A new week

We are starting a new week tomorrow! I am excited about my piano lessons coming up. I am starting a new student at my Inverness studio this week and trying a new series of books with her. I am so excited! I am also moving a student to the next level in her books either this week or the next and I am so excited to start her on some new things.

Friday, I was sight reading through a new Chopin piece I decided to start. I was thinking of my students and my recent lessons as I read through it a couple of times. I was thinking about how all the time we spend working on scales, fingering, and theory really pays off. It may take a while to get to this point, but when you want to sit down and learn something new, it makes such a difference to be able to spot a scale, an inversion of a chord, or to write your own fingering right away and not have to decipher each note.

The final goal with piano lessons is to put me out of a job. I strive in each lesson to teach my students to be able to teach themselves. I often ask the question, "why?" Why are we practicing this particular piece? Why do you think the music was written this way? What do you think you could improve about your performance? How do you think you need to practice this at home? Sometime the best thing you can do as a teacher or parent is to sit back and let them make a mistake that you see coming. Give the child the opportunity to notice and correct the mistake on their own before swooping in to the rescue. That can be a major challenge because as teachers and parents we always want to fix everything, but it gives the child the chance to do it on their own and the sense of self accomplishment when they know that they figured it out.

The goal of piano lessons is to get to a point where the student can sit down and enjoy their music. Spending time in lessons on scales, technique and written theory assignments help the student to progress to that point. I cannot express this enough to the child and to the parents. Constistant practice is the key to progressing to a point where playing becomes more about experiencing the joy of practicing a new piece rather than the burden of having to practice.