April 2019 was a month of breakthroughs in piano class. Some of my students had been struggling with things that should have been easy for them, and it took them months to reach that light-bulb moment when everything just fell into place.
A solution so simple and easy to understand, and yet, something that these particular students could only understand after a lot of struggle.
The practise of LEARNING.
A letter to the piano student who fears failure and therefore just won’t try.
I’m not asking you to succeed, but to just go through the motions to start with.
Because I know that success will follow.
Because I know, that someday you’ll move on and be independent in learning music. Continue reading
It’s what keeps you wanting to study and learn.
To strive to always be better today than you were yesterday.
Because you don’t live by rules imposed by the outside.
You’ve got an internal compass of your own and you’ve learned it’s wise to trust it.
And be comfortable with who you are. Continue reading
Reading about The 30 Piece Challenge and The 40 Piece Challenge got me thinking. I tested this out by starting my own sight-reading challenge and realised it was worth it.
I felt that 30 or 40 pieces a year would to just too much for the average Indian piano student, given the school plus coaching class schedule that young children here have. So, I gave my students another challenge.
Most Mumbai students beyond late elementary level learn between 5 to 10 pieces a year and this reduces to 4 or 5 pieces a year as they move on to intermediate and advanced levels. They learn a new piece for an exam, concert or competition and that’s about it.
The average student stops learning new music when piano class stops, because he/she simply doesn’t know how. Learning so little music means that students only learn pieces which are at the top of their ability and very rarely get work done on their own without their teacher – even easy pieces. So, the pieces selected should be :
The goal is to help each student get a little better than they were before, and to set standards that take the student forward in steps small enough, that it’s easy. So that learning new pieces is relaxing and enjoyable.
For example :
Get a group of piano teachers talking about what they struggle with, and students NOT practising is very likely to be a hot topic.
Like every teacher, I’m constantly looking for remedies to lack of practise, and to poor practise, because what works with one batch of students might not work with another.
I turned to the recorder on my cellphone in a desperate attempt to motivate a batch of students to practise – when all other methods failed. Audio or video recordings of any student who’d made great progress, emailed to my students & parents. And was surprised and quite thrilled with the results and the way it motivated my students!
Piano students want progress, and are often unable to understand the quality of work that is required to achieve this. A review of my lessons this year made me realise that students just don’t hear what their teacher hears. This hearing gap is one of the reasons why students get upset with the critical evaluation that’s a part of every piano class.
This November 2017, I decided to put my cellphone recorder and a pile of unused file dividers (assessment cards) to use, to remedy this problem :
I started experimenting with recording my piano students after reading a post from the blog of Frances Wilson’s Piano Studio – The benefits of recording your piano lessons class.
Recording plus a Guided Student Self-Assessment in piano class is improving the quality of my students practise and making a very positive difference to the way they respond to feedback. It’s also changing the way I interact with my students and taking away a potential source of student-teacher conflict. So much, that now it’s a regular part of my piano lessons.
