It’s the start of the summer holidays. It is 38 degrees outside and the kids are done with school. When my 2.45 walked in, I knew it wasn’t going to be a straightforward lesson but I had no idea it was going to go the way it did.
We normally start with the student playing me what they have been practicing (or not!) but she wasn’t in the mood to play the piano. Ok, que my first port of call for a child who doesn’t want to play the piano in their piano lesson (!) the mini whiteboard. Everyone loves to write on the mini whiteboard. No, I don’t want to do that either she said as she poked a small stick at the piano keys. I threaten to call Mummy, usually a last resort but worth a try. No no don’t do that, but I still don’t want to play the piano or write on the board.
Then I remembered a post I had read on facebook group for music teachers about a rhythm activity, that had worked really well when I had tried it with my Trom Chova chug group the week before. I pulled out 4 rhythm sticks, and asked her what she had for breakfast. This caught her off guard and she stopped to think, before recalling that she had had cornflakes…and milk. So we picked up our rhythm sticks and played the rhythm of these words, which I then wrote down on the mini white board.
What did you have for breakfast? She asked me, and I told her I had had yogurt and granola. Before we knew it we had 6 rhythms, comprising of our meals for the day as well as those of the babysitter who had brought her to the lesson! The rhythms had been played on our rhythm sticks and then notated on the board. By this point she had stopped objecting and I felt ready to bring the piano back in to the mix.
She opened up the piano and obediently placed her hands in the correct position. I then asked her to play through all the rhythms on just the note C. Once she had done that I asked her to take the first rhythm and play it on whatever notes she wanted. As she went through each pattern I wrote down the notes that she played in her manuscript book. Then I played for her what she had written and we changed notes here and there at her request.
It was now 25 minutes into the half an hour lesson and she was excited to play her first ever composition, ‘The Eating Song’, from start to finish! She didn’t believe me when I told her to hurry up and play the last 2 bars as she started to loose her focus, because the lesson was over!
As a teacher, our greatest challenges come from the unexpected moments. I had no idea that the lesson would play out like this, and this is not how I ‘normally’ do a piano lesson, but I'm certain that she learnt more than she ever would have in a regular lesson! Sometimes we need to be pushed to the edge to come up with new ideas. Learning to play the piano is a journey of discovery and the student needs to own the musical journey, and today certainly reminded me of the importance of that!
