Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Wait....

Thanks for your post, Betty. It does help to understand where you are coming from. I appreciate your sharing your experiences, and I do learn from them. Recently in another thread you wrote about "dancing on the keys" and that imagery has stuck with me - combined with another poster - perhaps John? - who wrote that measure bars get in the way sometimes (as does the end of a line). Those two things together help me think in different ways about fluency.

Backdog - If I didn't have any students that said wait, I'd have only a third or so of my students left!

Kevin - I understand your point while learning a piece, but once a piece is otherwise fluent, a "wait" is not helping things.

I do not make my students get every single thing about every single piece correct every single time. I am "grading" a student as they play - I'm looking for somewhere around a 95% in general, with more weight given to what a particular piece is stressing. For instance, if the piece is teaching staccato, I'm going to ask to hear the piece again if the staccato is mushy - even if every single note, dynamic, and rhythm is correct. Conversely, if the staccato is beautiful, and the rest of the piece is lacking something, I may decide to pass it and move along.

So just because a student says "wait" by itself isn't enough to derail an entire lesson for me. But what I am conscious of is that with certain students, it becomes an automatic audible tic every time their brain needs to switch gears somewhere. Often it does not indicate any other mistake, only a mental "concern" the student has at that point in the piece.

So every once in awhile, when I sense it is becoming problematic, I write at the top of the piece "No talking". It becomes one of the higher issues for that particular piece. I'm trying to ward off bad habits.

I have a couple of students who say "Sorry" when they make a mistake. I just reassure them that they don't have to apologize, and that making mistakes is part of learning something new.

Lollipop said: "Thanks for your post, Betty. It does help to understand where you are coming from. I appreciate your sharing your experiences, and I do learn from them. Recently in another thread you wrote about "dancing on the keys" and that imagery has stuck with me - combined with another poster - perhaps John? - who wrote that measure bars get in the way sometimes (as does the end of a line). Those two things together help me think in different ways about fluency.

Thank you, Lollipop, for commenting about dancing on the keys and fluency!

I wanted to comment on the "measure bars" as an interruption: I notoriously use "wite out" correction fluid in my teaching to remove things from the music page that are non-essential. For some children the biggest interruption is that they stop at the measure bars before moving on - so I white them out on at least one page of music so that they don't see the bars. This seems to help them over that awful habit.

Another problem sometimes is in melodies between two hands in the beginning and elementary level: Some kids stop and interrupt themselves moving from left hand to right hand (this is their eye movement slowly following the open white space where BCD are located. They need to "zip across the street" so I write in orange lines between the LH notehead and the RH notehead and say that its' a "crosswalk" to get across the street safely just as if there were traffic involved. The other words I use as I'm drawing crosswalks are "dot to dot" since we used the note head for "targets".

For some kids reading the two-handed melodies is very difficult not just at the crosswalks so the orange color starts at the beginning of the piece and ends at the end connecting every note that is part of the melody in "dot to dot" fashion. Some kids have more visual interferance than others - easy to understand since there is so much black and white on the music page.

I believe the use of colors is important to beginners to isolate certain thoughts that are being trained into place. I call our "art work" "Picasso's". It proves to be a colorful event of everything that was done on the page that was new or difficult. Every color acts as a consistent reminder.

Betty

I think you're onto something here. The "wait" I hear is usually meaning "I really do know how to do this, let me fix it by myself". And we are trying to develop independence in the end, aren't we. Not saying that the problem which caused the stumble doesn't need to be addressed, but we want students to work on things because they want to, not just because we say so.

How about encouraging them to take lessons on the instrument they play in band or orchestra? You can't hesitate for a difficult passage when playing pieces with other instruments, especially solo pieces with piano. My best piano students are those who take lessons on another instrument with a good teacher.

Meri