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Very often to overcome a technical difficulty or to produce a required quality of the sound we need to focus on a very small part of the piece. But here I have a BIG problem. Most of my students resist starting at the point where I want them to start and stopping at the point I want them to stop. It is as they are hardwired to play from the beginning to the end of the piece. Sometimes I have to stop them by holding their hands (I know I shouldn't do that ). Otherwise they will keep going up to the end. All my explanations why it would be beneficial for them to focus on a short part of the piece do not produce any effect. And it happens not only with the kids but with some adults too...

Dear colleagues, do you experience the same problem with your students and, if so, how are you dealing with it?

Sometimes I divide the piece into parts of the form or other obvious but simple divisions. I'll tell the student to only practice A on M,W,F and B on T, Th, S. Then at lesson I'll ask them to start in the B section (or whatever). Some days we will have lessons on just the B section or the second expression of A in each piece. We will do that until they learn to practice sections on their own. Periodically, we will have a refresher.

I divide EVERYTHING into parts. We start with the LAST part first for elementary pieces, hardest part first for advanced music.

That is my number one rule. If any student objects to this, I will not teach that student.

No exceptions.

Almost everything else is negotiable. But not playing from the beginning. I won't allow it.

Would you believe that I actually crafted a stop sign and held it up to get their attention? That was for the younger ones, but it works! Tell them that you are the conductor. Using hand motions, have them practice stopping and starting according to your motions. The other suggestions here are good, too.

I run into this a lot, but I've found a great solution. I ask them, "If you always make a mistake at measure 5, and then you always go back to measure 1 to get a running start at it, what gets the most practice? Measure 5 which gives you trouble, or measures 1-4 which are easy? Why would you want to waste time playing the easy parts and never get the hard parts learned?" They always get the right answer and realize that it is silly to start over again. At least they know better than to do it in front of me again .

I want to add that I then have them start right at the difficult measure and play only that passage in question. Then we step back and try to figure out what exactly is going on. I try to help them look for patterns and make sense out of it before trying to play it again. Sometimes this is all it takes. Other times there are issues that need to be worked out (practicing in rhythms, blocked chords, etc.) which I will show them. This way they know exactly what they must do when they are practicing at home.

<< Most of my students resist starting at the point where I want them to start and stopping at the point I want them to stop. It is as they are hardwired to play from the beginning to the end of the piece.>>

As an adult returner, I'll admit to being guilty of this.

The simplest solution is to prepare a 'study sheet' of just the required phrase or bars. I tend to paste them into MSWord, increase the size of the phrase (it looks less frightening) and also write in some notes, info and annotations. Put the study sheet on the music stand and not the full score.

Hi Balalaika,
I understand what you mean.
I often feel, that the student would like to continue playing or starting from the very beginning again. Then I just pay attention not to do this. I have never had to go that far to grab hands and stop.

What helps a lot to make it easier to get students attention and make the student want to make things as you teach is by my experience:

Ask questions. Fro example you say.. da-da-da-da lets stop here now, thank you.
And you ask: "Why is it good to you stop here?"
Now the students brain starts to work on the issue. He/she bets different reasons. So the situation where you speak and the student thinks his/her own things and does not want to do things according your teaching is avoided.

The best way to teach is make the student find out the right things by himself/herself and you just give a little supportive push. Then he/she has also thoroughly undestood why to do certain things because the chain of thoughts has been gone through.

And after he/she has told you the right answer about why to stop you can say: "Now let's make a deal that you stop if this happens. And just because of the same thing you told me."

It is very easy to make deals with kids. Now lets make a deal, you concentrate on this, and you will start to play much better. OK? He/she answers: "Yes." And by my experience the kid is really concentrating from that moment.

GL with your students and best wishes.
Hope I gave some ideas.
Jaak

The bottom line: people enjoy practicing in a way that does not work well only as long as they have not yet experience practicing a much better way. Once they learn how to get a lot done quickly, being intelligent about it, they don't even want to return to practicing the old, inefficient way.

I use Post-it notes to block off the measures before and after the problem measure(s). Works every time.

Thank you all for your ideas. I will post in detail later - have to go now.

I think using stickers is a smart idea. I used to make a copy of the page and then cut it into small pieces.
It requires lots of work. Stickers should work much better.

The problem is student's attitude does not change. You remove the stickers and the student goes back to his way of practicing. It is kind of spontaneous rejection of playing parts especially very small ones. Actually they are not really practicing but rather performing all the time (or maybe sight reading non-stop?).

At the bottom of things, isn't this a reading problem ?

That is to say, are the kids really reading the score as they play ? It sounds like they are playing that which they have read more or less plodingly and memorized.

This is what I do, too. We call them curtains, and they are only to play what is "in the window." They always ask to bring the "curtains" home with them.

Brilliant minds think alike!

That is my suspicion, too. None of the students who started piano with me have that problem. I get that problem from those transfer students who are weak readers or (gasp!) non-readers. The worst offenders are the ones who learned to play by ear; it's like they can't sing the middle of a song unless they start from the beginning.

I have yet to find a good solution to this problem. These students are usually allowed to advance way too quickly at the expense of reading notes (I just got one of those students yesterday!). I think the best way is to send them down 3-4 levels, or just start over with the Primer book and learn piano correctly.

This is a great question. I teach about 50 students a week for the last 25 years. I rarely see a student that can push themselves to practice correctly as much as I can push them to do it correctly in the lesson. My lesson almost always consist of at least 10 - 15 minutes of students practicing in front of me so I can see how they practice at home. The ones who don't know how to break things down to work on things in small groups with small goals are the toughest to make understand that that is what they should be doing.

I make them set goals in front of me and then practice those goals. It is the intention that they must complete a goal before we are done with that part of the lesson. There goals have to be spoken out loud in great detail. Example - "I will work on these 2 measure. I will get just the notes correct and do that 3 times in a row without a mistake." So they have to figure out, how many measures or notes, what kind, like rhythm or notes or articulation, and they have to do it 3 times in a row. (If they are going to perform the piece live it is 5x or 10x in a row)

There are a couple of things I interrupt them for. If the goal is too easy, they will be able to do it in the first (3x) try. If the goal is too hard, it will take them more than 5 minutes to complete. I will just keep reminding them of there goal, or make them change there goal till they complete it and are able to do something 3 times in a row.

The ones who never want to break things down, take years to finally get what I am looking for. There are many reason, if they don't want to take lessons and there parents are making them play piano, there goal is always to get through the song quickly to move on to something else. Or if they were never taught to think for themselves and they were always just given an answer, they don't know how to work on something.

I find the biggest thing is goal setting. For some students it works great to have them write down there own goals. I never write down a students small goals. Because the goals should be always changing and always evolving. They always ask me, "so I should do 1 line each day, or 2 measures a day." But there is no answer because some things are harder than others. They need to recognize there goals and complete a goal.

I just recently started with a transfer student. He was doing the same thing, starting from the beg and going to the end. This was a few weeks in a row of the same song. I talked to the parents who said he had ADD and could not focus on a piece long enough to finish it. I told them my strategy and we had him writing down 1 goal a day for the next week. This kid completely turned around. He comes in every week now completely knowing every song. It is night and day. This is a rare, most students will not turn around that quickly, but it felt good to me to know I made such a difference.

Thank you, mikey keys, for your in-depth response. I am really impressed by your focus on the goal setting.

There is one more issue that exacerbates the problem. There is a “magic” number of half-an-hour that most of the parents coming up with in regards of the student's practice. This kind of parental practice setting leads to the mindless repeats of the piece from the beginning to the end by the child.

I am constantly educating the parents on smart practising. Nobody knows in advance how much time it takes to solve a math problem. Maybe half-an-hour or maybe one hour or maybe only 5 minutes. The same with piano practising. It should take as much time as needed to accomplish a reasonable and achievable goal. But again and again I hear that their child is not practising “enough”. They listen to me but they don't hear me! So they are putting a timer on the top of the piano eventually killing any brain involvement in their child's practise. Just recently one parent decided to stop the lessons not because his child is not doing well but because he is not practising “enough” in his opinion.

Thank you for your post, landorrano, but I cannot see the connection here. How is student's desire to always perform the piece (vs practising or working on it) corresponds to the note reading issue? Recently, one of my students brought to the lesson Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin which he learned from scratch within a couple of weeks (from the music of course). You should see the displeasure on his face when I asked him to repeat a single bar of it couple of times. Trust me he would be more than happy to repeat the whole thing from the beginning to the end! It is an emotional issue not the technical one.

Maybe not, but I think landorrano makes a point worth thinking about. I have come across many pianists who can't play an isolated bar or two of a piece they supposedly know quite well. They are relying on the "get the fingers going and let them go to the end" method. Sure they may have read the music to start with (but who knows how slowly and laboriously!), memorised it in small sections and never engaged with the written music again. You might at least want to consider whether the student is resisting this because it's difficult for them to isolate and read an individual bar without the assistance of what comes before. It's not an unusual situation.

Thank you for your input currawong. You are right in the sense that it is not easy to start from the middle of the bar. Sometimes it requires an additional practice hands separately and then hands together to be able to do it. The very least it requires some effort. Still, I do not see the connection between this issue and poor note reading unless the person who studied Rhapsody in Blue in 2 weeks IS a poor note reader which seems quite unlikely to me (actually he is good at it).

As you may know in computer science there is a term of Random Access Memory (RAM) which allows access to any part of the memory from any point on. And there is a Sequential Access Memory which allows to access only starting from the beginning. RAM is more desirable but requires additional resources – more effort to achieve. The piano playing is quite similar – it is easier to memorize from the beginning to the end. The ability to start from any part of the piece or even from any bar is harder and requires an additional effort. And it is not because the student is a poor reader but because he or she has to work on this skill to obtain.

You'd be surprised at how much effort a poor reader can go to in order to avoid having to read! This situation would set my alarm bells ringing, and reading would be the first thing I'd check out.

But if you're convinced they can do it, I guess you just have to insist that they do, as Gary said earlier.