The Children Piano Teachers Don't Want

From a piano teacher's point of view, there are children who are easy to teach and those who present difficulties.

It's easy to teach a child who is calm, happy, diligent and serious.

It's hard to teach a child who is scattered, nervous, unhappy and uninterested.

Piano teachers, bless their hard-working souls, have ways of avoiding these unwanted students.

The first method is to simply wait until the child fails to master the teacher's method, and quits on their own. The teacher loses a little income, but also loses a headache.

Or, since the child is not doing well and knows it, (the teacher has made it clear they are not happy!) the student will start canceling lessons and then the teacher can let them go as a "financial liability." After all, the teacher has to fill time slots to survive.

I have the opposite tactic: I want these kids as students, these failures the other teachers call "quitters."

Why would I want the hardest of students, the ones who wiggle and giggle, the ones who have seemingly no aptitude whatsoever for the piano? I mean the same ones who cancel half their lessons out of apathy or fear or laziness or baseball or whatever.

Simple answer, I want the challenge. I'd prefer to feel the pride when I get a child like this to finally play, however simply, and with a sense of joy.

And most of all, I want to see the look on the child's face as they play something they would have sworn a year earlier that they could never play.

What I find mystifying is the piano teachers themselves.

Here they are in an industry where 90% of the clients are expected to fail, yet they never do anything about it. Why lose all those clients?

The reason, I'm sorry to say, is that some of the teachers are perhaps lazy and not a little bit impatient.

These teachers, either from inexperience or tiredness, know only how to turn students out of their "mill" with as little effort as possible, hence their "method." It's easy for a teacher to follow a standard text from page to page, especially if you've done it twenty thousand times.

If a student is unpromising and unable to toe the line of their "method," they are termed a "quitter" and a "failure" at the piano. These teachers make no allowance for personality, family situation, mood, age, gender, or any one of the ten thousand other things that affect why a kid can or cannot learn the piano at 3:30 today.

It is easier for these teachers to make kids follow a set curriculum, a diet of dry, unimaginative exercises that would chill the soul of even the most enthusiastic child. After all, they followed more or less the same path to the piano as a child, so why should this child not do exactly the same?

This beginning piano curriculum, worthy and valuable to the few people able to master and enjoy it, has not changed in almost 200 years.

Listen to yourselves: you're the same poeple who tell me, "I took piano when I was a kid but I hated it."

I'm not saying the standard piano curriculum will not teach you how to play. Obviously, to be a real pianist there are rules and you must learn them, if only to break them later.

I am saying the standard beginning piano curriculum will only succeed with a very few children, (that same 10%) and the other 90% are forgotten and denied a musical education at the piano.

Look at the statistics: the same 10% who "succeed" at piano lessons are the ones who have an aptitude for the teacher's method, not the piano itself.

If a child comes to me with "no aptitude" for the piano, I make them prove it. Then I find what little aptitude they have.

Every kid can do SOMETHING at the piano. I know because I've taught piano to remarkable, courageous kids with grievous, terrible disabilities, and if they can play piano and enjoy it, you can too.

Like a tiny campfire flame, I blow on that tiny spark of interest or aptitude until the fire burns as bright and hot as it can be.

I believe that every person, especially a child, has a musical spark inside, and that it is the obligation of the teacher to be creative enough to nurture that spark into a flame, regardless of the student's "aptitude" for any particular piano method.

This creativity takes, more than anything else, patience in measures not experienced by most normal humans.

The next time you hear about a child quitting the piano, start wondering if it was the teacher's fault.

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