We all know that long fingernails aren’t exactly a good thing when playing the piano.  But I’m curious to know how many of us stick to our guns on the fingernail issue? How strict are you?

Actions often speak louder than words.  At the advice of a reader, I’ve been video taping some of my students during lessons, then playing the recording back.  It has been a tremendous help for some of my students to SEE what I’ve been talking and drilling about for so long. 

The student who plays with flat fingers?  Now, she SEES the flat fingers and understands what she needs to work on.  The student who plays much too quickly, causing the piece to come out sloppy?  Now he SEES his fingers flying across the keys without control and HEARS the missed (and extra!) notes.  The student who plays much too slow and with no feeling?  Now she yawns as her piece is played back to her.  She knows what to do to make her piece more interesting.

Do you use video recording to assist you during lessons?  What successes have you found?

I just love this poem.  I hope my daughter will also see my great love for the piano and respect it as something reverent.

The Ebony Chickering

by Dorianne Laux

My mother cooked with lard she kept
In coffee cans beneath the kitchen sink.
Bean-colored linoleum ticked under her flats
as she wore a path from stove to countertop.
Eggs cracked against the lips of smooth
ceramic bowls she beat muffins in,
boxed cakes and cookie dough.
It was the afternoons she worked toward,
the smell of onions scrubbed from her hands,
when she would fold her flowered apron
and feed it through the sticky refrigerator
handle, adjust the spongy curlers on her head
and wrap a loud Hawaiian scarf into a tired knot
around them as she walked toward her piano,
the one thing my father had given her that she loved.

I can still see each gold letter engraved
on the polished lid she lifted and slid
into the piano’s dark body, the hidden hammers
trembling like a muffled word,
the scribbled sheets, her rough hands poised
above the keys as she began her daily practice.
Words like arpeggio sparkled through my childhood,
her fingers sliding from the black bar of a sharp
to the white of a common note. “This is Bach,”
she would instruct us, the tail of his name hissing
like a cat. “And Chopin,” she said, “was French,
like us,” pointing to the sheet music. “Listen.
Don’t let the letters fool you. It’s best
to always trust your ear.”

She played parts of fugues and lost concertos,
played hard as we kicked each other on the couch,
while the meat burned and the wet wash wrinkled
in the basket, played Beethoven as if she understood
the caged world of the deaf, his terrible music
pounding its way through the fence slats
and teh screened doors of the cul-de-sac, the yards
where other mothers hung clothes on a wire, bent
to weeds, swept the driveways clean.
Those were the years she taught us how to make
quick easy meals, accept the embarrassment
of a messy house, safety pins and rick-rack
hanging from the hem of her dress.
But I knew the other kids didn’t own words
like fortissimo and mordant, treble clef
and trill, or have a mother quite as elegant
as mine when she sat at th epiano,
playing like she was famous,
so that when the Sparklets man arrived
to fill our water cooler every week
he would lean against the doorjamb and wait
for her to finish, glossy-eyed
as he listened, secretly touching the tips
of his fingers to the tips of her fingers
as he bowed, and she slipped him the check.

Please take a moment to visit the new sponsor of Piano Teacher’s Retreat, iNoteTrainer.  Just click on the ad to the right, and it will take you to a site about iNoteTrainer.  This fun note reading App was designed by a piano student to help him get better at reading notes in his spare time.  In the game, a note pops up on the screen and you identify it by letter name or piano key.  There is a demonstration you can watch at the site.  What a great App for your students (or students’ parents) to put on their iPhones or iPod Touch!  You could even assign iNote Trainer time as part of practice every week!

I recently had the lovely experience of a tution check bouncing.  This is the first time I’ve had this experience, and I was surprised to see that my bank also charged me a $7.00 “paper processing” fee.  (I’m naive, I guess!). 

I knew I would have to confront the parent who bounced the check, but I desperately hate these kinds of confrontations.  It’s times like these when I wish I had a secretary to handle this kind of stuff.  (Wouldn’t that be nice?  Instead of saying that you can’t give a makeup lesson because Susie wanted to play with her neighbor, you could just turn the phone call over to your cold hearted secretary to enforce your rules).

However, since I lack that coveted secretary, I turned to the Faber Piano Teaching Forum, a fantastic place to get wonderful advice from great teachers.  One teacher suggested I send an email to the parent and even gave me a great script.  I tweaked it just a little, and here it is.

Just a quick note to let you know that I just received your check for April’s tuition back from my bank.  Will you please bring cash to (Child’s Name) next lesson, including the bank fee of $____ that I was charged.”

There was no awkward confrontation, and the situation was taken care of perfectly.  Now I just need to figure out how to word a bounced check fee in my policy…

Aaarggghh!!!  Do you deal with this?  Sometimes a student will skip a line or measure, and when I ask him to go back and play it, he tells me he already played it.  He INSISTS he played it, even though he most definitely did NOT!  It is one of my biggest pet peeves, and it’s hard not to act like a little child and stick out my tongue at him!

What do you do when students do this?

My husband’s birthday was last week, so I decided to get a student involved.  I knew that my husband would come home in the middle of my last student’s lesson.  So at the beginning of her lesson, I taught her a few bars of “Happy Birthday to You.”  She was thrilled to play it for my husband as soon as he walked in the door!  I love when I can make music personal, even if it’s something as silly as a few bars of “Happy Birthday to You!”

You are in the right place.  This is still Piano Teacher’s Retreat.  I am just experimenting with different backgrounds.  How do you like this one?

We’ve been having fun using blocks for different games during lessons.  Here is another one that has been helpful for a few students.  A few of my students have a hard time understanding that specific C’s, D’s, etc. are in specific places.  For example, they will see a Treble C and play whatever C they feel like.  I haven’t figured out why this is a problem for these students, but I have noticed that each student also has other issues that are exactly the same.  It seems like they each have a difficult time reading.  Do you have students with these issues as well?

This game seems to help a little bit.  Have your student set up letter blocks A through G.  Then, they must place each A underneath the block A, each B underneath the block B, etc. 

Once they have all three (or however many they have learned) correctly underneath the block, they put the flashcards in order from lowest to highest.  Then, they take them over to the piano and play them in that order while they watch the flashcards.

Muse

by Linda Pastan

No angel speaks to me.
And though the wind
plucks the dry leaves
as if they were so many notes
of music, I can hear no words.

Still, I listen. I search
the feathery shapes of clouds
hoping to find the curve of a wing.
And sometimes, when the static
of the world clears just for a moment

a small voice comes through,
chastening. Music
is its own language, it says.
Along the indifferent corridors
of space, angels could be hiding.