Alicia de Larrocha shows the piano what's what.

Celebrate to Communicate

I came across this jewel of wisdom in the book I am using to teach my son reading, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons:

Although the lessons should be overwhelmingly reinforcing, do not confuse being reinforcing with being soft. You are soft if you "overlook" mistakes or if you let the child get by with a sloppy effort. This behavior is not reinforcing. Furthermore, it is not realistic. The skills that are taught early in the program will be used later—all of them. If they are weak when they are presented in their simplest form, they will most certainly be weak later, when the child is expected to use them in complex tasks.

photo by striatic

Of course your child needs encouragement, a positive attitude, and praise when she is learning a new skill. However, these reinforcing behaviors should always be associated with real, incremental accomplishments in accord with the teacher's program. Calling out from the kitchen, "That sounds amazing!" might seem like a very encouraging thing to do, but if your child is supposed to be learning this week to keep her fingers properly curved with every keystroke, it may actually be counterproductive.

If you want to celebrate your child's progress, make sure you know what your child is supposed to be trying to accomplish, and that you are clearly communicating this goal to her at every opportunity with both prompt reminders and enthusiastic reinforcement.

Don't Fool Yourself

Xbe ipl acbq msnr tlcrmnpz?

A veteran cryptologist would easily translate the above. Using his knowledge of conventional syntax (the question verb comes first), familiarity with the most common repeated letters (e, t, a, o), and awareness of the situation (blogger trying to make a point with an unusual example), he would easily crack the code in half a minute.

If you are not a veteran cryptologist, you will probably just be confused, even if I tell you that I was using a simple substitution cipher, in which each letter represents another letter. In fact, you might still need a few minutes even if I actually gave you the code.

The same is true for every skilled activity. If you don't have the basic capacities, no amount of coaching and instruction can lead you to accomplish more complex tasks elegantly and fluidly. When it comes to the arts, in which fluidity and elegance are at a premium, the fundamentals are all the more indispensable. You simply cannot play the piano well unless you learn to do the things your teacher has been trying to get you to do since the first lesson: shape your hand correctly with your fingers curved and your thumbs pointing slightly inward, hold your wrists slightly above the keys, keep your feet flat on the floor (or stool), roll your shoulders back, and lean slightly forward. Practice identifying notes quickly and easily. Use warm-ups to master basic technique. If you are not even trying to do these things when you practice, you are not learning to play the piano.

(photo credit: Marco Arment)

Parenting the Piano Student

Supposedly, learning a musical instrument works like this:

Once a week, you meet with a teacher, who shows you how to do some things with the instrument and assigns you some music to learn. Then every day for the rest of the week you work really hard trying to play that music. When the teacher comes back you learn some more things and get more music to play. Repeat until you can play the instrument.

Unless you are a disciplined, highly motivated self-starter with a keen memory and excellent time management skills, this is a terrible way to learn anything. In reality, the typical student will hack through the assigned pieces a few times each practice session, repeating her mistakes until they become indelible, and completely forgetting all of the teacher's carefully programmed practice directives (which are all written in that notebook the student never looks at because of course she remembers which pieces to practice). In fact, every day the pieces get worse because new mistakes creep in as the student gets further from the lesson. When the teacher comes back and the student has learned nothing except to play several pieces rather badly, there is nothing to do but supervise and coach the student through an effective practice session, and then either discourage the student by assigning more work on the same pieces or set them up for failure by cramming new information into the tail end of the lesson and assigning new pieces.

That means the typical student gets one short effective practice session each week, and spends several hours each week accomplishing nothing at all.

So what? You should hire me to come teach your child every day? Well, if you can afford it, I wouldn't say no. But you don't need to do that to make five or six really productive practice sessions a week a reality for your child. What you do need to do is get involved, every time your child sits down to practice. You need to know what your child is supposed to be doing, and how they are supposed to be doing it. You need to be there at the beginning of each session to remind them of the importance of these instructions and insist that they be followed, no matter how little fun the child thinks it would be.

You can easily prepare yourself in just a few minutes to coach your child on points she has completely forgotten, because you are smarter than your child (whatever she may think about that), and more disciplined. You may not know how to play the piano, but you know how to follow instructions, take work seriously, organize time with intelligence, and properly value efforts that do not pay off instantly. These virtues and attitudes all require parenting, not piano lessons, to take hold. Only you can model, foster, and reinforce them throughout the week. You are the primary moral educator of your child, and make no mistake: morals make good piano practice; and indeed piano practice, done right, makes morals.

(photo credit: :mrMark:)