In the Piano Studio

I think I write about Autumn being my favorite season as a piano teacher each year.  It continues to be a time of progress for my students, and I love working with them.  For many students who take a break over the summer, fall is a time to dive in deep with more energy.  For my students who take lessons over the summer, the regularity of the fall academic schedule (whether they go to school or homeschool) propels them forward.

I have a few new little students this year.  Introducing small people to their instrument is always joyful for me.  And my small students are always so playful.  These students also happen to be focused little ones who are zipping right along, learning new concepts all the time, and they seem excited to bounce right up to the piano each week.

On one recent teaching day, one of my teenage boy students was finishing his lesson, and another teenage boy student was waiting for his lesson.  I was playing through some music for the first student to choose from, and when I finished, the first student looked at the next student and said, “I don’t know which one to pick.  The ones that sound good are always the ones that are practically impossible to play.”  The second student enthusiastically agreed.  It made me laugh.

Another one of my teenage boy students recently started a new piece.  Sight-reading is always challenging, and at one point he stopped playing, sighed, looked over at me and said, “You know, I just want to be able to play it really great right away!”  Don’t we all!  The struggle of music is hard, and every musician struggles when they growing.  That means every musician struggles with learning and perfecting music as a lifelong endeavor, because there is no end to the difficulty of music.  But even though that struggle is hard and frustrating, it’s also what makes learning new music fun, because when you’ve conquered it, you really feel like you’ve done something.  I got to have  a great conversation with that student.

Speaking of these teenage boy students, I love that they keep showing up for piano lessons.  It’s awesome!  I love my little students, my big students, my elderly student, the boys and the girls.  I love that every half an hour I get to listen to a new, completely different person learning to play music.  I can jump from age 6 to age 70 something just like that.  The bench goes up and in, and a footstool is added for my teensy little ones, and then the bench scoots out and down for those gigantic teenage boys.

I love that sometimes I get to sneak in a little bit of practicing between students, and for the first time in 14 years, this fall I have been enjoying teaching lessons to my homeschool students in a perfectly quiet house, while all my kidlets are still at school.