When I was a teacher in a state music school in Ukraine, we had a very talented student that was our school’s pride and joy. She was not my student, but I knew her very well as did all the teachers in our school. She was a winner of multiple piano competitions and nobody had a single doubt that she would be a stage performer and professional musician. I immigrated to the USA and visited Ukraine 10 years later to find out that this girl is pursuing a completely different career. She became an engineer. I asked her what happened. ‘I burned out,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to even open my piano. All I have is grief about music,’ she said.
Our personal experience is the most important criteria in life. It doesn’t matter what other people think, but lack of joy in any activity is crucial in our decisions.
So… what we should keep in mind when we are making plans to start music lessons for our children?
First, investigate the approach that your potential teacher uses. They have to be current with the latest, most effective findings in music education. Many think that a teacher’s personality is the main key of success in learning. This is not quite accurate. You would not keep any company or school that used an old fashioned abacus on a daily basis.
Before your child will progress to the artistic point of playing piano he/she ought to go through learning many basic skills.
The sweetest teacher in the world that doesn’t have any knowledge about current discoveries in music education is going to be potentially harmful for your child. Time has changed – so do we and so do our children. One cannot replace the most effective tools in teaching with words and personal ‘care’. In fact, I would be cautious about how much emphasis any ‘old fashioned’ teacher is placing on the uniqueness and ‘personal’ approach.
The rule of thumb is that the best teachers in the world want to be replaceable. Deep and honest care about the student’s success in life and education is their total agenda.
Real professionals always stick with what works best for any student; they always work on finding the best for students – not the most feasible for their ‘comfort zone’.
Second. How can you understand if the approach is correct? Ask what approach your prospective teacher uses and write down the key words. After that visit You Tube and find videos that link to that approach. If the approach initiates many videos with a lot of students from early learners, children with special needs, to prodigies; your teacher is a true professional, not a self–absorbed candidate for turning your child off music education.
Teachers can cause emotional scars on your child that are sometimes worse than a doctor’s malpractice. Would you prefer to have a nice, sweet surgeon with an ax and hammer – or you would like to have a highly skilled professional with the most accurate and up to date tools?
The reason why we used to hear that the personality of the teacher was so important is because we didn’t live at the time of the now current interactive technology. The teacher’s nice personality was only a ‘sugar pill’ that eased our struggles in learning how to read music and play the piano.
Third. Be cautious. It is very common for many music educators to create their own ‘ways’. Unfortunately, this indicates a weakness rather than effectiveness of the method (unless you can find A LOT of videos on You Tube that prove otherwise). Again, please, don’t be fooled by videos of prodigies. Any prodigy can learn despite the method. This is why many methods try to prove their merits by showing a couple of prodigies. This is a common and shameless scam. A true professional is the one who can teach anybody.
Fourth. If your perspective teacher is having a unique approach and a lot of videos of DIVERSE students on You Tube, check the followers of this approach. If the successful results are shown only by this particular teacher and limited to the exclusive class only his students with no followers from other fellow teachers, it means that the system relies heavily on the teacher’s ‘unique personality’ and you are going to be covered with ‘personality issues’ if something goes wrong.
Fifth. Be aware of the words:
‘I don’t use technology in my teaching.’
‘I don’t believe that digital keyboards or pianos should be used with the students.’
‘I start with games and introduce music notation later.’
‘We will start with theory first.’
‘I don’t introduce notation before your child knows letters and numbers.’
‘Young children’s hands and fingers are not strong enough to play the piano. I wait until they are at least 7 or 8 years old.’
‘A young child under the age of 7 has an attention span too short for piano lessons.’
With the current breakthroughs in applied music education - meaning actually learning to read and play an instrument (piano being the starting instrument of choice) - and the help of interactive technology there are no limitations in the learning process. In the words of one young student who learned to play a song in just a couple minutes, “So, this is how you play the piano!”
Finally, please note: just as you can teach your child today to speak, read, write, draw pictures, and explore the world – you CAN teach him/her to play the piano and read music. It sounds fantastic, but just recall how recently we switched to smart phones, tablets, Skype and the Internet! Today any parent or school can teach children applied music and piano online. As our Soft Mozart Academy shows, such an approach works better in today’s world than then any mediocre piano teacher.
Anybody Can Play Soft Mozart
Sincerely,
Hellene Hiner, professor of Herzen University (St Petersburg, Russia) - Developer of the Course 'Additional vocational training program and Interactive network technologies'. The author of 'Soft Way to Mozart computer based curriculum for teaching music and piano.
This letter was written with the help of Karla Hastings.
Karla Hastings is a piano teacher with over 4 decades of experience. In the late1980‘s she set up a successful nation-wide pre-school piano program for a major piano company using her own curriculum, Anybody Can Play. Always using technology to benefit students, she is now working together with Hellene Hiner, Soft Mozart, to bring the joy of learning to play the piano to greater numbers of young children (ages 2 to 102!) in the Anybody Can Play Soft Mozart program. She also has an iPad App: EZPianoNotes available in the Apple Store. Her new website:www.anybodycanplaysoftmozart.com should be up and running by August 1, 2014.
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