“Piano students aren’t learning basic skills in school”: My response.

Earlier this summer, an editorial by a local piano teacher appeared in the Newburyport Daily News (6/24/2022) about the lack of elemental skills in our student’s school curriculum, based on what she witnessed in her music studio.  The music teacher described, in detail, difficulties her students have with basic reading, comprehension, and math skills.  She believes that there has been a general decline in education during the past 30 years.  I offer a different perspective from working with my 45 students who also attend the same four local public-school systems. Too many of her examples of “students not being able to point to the first note of a piece,” “not being able to describe notes going up or down or repeating in their music” or “students not following the written directions in their music theory books” describe specific situations unique to music reading that more persuasively argues the importance of music education in our student’s lives. 

I have no expectation that students new to music would know these answers.  Music is a language, as complicated as any other, where fluency takes years or at least 15,000 hours, according to some estimates, to acquire a skill. In fact, I think of piano music as learning two languages presented simultaneously: reading the F clef and reading the G clef.  Piano students need to be bilingual, understanding two different texts or symbol systems, at the same time.

I want to turn this complaint on its head.  How many times do my students surprise me with what they know?  My students show me how to see things in a new light, every single day and at every single lesson. They share insightful observations even with music I’ve been working with for over 40 years. If our lessons don’t provide the opportunity for students to share with me something they know, I feel that the lesson wasn’t successful.  Yes, I’m sure all teachers wish our students practiced more and didn’t have such full schedules. I wish they had more time to dream and draw, away from screens.  I wish students didn’t have to suffer from economic, environmental, social, and ethnic insecurities.  But in our studio, music lessons are built around the image of a seesaw.  We take turns talking, comparing, contrasting, finding patterns, making discoveries, and contributing insight back and forth, even in the first lessons.

I can’t count the number of first piano lessons I’ve been a part of during my 40 years of teaching.  Despite the preponderance of piano books that use a “middle C approach,” no two starter lessons for me have ever been identical.  By always inviting students to “share what they know” even if this is their first time at the instrument, they can demonstrate an agile ability to generalize from a sound to the bigger picture of the piano. Or the inverse, take their experience with things you press and whittle it down to the idea of an individual piano key.  Today’s kids bring so much more to the table because their world is bigger from the start. Wishing for the “good old days” of a single set of stripped-down rules, or one authoritatively driven national curriculum doesn’t give kids a chance to shine.  Start with what they know, and then spiral out from there.  I guarantee that you’ll be praising today’s schools for teaching students how to think.

The things that my students have shared with me:

 1.   How to imagine the color of sounds.

2.   How to take a piece of fruit and use it at the piano to create a story and composition.

3.   Knowing something is wrong when a Black composer, who wrote before Mozart was born, couldn’t be called the “Black Mozart.”  It should be the other way around.

4.   How to compare and contrast patterns for quicker learning.

5.   How to think in all five senses.

6.   How to do computer searches faster and more elegantly than I can.

7.   A willingness to appreciate all kinds of musics.

8.   How to think beyond written instruction and come up with an alternate way to correctly solve a math problem.

9.   Respect for differences in others.

10. Respect and concern for our fragile environment.