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Patient Piano Teachers Pro and Con
Patient piano teachers have two sides, pro and con. Some think patience is a virtue, others think it is indulgence of lazy children. I once had a person comment in our forum that "Patient piano teachers are just controlling their anger."
I think the person making the comment was being impatient with my constant call for creativity and slow, fun work. I'd still hate to have my kid study piano with the person who made that comment. But what if they are right? What if patience is just controlled anger?
Piano Is Easy
Is Soft Piano Too Lenient?
Are we doing something wrong when we don't give in to our instinctive impatience and anger with childishness? What about our detractors who say we are too lenient? Should we explode and get mad, like the old piano teachers who rapped your knuckles with a ruler for every mistake?
There are still piano teachers out there that rap knuckles. I get emails and letters all the time from people who experience it. In many ways, I AM exploding when kids are fumbling and learning. This is because what I want from them I mastered long ago, and seems so easy to me. But there it is, the phrase, "...seems so easy to me."
Teacher's Feelings Don't Matter
Your point of view doesn't matter. You had better pay attention to every movement and nuance of the child.. Your anger is completely irrelevant to the child's piano learning process. Don't inject anger into the lesson. If you do, you will destroy the learning process instantly and make the child into a penitent.
I do let my impatience secretly drive me to stay several steps ahead of the child, devising ways of getting them to understand. So I am impatient, but with myself. I am impatient with myself when I have not found a way to unlock a certain skill, or have not found the underlying reason for a child's difficulty with it.
Stay Removed And Observe
I am not lost in their current failure, which is inevitable. I am looking for the cause of the failure. Many piano teachers get lost in the child's fumblings, rather than seeing what the fumblings must mean. For example, fumbling with fingering may mean many things other than a child's failure to grasp fingering. Let's take fingering as an example, since it is often a subject that causes initial frustration for many children.
Fumbling With Fingering
Is the child able to conceive of moving the fingers as a group, outside of the piano and music? The younger the child, the more you will have to work on this before you attempt fingering in any serious manner. Are the child's fingers very weak? Almost all kids have very weak finger muscles.
You'll have to play games in which the fingers are raised away from the piano before you expect them to raise their fingers at the piano. Do they understand up and down at the piano, different at the piano than in the world? Do they understand left and right?
So if I watch a child fumble at fingering, my mind is actually running through the above list. I'm seeing if we can improve the underlying skills, mental or physical, that will lead to success at our task. To answer the comment that "Patience is controlled anger," I suppose in a way they are right. But I'm actually too busy watching the child to feel anything approaching anger.
I've learned to start instantly looking through my mental index of underlying causes and skills to find the correct course. Common sense always works.
REFERENCES
Piano Teaching
Using Piano in the K-12 School Classroom
So You Want To Be A Piano Teacher?
The Art of Teaching Children’s Piano
Piano Starting Methods
Starting A New Child Piano Student
Even A Good Piano Teacher Has A Bad Day
What Sort Of Piano Teacher Are You?
Carrot and Donkey: Find The Interest In The Piano
What’s The Point of Piano Lessons?
How To Find A Good Piano Teacher
Teaching Children’s Piano
Piano Lesson Minute By Minute
A Short History of Piano Methods
Piano Fun for the Teacher, Fun for the Kids
