Has Parenthood Changed My Teaching?

Back in second half of 2006, when I was 14-16 weeks pregnant, Gina Wake (from Hal Leonard Australia) and I did a two or three week tour launching Getting to Grade Four. And then, between weeks 28-31 of my pregnancy (and when Gina was 15-18 weeks along in her pregnancy!), we toured the nation again launching Getting to Preliminary New Mix and Getting to Grade One New Mix. In retrospect we don’t know what we were thinking.

But talking to piano teachers at this cusp moment in my life, this about-to-be-parent phase, meant that teachers who had known me through my seminars since as early as 2000 were sharing this transition with me, celebrating the arrival of motherhood on my resumé and giving me some great advice along the way.

One teacher said to me with quite a twinkle in her eye “I wonder how becoming a parent is going to change your piano teaching…”

“So do I!”, I exclaimed back. I’d always said that people who think that having a baby isn’t going to change their lives are dangerously delusional and/or completely failing to appreciate that the whole point of having a baby is to have your life changed. So the idea that my piano teaching would change as a result of raising a child of my own seemed obvious.

And yet – I’d been teaching since I was 14 years old. I’d already seen my teaching change simply because I’d gained maturity. I’d seen my teaching change because of new ideas I’d been exposed to when undertaking studies in non-musical disciplines (linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, sociology, French, film studies, and so on). I’d seen my teaching change because I’d taught classroom music and experienced first-hand the calibre and conditions of New South Wales high school music education. I’d seen my teaching change because I’d started presenting seminars to other piano teachers. And I’d seen my teaching change because I was composing and publishing music for students to play.

Becoming a parent was just going to be another one of these enrichments that changed my teaching.

When I resumed lessons with my much-reduced number of students and an 8 week-old baby, the biggest change was that I needed to schedule breaks between every lesson to facilitate breast-feeding. And as my son grew a bit older I needed to stop teaching earlier in the evening to facilitate his night-time routines, and I had far less time to organise the administration of my teaching practice.

To be honest, as the first few years of my son’s life passed I was quietly surprised at how little my teaching was changing post-parenthood, organisational rather than qualitative changes.

More notable was how my experience as a piano teacher was shaping my approach to being a mother.

After more than 20 years of piano teaching I had experienced all kinds of different parents: parents who were always two minutes early, parents who were always five minutes late, parents who quibbled over money and parents who arrived at the start of each term with their chequebook open. I’d had parents who didn’t realise there’s any benefit to practice between lessons as well as parents who sat with their children to practice every day, for years, for each child in the family. There were parents who told me they just wanted their child to learn ‘for fun’ and parents who discussed how we should shape the next five to ten years to enable their child to gain a music scholarship or earn a diploma before the end of Year 10. Parents who barely spoke English and parents who thought migrants posed an unfair educational challenge to their children. Parents who were keen to sit in on lessons, parents who used piano lessons for a sleep in the car.

Chief amongst the approaches I’d quietly bemoaned along the years was the parent who uses the piano lesson as a kind of baby-siting, an expensive but enriching weekly event which requires no further engagement on the part of the student or the student’s family between sessions. Why invest the money in lessons each week if you can’t be bothered supporting the practice between lessons, even a little bit?, has been my bordering-on-exasperated thought. Don’t you know how much more your child could be achieving?!

But all of a sudden, I get it.

You’re exhausted. Years of parenting a child who doesn’t seem to need to sleep have finally compounded to deplete you of even the tiniest reserves. It’s a miracle if you can make it through the day without losing it between dinner and bedtime. The piano teacher wants your child to have practiced this week? It’s a feat of extraordinary proportions that the child got fed, for goodness sake, that they’ve turned up to their lesson in clean clothes. But you know that your child loves this 30 or 45 minutes each week, or at least you’re pretty sure they do, and you know that your child is getting quality one-on-one attention from a teacher who is invested in building a long-term learning relationship. AND you know that music is super-fantastic for the brain. Whatever is happening in the lesson is absolutely worth it, because it’s more than you can provide on your own.

I get it.

The piano teacher talks to you about your child’s capacities, potential and achievements based on weekly, focussed experience working with your child. You get to tell the teacher what’s been going on in the life of your family, what’s been making practice or organisation tricky, and the teacher makes some suggestions or sympathises or tells a joke. You know that the teacher wants good things for your child, and that they have been spending the past half hour thinking hard about the best way to help your child grow and develop. So what if this week was a disaster in the practice department? The piano teacher is part of your network, your support team. You’re not going to give this up just to save a few bucks.

I get it.

And I also know, from all my years as a piano teacher, that even without practice at home a child can still (miraculously) make something resembling progress, can still play happily at recitals, can still be a joyful musician. Not anything like a professional musician. But still happy. And it makes complete sense to have your child experience this, even if you can’t (for whatever reason) support your child’s at-home practice the way piano teachers might tell you you should.

Piano lessons aren’t always about playing the piano. A successful lesson might not even involve touching a keyboard. A great outcome for a student might not even have anything to do with music.

And that’s totally, completely, and always OK.

I think I really, truly knew this before I became a parent. But these days I think I marvel more – how extraordinary a thing it is that a student finds an hour a day to practice! – how tremendous that the whole family attends the end-of-term recital! – how spectacular is an improvement in posture! – how thrilling is a memorised performance!

Parenthood has underlined to me how the whole enterprise of learning is miraculous. And how it’s a privilege to participate in that miracle every day.

Half An Hour Is Not Enough

Since 2000 I’ve been talking to piano teachers around Australia (and from time to time around New Zealand, even less often in the UK, and just twice in Malaysia), and it doesn’t matter where I go, Sydney, Belfast, Bendigo, Wellington or Penang, teachers ask me “how can we fit it all in a half hour piano lesson?”.

The short answer is “you can’t”, and in a way it’s a relief to just get that admission out of the way. It takes a lot of energy and self-deceit to pretend that 30 minute lessons on an almost weekly basis for 10+ years will produce master musicians, and once we recognise that this time frame is insufficient we can start looking for better strategies.

So, if half an hour isn’t enough, what can we do about it?

1. We can re-examine how we define ‘enough’. What are the goals we are setting? Are they the goals we want to work towards?! Most of the time, in former Commonwealth countries, teachers define ‘enough’ by examinations (do we have enough time in 32-40 x 30 minute lessons to prepare for a excellent result in a Grade x examination?). Defining what is ‘enough’ involves talking to students and their parents about what they want to accomplish, as well as interrogating ourselves as to what we think a piano education should encompass.

2. We can look at ways of getting the most out of the thirty minute lesson. Have we built inefficiencies into our lesson model? Are our teaching methods wasteful of our limited time resources?

3. We can explore how more learning can take place between lessons. Are we structuring appropriate learning experiences to take place when we are not present? Are we informing students and their parents of ways to enhance learning between formal lessons?

4. We can restructure our teaching so that lessons are longer. This may involve a serious culture shift in some teaching studios where all lessons have always been charged in 30 minute units (even if they lasted for 45 minutes!).

5. We can offer once-a-term (or twice-a-term) learning opportunities which enhance the learning being done in the one-on-one context. This might be anything from a performance masterclass through to a Baroque dance class, from a scales concert through to a blog carnival, from a group harmony class to a studio-wide YouTube concert.

6. We can encourage students to take on additional musical commitments. This could range from learning a second instrument through to accompanying worship services at church/the choir at school, or being part of a jazz ensemble, and beyond.

And as with any such list, I’m sure we could add more to it.

But it’s these six ideas I’d like to explore a little further in follow-up posts: redefining ‘enough’, teaching more efficiently, facilitating out-of-lesson learning, creating and implementing scheduling changes, enabling group learning opportunities, and encouraging participation in non-solo piano music making.

In the meantime, do you find that half an hour is simply not enough?

Piano Lessons for Life

Piano teaching has been a part of my life since birth (my mother resumed her at-home piano teaching when I was three weeks old) and a part of my professional existence since I was 14 and started giving lessons myself.

Teaching at such a young age provided many lessons to me beyond the usual teenage job learning curve: I had to create invoices, prepare materials, plan learning sequences, discuss the progress of students with their parents, coordinate timetabling, engage in professional development, and so forth. This learning curve was much facilitated by teaching under the watchful eye of a mentor-mother, but even so, these are considerable responsibilities for someone who won’t be allowed to vote for another 4 years.

The most challenging aspect of teaching as a 14 year old was, without doubt, talking with the parents. Fortunately my early students practised well enough, and everyone paid their fees on time, so two of the biggest piano teacher communication challenges weren’t on my early agenda.

What did interest me considerably at this stage, however, were the rationales parents gave for having their children take piano lessons. None of the parents had the least expectation that their children would grow up to be concert pianists (unsurprisingly, seeing as they were trusting their children’s pianistic education to a novice), but they all believed that learning a musical instrument would impart lessons for life. The most usual lesson anticipated by parents was the lesson of self-discipline.

Students who learned to practice each day on the piano would, it was assumed, then transfer this lesson of discipline to any other endeavour in which they might choose to engage throughout the rest of their lives. Of course, parents who truly value self-discipline have been instilling this virtue into their children from the day they are born, and piano lessons are merely another means of engaging medium- to long-term goal setting and accomplishment skills.

During the 80s and the 90s this theme was a parental constant: piano lessons were important as much as anything for the discipline they imparted to children who came within their thrall.

But in the past ten years there has been a massive shift in parental thinking as regards the life lessons that piano lessons can give. These days parents will be more concerned with children learning to think creatively, and with children having a skill they can engage in with others. This trend reflects research showing how making music engages the whole brain as well as a changing societal perception as to the attributes that will contribute to a happy life.

What hasn’t changed is the deep-down conviction that piano lessons are not just for music, they are for life.

My own “piano lessons are for life” epiphany occurred, curiously enough, in an undergraduate harmony class. I was a 16 year old first-year student, and my harmony class was to be the final year that Dr Douglas Mews was to be giving it. Douglas Mews was a well-known name in New Zealand education, having written the definitive classroom textbook on harmony, and I knew my classes would be memorable if for no other reason than they were the last classes Dr Mews would give.

What I did not anticipate was the extent to which these harmony classes were about how to live life well.

My favourite life lesson from Dr Mews was this: if you come across something or someone once you should make no especial effort to remember it – maybe it’s a completely random occurrence that you and this new thing/person have met; if, however, you come across something or someone a second time you should immediately make every effort to make its/her/his acquaintance thoroughly – these meetings are no accident and you will surely meet a third, fourth and fifth time.

This principle is excellent for mastering harmonic language in music, and just as superb for managing one’s interpersonal experiences. In short, it’s a lesson for life, well-taught by Dr Mews in my first year harmony class, immediately ringing true in terms of its musical application, and proving itself over and over as I have applied it in everyday circumstances.

After this particular harmony class I found myself changing the way I approached the piano lessons I was giving. Much of the time a lesson might be concerned with minutiae of piano performance, finding a way to tuck a thumb comfortably beneath the hand, exploring how finger shape alters tone, mastering a chord progression or understanding a new notation. But each and every piano lesson was also about life. Voicing is not just about creating a beautiful sound, it’s about appreciating how conversations work by paying attention to one voice at a time; form is not just about how a composer has structured the work, it’s about how we can make sense of our experiences; scales are not just tedious exercises to be prepared for examinations, they are palettes of possibility, demonstrating the power that limitations can unleash as well as the tedium that repression can enforce.

A student once said to me “You don’t just compose music, you compose everything!” after seeing the meal I had prepared for my family that night. That too, is a lesson to be taken away from the piano: life is not for following instructions, but rather principles.

Related to this idea: the page is the start, not the end – you cannot predict what people will do with your music, and they cannot predict what you will do with theirs, but either way it’s all just stuff someone’s made up to make sense of the world they live in, to make themselves feel better about the world and themselves, a way of dealing with their disappointments, fears, exhilarations and satisfactions.

Remembering this lesson gives piano students a template for dealing in a positive fashion with the gossip, rumour and outright lies that litter teenage and adult relationships.

To be continued….