Posts Tagged ‘childrens piano lessons’

Brains, Children and Piano

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=John_Aschenbrenner]John Aschenbrenner

All that matters is your child’s experience at the piano. It doesn’t matter what other people think, what others expect, even what the piano teacher thinks is irrelevant.

What matters is that your child has a chance to experience playing the piano, however humbly, and enjoys what they are able to do. Even attempting the piano is a success.

Looking at children at the piano as a group, with statistical expectations that one child will live up to someone’s ideal of a musician, is actually destructive to the child.

No one in their right mind expects their child to play at Carnegie Hall: what we’re looking for is hobbyists and aficionados, not piano virtuosi and superstars.

Let me assure you that if your child has what it takes to play Carnegie Hall, it will be so obvious that no one in the piano business will miss their cue. The number of children that have that in the cards for them are so few, that it is not even a real number.

Take all the wildly talented children, divide by 10,000, and then pick one. That one child has a 1% chance of a successful career as a piano soloist. But all children, properly nurtured, have a 100% chance of playing simple songs at the piano, feeling great about it and adding to their general education and intellectual skills.

It’s more productive to think in terms of your child as an individual. Let’s get that individual child to play as well as they can, without stress, without wildly unrealistic expectations.

In fact, the point of early childhood music education is not expertise, but exposure to the intellectual and abstract concepts inherent in music that will help their minds grow.

To demonstrate the proposition that children’s piano lessons increase mental powers, we need to look at the human brain itself.

The brain, divided into two sides, controls each hand with the opposite side of the brain. The left brain controls the right hand, while the right brain controls the left hand.

The two sides “speak” to each other via a huge superhighway of nerves and ganglia called the “corpus callosum.” The reason the piano is so beneficial for children intellectually is that the piano, in having both hands work together in similar ways, forces the brain to use both halves of the brain simultaneously. There are very few activities on earth that excite the “corpus” like music and piano.

And so piano activity demonstrably produces better handwriting, better math skills, better abstract skills and higher self-esteem, all through having the two sides of the brain talk to each other, over and over until the nerve path is physically thickened.

That’s right, there is a PHYSICAL result in your child’s brain as a result of playing the piano, even attempting the piano. It is a known medical fact that the “corpus callosum” (that nerve path between the brain’s two sides) of musicians is up to 90% larger than that of people who are not musicians. And starting piano at an early age begins those benefits early in life.

So if your child is not destined for Carnegie Hall, they may still be destined to enjoy, appreciate and create music. And have a thicker corpus callosum!

The saddest part of music education today is that piano lessons are, as they always have been, designed to produce candidates for Carnegie Hall, not fully rounded and nurtured individuals who try to play piano to the best of THEIR ability.

Children who, with a little care, could gain all the benefits of a piano education are made to feel like failures because they cannot live up to a curriculum developed hundreds of years ago to produce professionals.

It’s time to let kids be kids and not rob them of the benefits of piano because they don’t fit some misguided teacher’s idea of accomplishment.

Start looking at the piano from the child’s point of view.

By John Aschenbrenner Copyright 2000 Walden Pond Press. Visit http://www.pianoiseasy.com and see the fun PIANO BY NUMBER method for kids.

John Aschenbrenner is a leading children’s music educator and book publisher, and the author of numerous piano method books in the series PIANO BY NUMBER.

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A Child’s Bill of Rights For Piano Lessons

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

By [http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=John_Aschenbrenner]John Aschenbrenner

This may be of interest only to the piano teacher, but I have the feeling it may be of use to parents who are wondering why their kids are having a bad time with piano lessons.

First of all, if your child does not enjoy piano lessons, something is very wrong. Having taught an almost encyclopedic roster of kids, I can tell you that a creative piano teacher can teach ANY child, if the teacher is prepared to be patient enough.

There may be many reasons why a child is uncomfortable with piano lessons.

The primary reason is usually the teacher. Almost all piano teachers of young children are too strict and not creative enough to interest the child in the piano. It’s as simple as that. There are a lot of bad piano teachers out there, and a lot of impatient kids.

The age of the child may demand a different approach than the teacher is prepared to give, or is capable of giving. The reason for this is that there are a wide variety of personalities in children and gifts in terms of piano, but only one accepted methodology of introducing children to the piano.

You’re headed for Carnegie hall, and if you don’t make the grade, you’re a failure: that’s the mindset of the conventional piano teacher. Do you want to expose your child to this competitive teaching racket, or do you wisely simply want them to enjoy music and play it as well as they can?

Each child is an individual and needs to be treated as such. But the piano teaching business has in essence not changed since Carl Czerny in the early 1800’s: you put this finger here, you play it now. For all their colored pages and big notes, modern piano methods are not unlike the early ones. The problems of teaching children the piano have not changed at all since the great J.S. Bach taught his kids in 1700: you have five fingers, so we’ll use them as a group. Easy to say, but not so easy for a 5 or 6 year old to do.

Consider the manner of the piano teacher. Are they patient, warm and humorous? Or are they gruff, demanding and stingy on praise? It’s one thing to be demanding of a child that has shown promise and WANTS to be driven harder. It’s quite another to apply that expectation and standard to a child of lesser but still respectable gifts. The truth is that every child deserves to learn and be taught the piano within their limits, at their pace, and in such a way that increases their self esteem no matter how small their honest efforts might be.

In fact, let us draw up a hypothetical BILL OF RIGHTS for a child’s piano lesson.

A child has a right to an interesting, entertaining experience at the piano. A child is not there to meet the piano teacher’s expectation, but rather to fulfill their own talents in the best way they can. It’s the teacher’s job to be creative enough to allow ANY child to achieve that.

A child has the right to play music that interests them. A teacher has to be creative enough to find out how to teach a child the musical principles based on what the CHILD can understand. There are many ways to skin a cat: you can just as easily use music the child knows and enjoys (Star Wars, for example) rather than the dry-as-dust exercise pieces with which even the best piano methods are loaded. They’re not all bad, but kids are turned off by endless repetition of “pretend music.” Let them play what they want. It will make repetition easier and more rewarding. It is the teacher’s job to forge that material into a musical education, and if you’re a halfway decent musician, you’ll be able to do it with style!

A child has the right to a bad day. We all do. I’ve seen over-pressured kids just wilt at the thought of even a modest additional amount of work. Let’s face it, piano lessons are an elective. Be creative enough to know how to disguise repetition as a game, and the wisdom to know when to back off and simply play piano games.

A child has a right to a lesson that is not entirely concerned with reading music and fingering. Those two areas are all that most teachers do during a lesson. But what about listening, ear training, history, composition, finger games, counting games, and a thousand other playful ruses that can be used to interest a child in the piano? What about playing by ear, playing by chords, improvising, memorizing and a thousand other creative methods that might unlock the child’s enthusiasm? There is not just one right way to teach all children, but there is one right way to teach an individual child. A teacher who uses the same approach for all students is a poor and lazy teacher.

A child has a right to a pace of work that does not exhaust them. Many teachers forget how deeply fatiguing reading music is for small children. It requires such abstract thought that most kids can bear it for a few minutes, but get very uncomfortable after that short period. Be creative enough to know when to move to something else, or you risk exhausting the child and their enthusiasm.

Never forget it is their piano lesson, not yours. It’s not a platform to expound your knowledge and authority, and expose their ignorance. It’s your opportunity to interest them in a fun activity that has great intellectual benefits for them.

By John Aschenbrenner Copyright 2000 Walden Pond Press. Visit http://www.pianoiseasy.com to see the author’s PIANO BY NUMBER method.

John Aschenbrenner is a leading children’s music educator and book publisher, and the author of numerous fun piano method books in the series PIANO BY NUMBER.

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