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.