In the Piano Studio

Autumn is one of my favorite learning season with my music students.  I love getting to see my students who do not take lessons in the summer return to lessons.  Even my students who come in the summer are transformed by the shift in routine as school starts again.  While I’m not always loving the regimented schedule of my own family in this season, I do love how routine and structure affect my students.

Autumn is a large swath of weeks stretching out over a couple of months that just seem to produce good results year after year.  There are less distractions in the fall compared with  the busy holiday season and in the spring, when it’s just hard to sit at an instrument because everyone is so ready to be outside enjoying the warmth after the long winter.  (Another great learning time seems to be the months of January, February and early March).

Best of all, in the fall I get to start working with brand new students!  Each year I only have a few positions open in my teaching schedule to accept new students, but I love new students!  I love getting to know how their brain works and processes what they are learning.  I love their excitement about playing a new instrument.  One of my students is six years old.  She comes to lessons during a homeschool time slot with two of her big sisters.  She’s been watching those sisters play for a few years, and she is super excited to play piano herself.    Seriously, this adorable little girl NEVER stops smiling the ENTIRE piano lesson.  Joy!

It’s fascinating how each student is naturally good at some part of learning music, and how each student struggles with something different:  note reading, rhythm, steady beat, focus, chords, patterns, intervals, tracking music as it goes across the page, coordination of two hands that have to do different things, sight-reading, ear training.  We all have a different set of problems, and a different path to working through them.  I am a musician with a LOT of problems (seriously  . . . that could be a whole post itself), but it makes me a better teacher, I think.  Learning music is a long, complicated process.  No wonder it does so many great things for our brain.

I know I’ve written before about how one of my favorite things about being a music teacher is getting to work with students longitudinally.  Unlike teachers who teach other things and get a fresh new crop of students each year, I get to work with kids for years on end.  I see them grow from preschoolers to middle schoolers and high school students.  It’s amazing to see long teenage boys sitting on my bench that has to be lowered to accommodate their legs that suddenly go on forever and remember them sitting next to me when they were first learning to read and I placed tall footstools under their feet because their toes couldn’t touch the floor if they were sitting properly.  Some of my middle school students began taking lessons from me before they were in kindergarten.  It’s so fun to see them grow and change and listen to how it affects how they play music. I love watching how tiny fingers that are barely strong enough to press down a key turn into fingers supported by the right hand position that move precisely over the keyboard, gliding smoothly and landing on deep chords with arm weight.  Most of all, I love watching a student that struggles to play something transform into a student who understands how to do it, and does it well.   That will never get old for me.