taught in grad school: emphasis on interpretation and performance, minute details, some technique, not nearly enough effort and time spent on building a good foundation, nor taking the time for lots and LOTS of repetition.

I shouldn’t be, but I am surprised that I am still learning new and important things. One of the recent most impactful ones came out of my growing frustration when students didn’t play well at a lesson.

I try to be very precise and unambiguous with the things I want my students to work on at home, but still, students were often not as well-prepared as I thought they could be. I remember one student in particular who kind of stumbled through his piece. I realized I was getting angry at his seeming lack of preparedness, especially since we had carefully set up goals and strategies at the previous lesson – and then his mother said, “At home he doesn’t play hands together, he only plays hands separately.” – So why on earth would you try to play hands together at the lesson?? When I asked him to play hands separately it was obvious that he was in fact very well-prepared.

So now, regardless of what a student asks – “Do you want me to play hands together or hands separately?” or “with metronome or without?” or “with the book or without?” or anything else -, I say, “Play it the way you play it at home.”

Sometimes they will say things like “- but I only got through the first two lines” to which I respond, “Then I would like to hear the first two lines.” – “But I only know the right hand” – “Then I would love to hear right hand for the first two lines.”

Once in a while a student seems to struggle with a piece and when I ask, “How do you play it at home?” they may sheepishly say, “Well – I usually play it *really* fast …”  No wonder they don’t recognize the piece when they try to play it at the correct (= slower) tempo for me.

One would think that my students have become used to this “Play it the way you play it at home” but every so often there is a student who plays through a piece and it gets progressively worse and worse. Why?  “I only practiced the first page, I haven’t learned the second one yet.”  So they were sight-reading through the second page (but making it appear like the second page was part of their preparation). I try to explain that that is not a smart idea because it makes it look like they didn’t practice at home.

I guess, it all comes down, again, to communication.

 

New Students

(publ. Nov. 2021) Over the last 15 months or so quite a few new students have come into the studio, and because I have a strict mask policy I have yet to see their faces. I know their eyes, and I know their voice, and their favorite outfits and their favorite masks; I am sure I would recognize them if I ran into them in a store.

The other day, someone other than a parent dropped off one of the younger students and said she wouldn’t come inside because she forgot her mask. I offered her a mask which she gratefully accepted, and that’s when I realized that it was, in fact, the mother of the student. I had never seen her face, and I was stunned at how very different she looked without a mask.

Yesterday, I asked the mother of another young student if it would be ok for me to take a picture of her daughter at the piano, and if it would be ok for her to pull her mask down for the two seconds it took to take the picture. She said, Sure, Of course, and – again, there was suddenly a completely new person at the piano, it was mind-boggling.

So, now I have started to take pictures of my newer students whose faces I had never seen, at the piano, mask pulled down for a second or two, to reveal the entire face.

I was surprised at how giddily excited I have become, seeing the whole face for the first time ever – it’s like discovering a new person! I had known their eyes, their voices but this is like a new dimension.

We say that you can see the soul of a person in their eyes and I am sure that is true, and eyes can be very expressive, but boy, there’s something about the rest of the face that the eyes don’t even hint at.

Makes me smile, just thinking about the other students whom I get to discover over the next couple lessons! I find myself wondering now, actively guessing what their faces look like behind their masks. (Mark asked if these new students have ever seen *me* without a mask, and – no, of course they haven’t, but most of them have seen a picture of me, without mask.) I think I’ll print the pictures of students’ faces just so I can look at them – and hope that someday, before too long, we will not need masks all the time anymore, and I get to see their entire beautiful faces for real, not just in a picture.

 

A Sign of the Times

Our town has always had its (small) share of (usually) homeless people, standing in the shade under a tree at the street corner, often close to a grocery store or Walmart, usually with a smallish hand-written piece of paper or cardboard sign, asking for help, food, occasionally money.

Recently, things have become more sophisticated. It is now usually a small family, or mother and children, often Hispanic where the mother speaks no English and depends on the child(ren) to communicate. The signs have become larger, much larger, with large print that is readable from across the parking lot, and the pleas for help have become more urgent, usually mentioning some sort of dire emergency: pregnant without resources, just lost their house in a fire or having been thrown out by the landlord with nowhere to go, one of the children urgently needing surgery, etc. and so on.

Gone is the disheveled look, the temporary-ness of the small cardboard signs. The same few (two or three) families seem to cycle through town, showing up in different places on different days.

The newest, latest, is now someone, sometimes a child (with father nearby), playing a violin, again with a large sign declaring their emergency, often with an online payment option at the bottom of the sign, Venmo number etc. so you don’t even have to interrupt their playing as you give them money.

The music is beautiful, romantic, lush, usually with some orchestral background to the violin solo. While it is not at all unusual for street musicians to have a recording of the orchestra part to their live playing, these recent performances are so obviously NOT live performances – the bowing and the finger movement of the other hand are so terribly out of sync with the music, and the sound of the violin unnaturally carries all the way across the parking lot.

It is not these scam artists whom I consider a sign of the times, but the reaction of the people.

We’ve been under so much stress for so long, helplessly watching COVID-19 ravage our country, raging fires destroy towns, entire counties, with no end in sight. Afghanistan, hurricanes, it just keeps piling up – and there is NOTHING the average citizen can do. We’ve been feeling helpless, powerless for so long – so, when there appears a chance to make a difference in someone’s awful life by helping them – a chance to actually DO something, right here, right now – people jump at it.

Reading accounts on social media, it is touching how quickly people put their lives on hold and go to great lengths to help these unfortunate ones who through no fault of their own are in such dire straights right now. People spend hours and resources to collect money, set up GoFundMe’s, collect resources where to find help (we have lots of them in our town), offer to take them places. – Only, these unfortunate ones show up a couple days later in a different part of town, with the same story, starting another cycle of people going out of their way to help them.

When it is being pointed out to the helpful ones that the boy playing the violin is not actually playing the violin, they get upset, “We were just there! We saw him!”

Which may possibly be a point to be made for public school music education: educate people so they can tell the difference between real violin playing and something fake. 

Your earliest convenience

My brain has trouble processing spoken language when I cannot see the person with whom I am speaking. I therefore have on my website that all communication should be via email. So, I receive emails, inquiring about piano lessons. Sometimes they have specific questions, sometimes it’s just, “Do you have room in your studio?”

Once in a while, the email concludes with “Please respond at your earliest convenience.”

I want to respond and ask, “Why?” Is there some emergency?

I can think of medical emergencies where I depend on a fairly immediate response from my physician. But piano lessons?

Or perhaps they think I need to be told not to dawdle? Because – ?

I don’t get it. And I resent it. If you send me an email with a question, of course I will respond. And I will respond as soon as I get to it. Which is usually the same day, unusually a day or two later, perhaps after the weekend. Which is by the way how my doctor responds, or actually any professional I happen to do business with. And they do it without being told to respond at their earliest convenience. It’s just – normal? I would think? And if they don’t respond right away then there’s most likely a good reason.

Many years ago, an email arrived, inquiring about piano lessons. When I didn’t respond right away, a tersely worded follow-up email basically said, “Well, are you interested or not? Because if you’re not then we’ll look somewhere else.”

I should have said, “Go something-something-unprintable and look somewhere else.” Instead, I was polite and responded that I was in Germany, completely overwhelmed because I was taking care of the memorial service for my mother who had died unexpectedly a couple days earlier, taking care of her affairs, and that I would get back with them when I was back in the States. “Oh.”

Instead of telling me what to do, implying that I NEED to be told what to do, I would suggest something like, “I look forward to your response!” or “We’re eager to get started!” or “Can’t wait to hear from you!”

(In case anyone is wondering – yes, I do take things very literally.)

 

Retard!

Retard!

Ever since I came to this country, I’ve been puzzled and appalled by music teachers who use the term “ritard”.

I recently came across it on a website where the blogger talked about taking advantage of “phrases, cadences, ritards, etc… – Whenever I have an excuse, like at the end of a phrase, at big cadences, in spots marked with tenuto marks, or where there are ritards, […]” .

If you were to hear someone use the term “dimins” – would you know what they meant? It’s the same kind of abbreviation as “ritards”.

Yes, “ritardando” is a long word, but so are crescendo, decrescendo, and five-syllable words such as accelerando and diminuendo (which is even harder to pronounce).

The use of the term ritardando varies of course from composer to composer and from one style period to the next: Baroque and Classical composers didn’t seem to use the term (they trusted you to know where and how much to bend the tempo), 19th Century romantic composers actually did not use it as much as one would think, whereas contemporary composers who compose in a romantic style use it a lot. Impressionistic composers do use it but prefer French terminology (en retenant or cedez).

There are two commonly used abbreviations for ritardando:  rit. and ritard.

In scores, whether we find rit. or ritard. seems to depend to a large degree on the edition: Wiener Urtext does ritard., Henle has mostly rit., Schirmer seems to be 50/50, Maurice Hinson and Jane Magrath use rit.

Chopin, in Polish and Hungarian editions, uses rall. or rallent.

Here in the United States, I find the use of “ritard.” appallingly insensitive because ritard. sounds too much like “retard” – a word we have been working so hard to get people to stop using. Retard *is* a word in the English language, and to use something that sounds alike, even though you mean something different (the root is the same, though), shows an appalling lack of concern, especially when it comes from a teacher.

If you want to abbreviate ritardando please use rit. (There is no confusion with ritenuto which is always shortened to riten.)

P.S.: I similarly like to shorten diminuendo to dim. (not dimin.) because it is short and unambiguous, and because it is descriptive: dim the lights, dim the sound.

 

It’s a brave (??) new world

If things were normal, I would be in Chicago right now, at the annual Music Teachers National Association conference.

I don’t attend every year, but this one I had been particularly looking forward to. I signed up in November, sent my check, booked the hotel room, and after much research decided to book a dormette on Amtrak, mostly so I could take a nap with some privacy. I have never been on a train here in the States and was getting excited about this new adventure.

Because I didn’t have a computer bag – something sturdy, protective, and large enough to hold everything I could possibly need for a day at the conference -, I spent hours on Amazon, looking, measuring, weighing (some of them are surprisingly heavy …), reading reviews, and finally found one that I thought was perfect. It arrived and it is, in fact, perfect. I like everything about it: the sturdiness, the color, how it feels, how it carries, how immensely stable it is: at the moment I have three 1/2 inch binders and several thicker piano books in it and it refuses to wobble even the least bit.

Not being able to be at the conference and meeting people I usually see only at the conference, and attending presentations I had been looking forward to – that was very disappointing.  There are now plans to do things digitally, remotely, electronically, and I am grateful that I will most likely get to – somehow – see at least some of the presentations after all.

It is perhaps a sign of these weird and unsure times, this new world that is anything but brave, that I found myself feeling unreasonably (?) crushed that I wouldn’t get to use my new computer bag. – Like buying a new car, THE perfect car, and then for whatever reason not being able to drive it.

A few days ago, I decided to use the bag anyway: in the studio, next to my desk where it now holds my most frequently used books and materials.

And someday, I hope to use it for real, out in the world again. A brave new world.

 

Covid-19 and other challenges

Yesterday, the Kansas State Department of Education clarified that “Governor Kelly didn’t cancel school for the remainder of the 2019-2020 school year due COVID-19. She closed school buildings. Schools will be working to implement Continuous Learning plans for all students.”

Similarly, my piano studio is closed for in-person lessons but learning will continue, via remote communication. One week ago, I sent an email to my piano students and parents, explaining how we will go about this: most of the learning and teaching will happen via videos my students send me which I will then critique and respond to, via email and/or video. The videos I send to students illustrate a point I was making in my email, or it is a recording of a piece or part of a piece that a student is struggling with – the way I would at an in-person lesson perform for a student (who usually takes a video to review at home). That way they don’t have to try to remember but have something they can re-read and re-watch.

A few parents and adult students responded within a day or three to say, good idea, but how *exactly* do we do this??

In addition to responding to students individually, I also wrote another lengthy email to the entire studio, explaining in more detail *what* to put in the video, what format to send it in (I made suggestions but also said that anything goes, I am not particular), and when to send it – no need to wait until the normal, usual lesson day, but send whenever you have something you want my feedback for.

While there has been a wonderful response from some parents and adult students, actually thanking me for this arrangement to keep the learning going, and sending videos right away and responding to my response, there are parents from whom I haven’t heard at all.

Just like probably everyone else, I, too, am a bit on edge, not sure how all of this – virus, school closings, etc. – will unfold over the next weeks, months. Communication is very important to me, saying please and thank you is important to me, and when I send an email, especially an important one that outlines important changes, I need a response. Doesn’t have to be an essay, just a short “got your email, busy, will talk in a couple days” or “got sick, distracted” or something like that. Anything. To not respond at all is rude.

ETA: a parent to whom I just complained about the above reminded me that “I think the silent ones are the ones that think the same as I thought yesterday: today for certain I will have time to deal with it.“ (Thanks, Yurii.)

So. Deep breath. These *are* stressful times, for everyone.

 

On the subject of pianos

I own a piano studio. I teach people how to play classical piano. Acoustic pianos have several unique properties that allow them to produce music that is richly textured, has tremendous dynamic range, and is exquisitely beautiful. Having a good quality acoustic instrument is essential for learning piano and laying the foundation for a lifetime of music enjoyment.

While it is possible to learn to play piano music on a keyboard, I do not recommend it. In order for a keyboard to be acceptable it must have weighted keys and touch. Expect to pay at least $1500 for an acceptable digital piano with weighted keys.

Keyboards without weighted keys, or that do not have a full sized keyboard are simply not sufficient for piano study. (Full sized refers to the number of keys as well as the size of the keys.)

Pianos, like any other manufactured object, have a spectrum of quality; from “piano shaped objects” to world class concert grand pianos that cost more than $1,000,000. While it is possible to spend tens of thousands or more on a piano, a good quality student instrument will cost about $3,000 or $4,000. While there are good instruments available for less than $3,000, less expensive instruments often are in poor repair or have mechanical issues that will make them uncomfortable to play and will hamper a student’s progress.

I am always available to help families look at and decide about a piano purchase. I am thrilled when students and their families ask me to help them make a good piano purchase, one that will last for years and years.

I understand the reality of making a piano purchase. I traded in two high-quality upright pianos to purchase my first grand piano, and I still had a two year loan to pay off the instrument. Pianos, good pianos, are expensive. Good piano lessons are too. You are investing in the lessons I provide, paying for the 30+ years of teaching experience I bring to each one of your or your child’s lessons. Please invest in an instrument to match. You didn’t compromise when it came to baby food and medical care when your child was born, please don’t compromise when it comes to laying a healthy foundation for a lifetime enjoyment of music making.

Purchasing a quality student instrument for $3000 or $4000 is an investment in your or your child’s musical future. The natural, injury-free technique I teach will protect them from repetition injuries and tendonitis. Having an instrument that is in poor repair, having a fixed height bench that requires an unnatural arm-wrist-hand alignment, having a keyboard that simply can’t produce the music – all of these factors will detract from your child’s success and will potentially risk their physical health as well as their desire to continue piano.

(Written in collaboration with Mark Nichols)