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Have you ever had a student that was ridiculously spoiled and undisiplined?

Today one of my students (she is 5 years old) told me directly "I hate the piano!". She is one of those children who has a very short attention span, uses "I don't know how to do it, it's too hard" as a reply for everything and her mind is constantly racing everywhere.

I am a beginner piano teacher and I am aware that she may be a little too young to be starting formal piano lessons (7 is the ideal age). Althought since I am in this position, I am lost at what to do.

I have another student and she is 9 years old. She is a sweet disiplined girl and we have an amazing connetion because she is patient, responsible and enjoys playing music. She even told me that she wanted to become a piano teacher just as I am.

How do you deal with all sorts of personalities? Especially the ones who don't mend well with music?

Am I too strict? I try as best as I can to make sure the children are learning lots and being productive. I can't imagine myself singing to my 5 year old student all the time just for her own enjoyment.

Please let me know what you would do?


**edit: How important is it to build a good relationship with the student? I almost see it as the MOST important aspect since they would definitely put a lot more effort if they actually enjoyed lessons with their teacher.

Five year olds should simply be slapped with your ruler when they threaten to become unruly. Why should they think they might be allowed to act their age? Your only responsibility is to keep them quiet and sitting still. The worst thing you could do is engage them with play and garner their interest in the delicious sounds emanating from the piano when one tickles the ivories. I recommned a parent-teacher conference where you inform the parents that they are ruining their child through lack of discipline and by spoiling her with paid lessons with such a wise teacher.

Good heavens, a 5 year old who cannot sit still? Stop the presses!
In seriousness, this is to be expected. Try to appeal to a 5 year old by telling stories and appealing to their interests. Every 5 year old is obsessed with something, ponies, trains, cars, etc. Once you figure out what interests the child, try to incorporate it into your lessons. Perhaps play a piece that has something to do with a train, for example.
You're not dealing with someone capable of rational thought yet. Just remember, this is a child.

Thank you for your comments, you've made me feel reassured that it is normal to go insane with someone as you said was not capable of rational thought.

GREAT ideas! Conferences with parents and finding the child's obsession. I believe this 5 year old thinks she's a princess=).... although enforcing it throughout her lessons??? ...ehhhh maybe not! (This may spoil her further!)

Thanks for the input!

When a parents asks about teaching their 5 year old, I suggest Kindermusik class first.

Currently I have two very young students but I make exception for them because they take with their siblings. I give a 15 minute lesson to the five year old then ½ hour to the sibling and then I bring in the five year old again for another 15 minutes. I am never harsh with these little ones ( or any students) We play games and I use Piano Adventures pre piano course. pPian Adventures has wonderful CD’s and activities that make learning piano fun. I concentrate on dexterity and Rhythm games

I am clear with the parents that progress will be slow but their little one will have a positive beginner piano experience.

BSM, I have had a few like that over the years. Is this child's parent in the room? I found that the "attitude" and the fake tears went away after I asked mom to wait outside.

That was hard for me to do, because mom and I had good rapport. After mom left, the children became less manipulative and lots less whiny. I'm sure you understand that it is a child. But just because she is a child does not mean you have to tolerate disrespect.

When a kid says "I don't know how" or "it's too hard" I just tell them to repeat what I said and then wait a second before they say anything.

I had one that drove me up the wall with "huh? I don't get it" over and over and over til I finally said "you don't even let me finish! Let me finish talking, count to 5 and then tell me what you want to say". It really helped. She was just using that as an excuse not to try new stuff.

5 year olds can be and probably will be wiggly. Let her do fun games on the keyboard between "work". Have her stand up and count out the music that you clap by kicking into the air. This makes them laugh cuz they're never in tempo with me There are lots of keyboard things to keep her busy learning, but having fun too.

I don't know if you're being too strict or not, but I believe in being strict in the beginning and letting the reins out later. It is important to build a relationship, but you're not her counselor or entertainer. You can clearly spell out what is acceptable and still have a good relationship.

There will always be some kids you like more than others. You just need to put on your business hat and go about your lesson. I have never had to let someone go jsut becuase of personality differences. Some kids are more fun than others, some work harder etc...

We just need to do our jobs and as they say "fake it til you make it" works wonders when you don't like the kid or their behaviors.

I don't recommend talking to mom, she is what she is and I'm sure she believes she's doing the right thing. We have to accept that we don't always agree with many things parents do, but unless it's about piano, we have no business telling them how they are screwing up their kids lol.

I have always questioned if a 3-4-5-6-7 year old can be considered a piano student. The student part is what I question. A participant in a group music appreciation or introduction to general music making, yes - like the programs that have been in place for a while. They learn by doing and the activities are playlike. The piano and the keyboard are not specifically learned - applied piano does not exist with a music staff nor the graphical keyboard understanding.

We know that piano takes comprehension and logic - logic and discernment doesn't appear until about age 9. Associations and comparisons of the same and different as related to spacial organization is required to decipher complex written music. Many adults cannot do these things.

The fact that she is 5, spoiled and undisciplined in your viewpoint, makes me feel sorry for her. A well meaning parent and a willing teacher have nothing but the best of intentions for her to be musical, but the situation has no possibility of being successful if you have no previous experience in teaching a child of this age.

I know the Mozart Mouse series is pretty popular and many teachers use it with their very young students. I, myself, would not be interested in using such a story plot and characters to have to "sell" or "stack" the study of music upon. Someone needing this kind of "propping up" is not a candidate for piano lessons, in my opinion. I could never take money for providing "story time" to a student, nor to accomplish so little over a very long time.

There are children's minds we are invading and their entire future depends on their early teachers as to what is doable and how to do it. I caution you to become well thought out in teaching young children one on one in private lessons.

Another factor is their size and ability to control their muscles - they can't. The piano is uncomfortable to use for their little hands and weak fingers. The music is above their eye level and their chins are in the air to read it. Try this position for yourself for 3 minutes and see how "wonderful" this is for the child. Children are too short on the bench to access the keys without being fatigues and stressed. Do we want that? We are asking kids who have normal desire to move above to sit and focus on something minute (a note head) and to laser-beam their eyes onto the note and then the next note, etc. We are asking the impossible with all these things.

The child should try to get herself out of this situation I think, and that is probably what she is doing, rebelling to authority. She is far wiser than the adults in this scenario.

Please don't take offense as you are a new teacher, I think I know these things because of my own experiences through the years. My opinion is based on my personal experiences. Teaching a 6 year old who has been through kindergarten is a lot easier to do - they have been exposed to structure in the classroom, they are used to interpreting symbols - alphabet and numbers. They have a degree of behavior that assists you. They still do not have the size and development for accomplishing much.

Yes, there are prodigies from time to time, however they possess the profile of a thinking musician in their brains before they ever start lessons and they usually have the best of teachers understand the child mind and behavior and have the ability to develop musicians of the highest caliber. These teachers are usually superior pedagoges. Prodigies need strong teachers to help them gain control of their childlike bodies and to develop the musical mind based on the talents and characteristics already in the child. I hope readers recognize the difference between "young learning musicians with recognized abilities" and "beginners at the piano" who are fed every piece of information. The difference between "self-starters" and the "wind-up" kind.

What CAN be done with THIS 5 year old?

What is going to be BEST for the child at this time?

How do you evaluate readiness for piano lessons in a child?

Do you really want to be teaching this child specifically and dealing with situations and problems whenever they crop up?

Behavior problems and lack of attention or interest are very hard to overcome. This is one of the things I look for in all interviews. It is easily recognizable in each person who is in the room during the interview or the lesson. Is it a positive experience or a negative one? All indications are usually visible and the clues we receive tell us what we need to know.

Betty Patnude

Great ideas you have here.

Five is young. Will it work? It totally depends on the child, the parents and the teacher.

I don't teach very many five year-olds, but I do have a couple each year, and usually they turn out to be my best students.

However, I teach a parent along with the child. This is not an option. If I do not have a promise from a parent to be part of the lessons, it's a no-go. This kind of teaching is actually much harder for me, since it involves my teaching the parent how to teach the child, and that is HARD.

And yes, they all are wiggly. It takes lots of patience, lots of encouragement, and often the hardest part is getting the parent not to push too hard. Or panic when something is not immediately understood.

Kids around here start school at 3. They have been exposed to all these things much earlier than 6. I'm sure kids start at different ages different places, but they don't all wait til they're 6 years old. I disagree that a 6-7 year old does "not have the size and development for accomplishing much." They can accomplish a ton, they just need to go about it differently than the older/bigger kids do.

It is easier once they can recognize symbols, but they definitely don't need to be able to read.

You will have things "crop up" in all your students at different times, that's why we call it learning. If it were easy all along and there were no challenges for them or you, we wouldn't be teaching them anything.

Very true. The first big drop-out I face is middle school. If I can't find a way to get students to a reasonably advanced level by 6th grade, I have about a 50/50 chance of losing them.

The younger I can start them, the greater chance I have to get them farther advanced by the time they are a bit older.

Perhaps one can teach piano to younger children, and probably others - I'm aware of a couple of other methods -, without starting at translating notes on paper to the keyboard? Does the Suzuki piano method start, as does the Suzuki violin method, by playing by ear? It seems to me I've read posts by people here that teach methods similar to the kindermusic mentioned in this thread that also incorporate keyboards? At any rate, it seems to me that reading music doesn't have to be the starting place for learning/teaching piano. I've had very young children be fascinated with the music and learn simple songs quickly without reading music.

And I really, really hope we're not invading their minds

Cathy

Reading is the starting place for reading.

It's so simple, it's ridiculous, isn't it?

There is also rote learning (imitation) and playing by ear (nothing to do with reading).

I always start with reading from day one, but that's my personal preference. If I'm teaching anything, it is easiest for ME to write it out rather than present it by example and have to REPEAT and REPEAT and REPEAT and REPEAT and REPEAT and REPEAT.

Yes it is. But my thought was that reading doesn't have to be the one and only place to start playing piano, as you indicate later.



I've used the phrase "rote learning", too. What I mean by it is that if one learns something by rote they have learned to do only that thing, and nothing they have learned is transferrable to other things, similar or not. I don't equate rote learning and imitation. Even if I learned to play Mary Had a Little Lamb by imitating you playing it on particular keys on the piano it doesn't seem to me that I've necessarily not picked up other information that I can use to play, say, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. I may well have also learned that "higher" pitches are played to the right on the piano, and "lower" pitches are played to the left, and perhaps that "higher" and "lower" are words that we use to describe/compare pitches. That's useful and transferrable information. I may have learned how to compare the sounds that adjacent keys make with the sound that keys further from each other make. That's useful information. I may have been singing along - matching pitches to the ones I'm playing is a useful skill, and I can use it to play other pieces - by ear, thereby overlapping with that skill, and I can use it to recognize wrong notes when I'm playing music that I've learned from sheet music later. I may even imitate the relaxation of your hands - watching other piano players has often helped me with that issue. I just think that in reality there is very little "rote learning" in my sense of the word, and I really don't find that it is equivalent to imitation. You may have a different take on it, though.

I only learned to read music, not to play by ear, good little robot that I was It was only much later in life that I learned how much differently I played if those two skills could feed back into each other. My music became - music. I suspect you have ways by which you provide that ability to make music that both include and are broader than just the feedback from one's ears to one's mechanics, but for me it was one of the best things I've ever discovered.



Unlike me, my brother, who is now a working performing musician, plays mostly by ear. I doubt that at the beginning you would have had to do that many repeats before he caught on So I think there are some individual differences there.

I have no problem with teaching reading, and I'm glad I can read. I don't think any of my ABF recital pieces here have not involved reading at some point in my learning them, and some of them are essentially as they were written out.

But the question here was about whether a 5 year old could learn to play piano, and Betty seemed to think that part of the reason that most 5 year olds can't is because they are not, for various reasons, good candidates for learning to read music. My thought was that there might be other ways to start a 5 year old, and other people, on piano that don't start with reading, if in fact they are not yet good candidates for reading. I would guess that many if not most of the teachers, including you, use some of those ways of teaching.

Cathy

Gary - I suspect we're pretty close to being on the same page. I like the way your post came out

I did look up "rote" - "the use of memory usu. with little intelligence", and "routine or repetition carried out mechanically or unthinkingly" - sounds like the way I always read music on the staff

I still wouldn't use the words "rote" and "imitation" as similar things, but I understand what you're saying.

Cathy

I see that as a semantic problem, Cathy. In the sense you are using "rote", I generally see it as rather negative.

g

I just had the night mare experience! A little girl just turned 6 in July, going to 1st grade in September, had 3 clases in KinderMusic and has good rhythm responses and pitch when she sings. She started with me in April - we did my "Piano Power" precharts with very good results. We switched to Finger Painting #1 by Dennis Alexander, a very imaginative book with keyboard graphics to help the student find positions. I label all finger numbers and draw sidewalks between RH and LH to indicate it the change between hands. She likes the music in the book, especially "Giggle Bugs".

Today, Dad brought her for the first time. The demonstrate all kinds of reluctance to be here or to have a lesson: she is biting her lips, chewing her tongue as thought she has gum in her mouth, she is wiggly on the bench, her legs show anxiety in their nervous movement, her eyes are all over the page she loses her place, plays notes that aren't there, plays the wrong hand...but the counting is stable, the steady beat almost always there. She shows annoyance and confusion. Her arms go straight out from the piano as though she is refusing to eat her dinner and needs distance from the food. She is acting out bigtime and I have noticed it all. The playing is reluctant. She missed last weeks lesson due to her vacation plans, she is probably worried about her music making today. She starts yawning.

I have just given a half hour of patient coaching to a little girl who has a great imagination and a flair for drama. I consulted with her Dad and said how do you feel about this display today. Options: 1) Give in to her. 2) Expect that with continued lessons she will eventually show the discipline, maturity, patience and confidence that is not there today.

I was really surprised by this turn of events in a student who is so promising. Her Dad seems cooperative and interested in keeping her in music lessons. At no time did she say a word - it was all a display of reluctance and feet dragging.

This was maybe the longest half an hour of my teaching life.

We will have to see what next week brings. When we work with young kids, we have to be very accepting of the times when things do not go well.

Any advice for me?

Now my 5:00 interview has arrived - a beginner adult - and I'm looking forward to meeting him as John Van Der Brook had referred him here on Piano World.

Then I get to go and have a lot of fun in my husband's barbershop special event tonight. A little R & R!

Betty

Betty, I'm just glad to know all of your students aren't perfect.
What teacher hasn't had these moments and issues every day of his/her life as a piano teacher?

Betty,

I can't help wondering if the little girl's "performance" was because her Dad was there. Experience as a public school teacher has given me a rather dark outlook on some parent/child relationships. I don't know the little girl's home situation but is it possible the girl was angry at her Dad or perhaps something unhealthy is occurring in her relationship with her Dad? It sounds like rebellion, fear or anger to me.