Recital

This is it! The recital was on Saturday, and everyone did great! I could not be prouder of the progress that all my students have made. I am so grateful for the opportunity that I have been given to work with them for the past 12 weeks. They have taught me so much, and I like to think that I taught them at least a little bit about music. Thank you, everyone, and enjoy the show.

P.S. My oldest student couldn't make it to the recital, so I had him come to my house one last time so I could record him playing the piece he had been working on. 

How Children Succeed

Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

The author of this book, Paul Tough, discusses that the success of a child depends not on what society glorifies, such as test scores and school admissions. He argues that the qualities that matter most are that of character. He puts a lot of emphasis on parenting, since that plays a huge part in determining a child's character later on down the road. He says that even if a child grows up in a neglectful or abusive household, there is still hope for their future. He first looked at a study of rat pups and their relationship with their mothers.

Paul Tough

When a pup received the comforting experience of licking and grooming as an infant, it grew up to be braver and bolder and better adjusted than a pup who hadn't, whether or not its biological mother was the one who had done the licking and grooming.

                   - Tough

Neuroscientists have evidence that this occurs in humans as well. For example, a teacher can be that rearing parental figure for a child. 1950s and 1960s behaviorists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth conducted experiments to find that babies whose parents reacted to every small cry in their infancy were "more independent and intrepid" in preschool and even later in life. They concluded that warm, sensitive, parental care created a 'secure base' for each child, encouraging them to go out and explore the world. 

Ainsworth later conducted the Strange Situation experiment, outlined as shown. In the end, she found three different types of mother-child attachment: 

secure attachment, 

ambivalent-insecure attachment, and avoidant-insecure attachment.

Tough tells us that 60% of American children are securely attached to their parents. These are the children that will see greater achievement and stronger relationships as they grow older. That's all thanks to the great parenting demonstrated in their lives.

Tough shares an interesting story about children revolving their lives around chess. Sure, these kids will be really good at chess. But is that what's best for them? Some people can see that a childhood organized obsessively around one thing is unbalanced. On the other hand, some people wish they had had a childhood like that. Imagine how good I would be at the piano if my parents had forced me to practice 2 hours a day since I was 5. I'd be amazing! But just think about everything I would have missed out on. My social skills would be lacking, my transcript wouldn't look so good, and I would have distorted priorities. My parents did a good job at getting me involved in lots of different things as a kid. Soccer, dance, piano, choir, band, hiking, and more. But service and kindness were always the most important. To this day, as I walk out the door, they say, "Remember your name". They want my good character to be what people remember about me. The positive parenting and the experiences I've been given have made me who I am. 

"The development of an individual's character depends on all sorts of mysterious interactions among culture and family and genes and free will and fate." - Tough

Instinctive Understanding of Music

I love this! So much. Anybody can understand music. It comes instinctively, just as Mr. Bobby McFerrin demonstrates. Watch and be amazed, just like I was. Now I want to try this in front of a crowd and see if I can show everyone their capability of creating music so simply.

Teaching Piano

Teaching piano begins with learning, playing, knowing, and loving the piano and the music it can produce. Equally, teaching piano begins with learning about, playing with, knowing, and loving people.

                  - True-Piano-Lessons.com

Sometimes, parents find a piano teacher for their child, and start the first lesson with saying, "I don't want my child to be a concert pianist. I just want my child to know how to play." Where do you think a concert pianist starts? The exact same place as your child. That's something the teachers need to understand.

No matter what a piano student expects out of their lessons and practice, the teachers need to start with the fundamentals. Every student needs to be taught the same basic knowledge and skills. Over time, the student will express interest or the lack of, and that's when the teacher can change teaching methods. Pace is also something that differs between students. The teacher cannot rush in to anything. I've definitely learned that throughout this project. It's hard for me to understand why someone is having such a hard time learning something I find very simple. That's when I need to take a step back and remember I struggled with learning things at the piano too. I remember so vividly one song in my Level 3 method book. It was a polka, and I just could not play it! I was practicing that song for 3 weeks before my teacher just said, "Close enough", and we moved on. I have to admit, I've done that a few times myself. Method books include songs that are meant to teach students a certain skill. For example, right now, I have a few students learning the concept of a 5th interval. It's when you play notes that are five notes apart, either one at a time or as a cord. When they play the song right after the introduction of a 5th, I don't care about rhythm or tempo; I care about them playing a 5th. If they do it, great. We move on. If not, they do it again until they can play a 5th. One concept at a time. That's how piano teachers need to teach.

An Appreciation of Adult Amateurs

Matthew Harre

Why is it that the young person's accomplishment seems so impressive but a similar accomplishment by an adult does not? Why it is perceived so differently? It certainly doesn't have to do with the magnitude of the learning accomplishment. If anything, the adult's accomplishment would be even more spectacular.

- Matthew Harre 


This man runs a website called Musical Fossils. I found it really inspiring, actually. My project is about teaching students of all different ages, and he talks about the appreciation of adult amateurs. I think that is so important. Just as he said, why are people so much more impressed by a young person's accomplishment when an adult has to work just as hard, if not harder? 

I love what he had to say about a couple former adult students of his. They shared with him their thoughts on taking lessons as an adult. They talked about the passion they found in music, even though they didn't know why they were still taking piano lessons. One of them talked about how as she first started playing things that sounded remotely like music, the rhythm was uneven, some of the notes were wrong, but she was "beside [herself] with glee". 

That's something teachers have lost. We have become so obsessed with perfection in the field of music. We are upset when we find that we are sometimes limited, even after years of practice and hard work. Amateurs are surprised when they do something right, while the teachers are surprised when they do something wrong. Years ago, the teacher was the amateur. Through time, teachers forget the excitement that creating music can bring. 

A friend of mine is an amazing pianist and avid song-writer. She gets frustrated if she doesn't start and finish a song in one day. I, for one, am very impressed by the work she does and the music she creates. But I think it's ridiculous that she gives herself a deadline for it! Progress in music takes time.

It's just crazy looking back at how far I've come. I remember taking lessons when I was 8. I absolutely hated it. I only went to lessons because my teacher was my friend's mom and we got to go swimming afterwards. Now, I play the piano every single day. Music has been something I have been blessed with, and this project is really helping me appreciate it more. Sure, sometimes I complain about always being the fall-back when somebody needs an accompanist. But taking a different perspective right now, I should be grateful for the development of this talent of mine. My mom is the one that made me go to lessons, and my older siblings are the ones that set the example and showed me how great the piano is. Thanks to them, music is a special part of my life. And I love sharing it with others. It's reassuring to know that it's not too late for the adult amateurs to develop skills at the piano. Music touches a deeper part of people than anything else.

A Mind at a Time

Dr. Mel Levine is a well-known education expert and pediatrician. He wrote this book, entitled A Mind at a Time, to parents and others who care for children to give them a better understanding of learning patterns. I didn't find anything written directly for music teachers, but most of the things he wrote still apply. For example, Levine talks about mind profiles. He put it best in saying: 

Some of our children are blessed with profiles that are magnificently matched to expectations, while others are saddled with profiles that fail to mesh with demands.

To the parents of children that may not be blessed with such a marvelous profile, he counsels to take heart. Don't give up on them, and don't allow them to give up on themselves. Fix weaknesses by pursuing strengths. 

Every child has a creative side. It's up to them to pursue it. Levine says:

In being creative, kids unshackle their minds and discover novel possibilities for self-expression and mental free play. 

Everything I've studied so far in this project tells stories of kids finding an escape in music. But all of them needed a little nudge from an adult figure - either a parent or a teacher. I'm excited to be in that position!

Sometimes, though, students and teachers clash. To address this, one cannot rewire the student, nor can one alter the expectations of the teacher. No one is at fault when there just isn't a good relationship. But how can it be dealt with? Compromise and acceptance. Through all walks of life, there will be people we don't get along with. Unfortunately for some, this begins in an elementary school classroom, or with your childhood piano teacher. Here's a little side-note from my life.

I have 4 sisters. We all grew up playing piano and competing in soccer.  My oldest sister, Jennifer, was a goal-keeper, just like me. As a goal-keeper, you get pretty beat up - your hands especially. Jennifer was really good at soccer, but she was even better at the piano. She even studied it in college and is now a great teacher. When my family moved to Arizona, Jennifer started taking lessons from a lady here. This teacher did not support Jennifer's soccer playing, mainly because of her torn-up hands. This teacher felt that piano was everything. You can't do soccer and piano. That's impossible. She was the kind of teacher that would smack your hands every time you made a mistake. She was a little intense. Jennifer didn't take lessons from her for very long. Why? Because she was constantly being put down by her piano teacher!

Moral of the story: Putting each other down will get you no where.

The next thing that I found really important was what Levine said about motivation. 

Generally speaking, an individual is motivated if he finds the goal attractive.

We are motivated to do something if we feel we can actually achieve it. Otherwise, motivation is nonexistent. But who sets the standards for what students need to achieve? Teachers? Parents? Themselves? We can't let students feel like they have to meet certain standards. That's when self-confidence begins to crumble. They feel they'll never be as good as the person next to them. That's what worries me about having a piano recital. I'm afraid that my students will look at each other's performances and think, "Wow. They learned way faster than I did. I'll never be that good." That is the last thing I want to happen! I want to have a recital so we can celebrate the progress that's been made over the past few months. I always want to stress that EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT. Some minds just aren't made for certain things. My mind, for example, fails at history and biology. Those subjects focus so much on memorization, which just isn't my thing. I work with processes and free-thinking, like math and music. The way I see it, music is just like math. You start simple, learning the fundamentals. Then you're exposed to more difficult concepts which, with practice, will come.

We cannot allow discouragement to engulf the minds of students. 
We want them to succeed.
We want them to want to succeed.

Frustration

I am typically a very optimistic person. But the past week has really gotten me down, and I don't like it! It seems like nobody practices, nobody cares, nobody wants anything to do with piano. Yesterday, I had a student show up for his fifth lesson. I have had him playing Oh When the Saints Go Marching In since the first time he came. Every week, he was supposed to learn it in a new key. He has only learned it in 2 because he still doesn't know how the song goes! I was about to lose my patience with him yesterday. Instead, this was me throughout the lesson: 

I had plans for last night, and I had to drag myself into my car to go because I was just so down from the lessons this past week! It was terrible! I don't teach on Tuesdays because my schedule conflicts with everyone else's. I am so glad I have the day off to just kind of relax and get my head on straight before I have to deal with another student who most likely didn't practice. I don't ask much of them! I really don't! Now I know how my math teacher felt when he would randomly collect homework and only 4 people did it. I felt bad getting lectured for not doing my homework. I feel worse on the other side! This anger may be unwarranted because I wasn't the best at practicing the piano when I took lessons. But I practiced enough where I wasn't at the same place for 5 weeks! Okay, I'm sorry. I just needed to get the frustration out. And this blog is supposed to be a candid account of my journey with this project, right? I wouldn't be honest in saying that everything is going great and that there are no hitches to teaching. Teaching is hard.

Intelligence

Psychologist Raymond Cattell studied the idea of intelligence. He broke up general intelligence into two distinct counterparts:

Fluid Intelligence - This is basically the ability to reason quickly and to think abstractly. This peaks in our early adulthood, as the graph shows, and as we grow older, our fluid intelligence decreases. We tend to forget things more easily.

Crystallized Intelligence - This refers to the knowledge and skills that are accumulated over a lifetime. It involves learning, knowledge, and skills, and increases with age as we become more and more experienced.

On Mondays, I teach my oldest student. As I taught him today, I really started to notice how age affects one's ability to learn and acquire new skills. For example, we were clapping out rhythm sheets that I do with every student. I could see that in his mind, he knew how it was supposed to sound, but it was really a struggle for him to clap it out. Every time he made a mistake, he would stop, say, "That was wrong", and start over. I started to feel bad for him after a while. He was getting frustrated because his mind just doesn't work the way mine does. Not anymore, at least. His fluid intelligence has really decreased, and I can see that. It's not just that though. I have been blessed with musical talent. I know that. He, on the other hand, was blessed with the mind of an engineer. That was his life before he reached the age of retirement. He over-analyzes details and tends to look at the mechanics of playing the piano rather than just listening to the music he creates. This is pretty much how we work:

His mind

My mind

Music and the Mind

After discussing my independent study with one of my students, she lent me these cassette tapes entitled Music and the Mind. I was not intending on using these as part of my research, but I am so glad I got the opportunity to. They are made by Michael Ballam.

Michael Ballam

He talks about music and its effects on the human mind. He mostly shares stories, which helped me stay focused and interested in what he was talking about. Here are summaries of a few of the stories that stuck out to me:

The Paper Boy

The paper boy in some small town came from a family that had 10 kids. After dinner, they would all pick up whatever musical instrument was laying around (because there were a lot of them) and would just start playing. They would spend an hour playing music that had been written by somebody else, and then would just start "jamming". This jamming could go on for 10 minutes, or it could go on for hours. It all depended on how much they were feeling the music that night. Kids in the neighborhood were really intrigued by that family and would often go over for dinner, not knowing what went on afterwards. One boy in particular was inspired by the musical talent that this family had and went home and asked his father for a violin. Beforehand, this kid was a troublemaker, and was really challenged in school. Soon after he got that violin, he was on the honor roll. The teachers didn't know what was going on, so they called in his father. The father was used to being called in by teachers to discuss the disciplinary problems his son was having in class. But this time, the teachers said something had changed. The father said, "All I did was buy him a violin."

                Albert

When Albert was six years old, his mother signed him up for violin lessons. Like most other kids, he didn't like it. He liked building houses of cards. In school, Albert's teachers constantly called him stupid and told him that he should leave school to work. It's a good thing Albert stuck with his violin, because at the age of 13, that's where he found his refuge. Improvisation on the violin helped Albert overcome his geometric problems. Playing the violin enabled him to have such intense thoughts that he, Albert Einstein, became one of the smartest people who have ever lived. Looking back, people say he lived in the right side of his brain. The visionary, poetic side. His violin helped him merge the two sides, and for almost 70 years, Albert used the violin to relax when he became stuck in his thinking processes.

Music and Deviant Behavior

People say introducing music classes in schools is too expensive. Jackson Elementary School in Salt Lake City, Utah tried it out. The results showed that the children were more interested and focused in all subjects, even if they weren't particularly good at it. The teachers said there was a lot less disruption in their classrooms. Perhaps there is a link between music education and delinquent behavior. Still, the argument remains that state-funded music education is too expensive. Deviant behavior is also costly. A violin will cost roughly $150. How far will that go in a reform school? Just something to think about.

Go the Distance - Part 2

One week later, and we have this.
Practice can do amazing things, kids.

Go the Distance

Rachel has chosen a song for the recital! I think she's going to perform it fabulously in May. This was about 30 minutes after we had started looking at the song. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Katie Jeanne

This is my friend Katie. She's 14 years old, loves giving hugs, and really loves pizza. She truly is just a sweet spirit. 

When word got around that I was teaching piano for my senior project, Katie's mom asked me if I wanted to teach her. Of course I said yes! Why would I pass up an opportunity like that? My older sister, Dianna, taught Katie for a while before she got a job as a teacher in downtown Tucson. So no, Katie does not fit the same criteria as all of my other students. She does have a past with learning music. But that's okay! I knew it was going to be different teaching her, and that she would give me quite a bit of diversity in my teaching methods. 

Earlier, I read an article about teaching children with Down Syndrome how to play the piano. The author of the article, Rosie Cross, says this:

I believe very strongly that people with learning difficulties, however severe, have as much right to play a musical instrument as the rest of us. What is desperately needed is more teachers who are prepared to teach them, and who will persevere when progress seems elusive.

Patience is definitely an attribute that is needed by these teachers. I honestly don't know how my sister started with Katie from Square 1. My head would have just been filled with doubt. But now that Katie has some familiarity with the piano and with reading music, I feel that I can endure. 

Rosie Cross writes that children with Down Syndrome have a great aural memory, meaning that they have a really good way of remembering things they hear. She also said that they are good at mimicry. If I play a tune for Katie on the piano and tell her to play it, she has a better chance of copying what I just did rather than if I place a piece of music in front of her and tell her to play it. She won't get the satisfaction of playing it right because she doesn't know what that song is supposed to sound like! That's the main thing this article taught me: aural memory and mimicry. 

This article also talked a lot about illustration. At first, I didn't think she meant literal illustration, but she did. She actually draws a picture and tells her students with Down Syndrome to play on the keyboard the feeling they get from the picture. She tells a story about Ziekel, a student of hers. His father stands next to the piano telling a story while Ziekel plays along on the entire keyboard. I simply could not do that. I've never been good at improvising or composing. I think it's great that children with Down Syndrome are good at that! I'm sure Katie will teach me much more throughout this process than I'll teach her.

21 Days

We've all heard the myth about how it only takes 21 days to make or break a habit. We buy into it so quickly because it gives us hope.

"I'm going to run 15 minutes everyday."

"I'm going to start flossing."

"I'm going to keep a journal."

Sounds simple, right?

For some habits, it is. In a study at University College London, 96 people chose a behavior that they wanted to be part of their daily routine. Some chose to drink a glass of water after breakfast. This action become automatic to them within the expected 21 days. Those who chose exercising, however, weren't so lucky. After 84 days, the action of doing 50 sit-ups every morning was still forced. Here's why:

... 21 days to form a habit is probably right, as long as all you want to do is drink a glass of water after breakfast. Anything harder is likely to take longer to become a really strong habit, and, in the case of some activities, much longer.

Habit comes through diligence. I want my students to be diligent about practicing the piano on their own! This article I found, 21 Days to Consistent Piano Practice, talks about how piano is not your typical extracurricular activity. Sports teams, for example, provide you with several opportunities each week to practice. Piano students must take practice upon themselves. The author of this article gives piano teachers 6 ways to encourage individual practice. Here they are in a nutshell:

1. Explain the importance of daily practice.

2. Have them commit to a routine.

3. Encourage them to practice 5 minutes everyday the first week, 7 minutes the second, 10 minutes the third, and so on.

4. Provide them with a practice log.

5. Ask the parents how the practices are going.

6. Repeat.

I am not nearly experienced enough to know if this works. But from my past with taking piano lessons, I know that the teacher and the parents can try all day long to get the kid to practice. They still won't do it. The students have to have the desire for themselves. 

The Mozart Effect

                               [It wouldn't be a bad idea to have this playing as you read.]

I found this in the psychology textbook I was reading last week. Since the Mozart effect has been a little bit of a trend lately, I figured I'd look into it some more.

One widely publicized but now-discounted finding, dubbed the "Mozart effect," suggested that listening to classical music boosted cognitive ability. Other research has, however, revealed small but enduring cognitive benefits to either keyboard or vocal music training (Schellenberg, 2005, 2006). The music-training effect appears unexplained by the greater parental income and education of music-trained children; it may result from improved attention focus or abstract thinking ability. Other researchers hold out hope that targeted training of specific abilities (rather like a body builder doing curls to strengthen biceps and sit-ups to strengthen abdominal muscles) might build mental muscles (Kosslyn, 2007).

I wanted to know more, so I Googled it. Here's what I found:

Researchers at the University of Vienna (Pietschnig, Voracek, & Formann, 2010) performed a meta-analysis of nearly 40 studies. Guess what? They found no evidence that listening to Mozart's music "enhanced" cognitive abilities in any way. Now this doesn't mean you should throw out every classical CD, DVD, and toy you own. It just means you just can't expect brilliant results from your child by simply having him or her listen to or play with those materials. However, there IS evidence that learning music and being involved in music helps improve a child's math and language abilities. Additionally, there are tangible social benefits to being involved in music, as well as                                                                     emotional and self-expression rewards.

These are "ways to incorporate music in your child's life that have some real benefit": 

          1. Sing to your child.

          2. Purchase child-friendly musical instruments.

          3. Enroll in an early childhood music class.

          4. Pay for formal music lessons.

          5. Encourage participation in band, orchestra, or choir.

Moral of the story: Take piano lessons! Simply listening to music will not improve your "cognitive abilities", as the experts say. You have to put your brain to work. 

David G. Myers' Psychology

One of my advisors went through a psychology textbook to find all the things I should be looking at while going through this project. Because I don't want to overwhelm anyone (including myself) by putting them all in one post, here are a couple of the topics I studied today:

Classical & Operant Conditioning
"Conditioning is the process of learning associations."
We smell the fresh bread, we eat the fresh bread, and decide we really like the fresh bread. The next time we smell fresh bread, we will expect another satisfying experience. The same goes for sounds. As Myers puts it: "If you associate a sound with a frightening consequence, hearing the sound alone may trigger your fear." Now this made me laugh a little. If a student of mine were to hit a wrong note, I have three options. I could ignore it, I could gently tell them that it was wrong, or I could scream at them and whack the back of their hand with a ruler. If I were to do the latter, I would most definitely cause the student to anticipate fear when they hit a wrong note! That sure would get them to practice a lot more though. However, that is not the way I want to teach. Instead, I use conditioning methods.
Classical conditioning is when we associate certain stimuli. The example Myers gives is when there is lightning, there will be thunder. Now how do we learn that? Over several instances, we notice the relationship. See lightning - hear thunder.
Operant conditioning is when we associate a consequence to our behavior. Let's look at teaching a dog a new trick. You have the dog do the trick, and when it does, you give it a treat. Repetition of this action and response will strengthen the desired behavior of the dog. As humans, we learn to repeat acts that bring positive results, and avoid acts that bring negative ones.

Information Processing
To get information into our brain, we encode. To keep it there, we store. To later get it back, we retrieve. In 1968, psychologists Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin proposed the idea that we form memories in 3 stages:

"1. We first record to-be-remembered information as fleeting sensory memory.
 2. From there, we process information into a short-term memory bin, where we encode  it through rehearsal.
 3. Finally, information moves into long-term memory for later retrieval."

As time has gone on, psychologists realized that this is an extremely simplified version of the way memory really works. I won't get in to much detail about it as it gets into a lot about unconscious encoding and stuff that doesn't really apply to what I'm looking at. But what really matters is what they say about rehearsal. Rehearsal is part of our working memory. We use our working memory when our brains are bombarded with great amounts of information all at once. We automatically process things such as space, time, frequency, and well-learned information so we can "shine the flashlight beam" on what we think matters most. I've put this to the test with a couple students. To show them what an accidental looks like, I pull out this piece that I'm working on right now for a big concert mid-March. I'm not going to lie, the music is intimidating. But when I just ask them to find this one simple thing (by them shining that flashlight beam on it) they can focus on that one note and ignore the rest of it. That's the working memory. When it comes to music, I don't have to use my working memory much anymore. Reading music is now automatically processed by my brain. I don't have to look at it one note at a time and consciously tell myself where it is and where I need to put my hand. That came through much rehearsal. So practice. 

Week #1

I have taught 5 lessons so far this week, and these people are blowing me away! They catch on so quickly - much faster than I did when I took lessons.

Rachel. When I asked her what she wanted to do for the recital at the end of all this, she chose to think of a popular song, which I will simplify (or not, depending on her progress). I don't play much popular, modern stuff, so this will be a new experience for me too! Rachel has a lot of potential to go far in this piano-playing process.
P.S. She's writing a novel. She's 18. If that's not impressive, I don't know what is.
Hazel. Apparently, I promised her my first-born child. (I do not remember that!) Then during the lesson, when I asked her to play Mary Had a Little Lamb, she told me I now owe her my second as well. She really has a light mood about this introduction to music at the age of 55. She is a pro at rhythm though! I showed her the rhythm sheets and she just clapped right through them - no problem. She finished three when I had an expectation of one. She's also already chosen a song for the recital. Way to go, Hazel.
Ben. He's the youngest student I have. He's 6, but he has more drive than I've ever seen in a person. He knows exactly when he makes a mistake and he just starts over so he can fix it. I don't have to tell him anything! He did so well, I promised him Jolly Ranchers for next week. (Little kids need a little more motivation.)
Pam. The most intelligent, worldly person I have ever met. I am truly lucky that she agreed to participate in this project. She is so diligent and devoted to learning, no matter what it is. That's refreshing. Ear training may be a small battle throughout this journey, but we will make improvement.We ended the first lesson with improvising a couple songs together, and they sounded great! It's going to be fun teaching her every week.
Ryan. Ryan is, by far, the quickest learner. He's a 16 year old boy, so I think he made this a little competition for himself. When we were doing note-reading, I told him nobody had gotten that far in the book, and he said, "Let's do one more so I can be really far ahead." When I told him to play Mary Had a Little Lamb in G Major, he started plunking it out, and had it memorized by the time he left. We had so much time left, I taught him Chopsticks and Heart and Soul too.

THE 5

Each lesson revolves around 5 categories that my advisor and I decided on. Here they are:

                                1. Note-reading

                                2. Rhythm

                                3. Transposition

                                4. Composition

                                5. Improvisation

1. Note-reading is pretty self-explanatory. I open the book, tell them what to play, and help them make it happen. So far, the students are just flying through the book I have, which is very good news! As the weeks go by, I'll give them songs that they may or may not be familiar with. Hopefully they'll practice (fingers crossed!) so the next time I see them, they can show me their improvement.

2. I have 21 rhythm sheets, titled The Eighth Note Challenge. They start off pretty easy, but progressively get more difficult. I had planned on going through one or two of these every lesson, but from what I've seen so far, they can handle much more than that. One student completed three sheets in three minutes. I was beyond impressed.

3. Transposition is something I really wish I had learned early on. Basically, these are "5 finger positions". I introduced G Major first. Your thumb (finger #1) falls on G. Then the rest of your fingers fall on A, B, C, and D. In this position, I have them plunk out a couple different tunes. Mary Had a Little Lamb, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, or When the Saints Go Marching In. This relies a lot on playing by ear, and it helps them become more familiar with the piano and the change in pitch from key to key. Yes, the students get  a little frustrated when they can't find the tune very quickly, so I help them out. I write the finger number patterns, I play it for them so they can get the tune in their head, or whatever that particular student needs. So far, they've all walked out the door having been able to play at least one of the tunes all the way through.

4. Composition has always been something that's really hard for me. What I'm going to do for this part of my project is give them three notes and a mood. Then I'll say, "Ready, go." I did this with a student for the first time yesterday, and she really pulled it off! I gave her a simple triad (C,E,G), and said "happy". She took that and ran with it. She gave me cords, she gave me rhythm, and she gave me a melody! Who knows? Maybe I'll have a student write a song to play at the recital.

5. Improvisation is my favorite part. There is this book that my advisor recommended, and I was looking around for it, couldn't find it, got a little upset, then miraculously, I found out my sister had a copy! It's called Pattern Play, and it is my new best friend. It has parts for me (the teacher) while the students play whatever they want to. It is so fun! And it makes the students feel good at the end of a tough lesson by having them realize that they can make music. That's what this is all about.

Before this begins.

So, it's great not having to go to school and everything, but I'm getting a little bored. That's why I'm so excited to start teaching next week! I've got 12 students, ages 6-70. One has Downs Syndrome, one is writing a novel, and one was forced into this, haha. I'm really looking forward to what they learn, but also what I learn. I'm so ready.