Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum The problem with starting and stopping at the certain spots

Yes. However, we're not talking about memorising, but reading, playing a bar when it's up there in front of you in black and white. No memorising needed.

There is a limit how much I can push the student without harming teacher/student relationship. It is different for every student. I am not in the position to dismiss a student just because he does not like starting from the middle of the piece (as one post suggests). I consider it as an extreme approach. I am more in the middle of the road person.

So you believe that you can play a bar of music without at least partially memorizing (or knowing) the texture? Studying IS memorizing. You maybe are not memorizing the complete set of your sounds and movements but for sure the most of the bits and pieces of it. You are reading only to link those bits and pieces of your memory, knowledge and experience together. Otherwise we all be doing sight reading all the time. More over, very often it is very beneficial to keep your eyes at the keyboard particularly when the shifts are involved. For an example, it would be very interesting to see one mastering the beginning of Campanella by Liszt with his or her eyes glued to the music. The one has to completely memorize it before being able to polish it bar by bar.

Certainly memory is involved. I just read what you said and suddenly thought you were talking about a completely memorised performance, without the music. However, I still think you need to be able to read the bar in question. Any bar of the piece. At sight. La Campanella with eyes glued to the page is perhaps an extreme example I assumed you were talking about something simpler.

(btw I think the post-it notes or printing out small sections were good ideas.)

Thank you for your input, currawong. I appreciate your opinion.

This is something that I constantly deal with as well. I actually had a younger student get very upset that I was making him not start at the very beginning but at a measure near the end of a 16 measure song. I always try to reason with them, but like what as already suggested here before there is a hard wiring for students , especially the young ones to start at the beginning and not focus on the new problem measures.

Often I try to cover the rest of the music on the page with blank paper except for what i want the student to work on....this seems to work in some cases

With the particular student I mentioned, this has been a HUGE problem of his for almost two years now. I finally decided to be more strict, that is why became upset. I plan on bringing in that particular song to the next lesson where I will make it broken up into four measures per page. He will have to master each page starting with the last. Hopefully he will see the benefit of breaking music down in sections after this.

Maybe someone else also suggested this, but how about having your students do "backwards practice" with pieces they have trouble with? Choose a page or start right at the end. Have them play the last 2 measures. Then have them play the last 4 measures, then the last 6, etc. They will be making the very end of the piece/page/section much stronger, so it will be almost as familiar as the beginning.

With very young students playing those 8-16 measure pieces, you could even have them do backwards practice one measure at a time. Within a section, try one note at a time! You could even "give" them the starting note the first time around, just to get them started.

You might try having students use backwards practice before they get to the point that they are doing full play-throughs with motor memory, to kind of "head it off at the pass." Kids usually think this is kind of fun, too, so they may not balk at it as much as having the teacher say "start here." Just a thought.
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Another thought: How many of us are using the "scramble game" idea from the Valery Lloyd Watts piano teaching manual? This is potentially another useful way to avoiding the "start from the beginning every time" phenomenon.

If I were a mean, autocratic, unreasonable teacher, my students would be afraid of me, and many would quit.

I was talking about drawing a line in the sand and making it clear that *some* things are not negotiable.

In general, I won't bend on these things:

1) Coming frequently to lessons with no music is not OK.
2) Showing up, week after week, with no practice done at home is not OK. I will not accept the job of Personal Piano Trainer.
3) When trying to help a student polish something, always starting at the beginning is insane.

Listening while a student gets stuck in the same place, time after time, is not only encouraging a way of practicing that will ultimately result in very slow progress, at best, it is also unbelievably stressful for me.

For the record, I don't think any student has ever quit taking lessons from me because I insisted on not starting at the beginning, as a default. I think in the long run it leads to keeping students longer, since teaching students HOW to practice in a highly logical and efficient manner leads to success for everyone.

Sounds like a lot of muscle memory at work. How about this; copy their music, cut it up in pieces, rearrange it and have them play through it. Then rearrange it again. This is a great way for them to LOOK at the music and be able to start anywhere.

Gary D. I appreciate your principles. I am a bit more flexible and accommodating. I have some students with some mental and behaviour problems. I do not dismiss them as long as I believe the lessons are beneficial for them. How about students with ADD or Down Syndrome? Is your line on the sand applicable to everyone? Or you only take the "easy" ones?

Let's be honest. There are some students who will never practice properly no matter what you tell them. I consider them as students with mild learning disabilities. I will try my best with them, sometimes I will be their Personal Trainer. It is OK with me as long as there is a hope. I'll give them a chance.

For me, this is often a bigger problem with new transfer students than students who began with me. Principally because we never study a piece as a whole (for the most part) until we work through a number of preliminaries. As a result, my long time students are used to deconstructing music into its elements and working on parts.

I have found, however, that especially with High School transfer students, a little logic and appeal to their common sense goes a long way.

For the most part, these students are not seeing the musical line or phrase, so starting back somewhere and getting a running start seems logical. But when you have them read something out loud from a book, perhaps a dependent clause, they have no problem. Ask them why they didn't start reading from the left hand edge of the page and they look at you like you're an idiot, until you point out that this is precisely what they are doing with their music. We don't start at a bar line (necessarily), but begin with a phrase or sub-phrase, or point which makes sense. We don't go back to the beginning of the chapter and read everything up to the trouble spot, we simply work on the correct pronunciation, phrasing, or whatever.

A second real problem which is probably a corollary to this, is that students are simply playing at an incorrect tempo for where they are at technically. I find that I have to play/count the beat at a drastically slower tempo, so they can have success. Then, we gradually speed up.

Does this help any?

Gary D. You posted that you are supporting currawong suggestion that this problem can be attributed to poor note reading. Though it is debatable whether resistance to start from the certain point could be a sign of inadequate reading skills but I would challenge you to explain why the poor note reader would be reluctant STOPPING at the point where the teacher asked him to stop. Where is the link?

I have three autistic students. That's only the tip of the iceberg. I'll let you decide if I take "only the easy ones".

My line in the sand applies to the individuals who are capable of working with me without supervision. Even the little ones understand it when I say, "Where are you starting?"

When they point to measure one, I point to the last line or last measure and tell them to start there. I'm not mean about it.

When I have very little children, or older students who have serious problems, I have a parent in the room, and we work together. The parents are very good about drilling or practicing in sections and help me stress the importance of this when it is necessary.

You are assuming you are more flexible and more accomodating than I am. I think that's a big stretch.

This could very well be due to poor reading abilities, because as soon as you stop the student, he/she would not be able to re-start except from the very beginning. Thus, the student would be unwilling to stop in the middle for any reason.

Either that, or you have some hopelessly defiant students. Just dump them and find better students.

AZNpiano, I am amazed with your logic. I am sorry but in my experience poor readers stop right away when I ask them to stop. The reason is simple - it is hard for them to continue reading.

AZNpiano, I had a nasty heartburn in the morning. Could it be also explained by poor note reading??

Gary D.

• If my student comes to the lesson with no music I would not make a big deal out if it. I would just pickup my own copy from the shelf and go on with the lesson. I would also remind him or her to bring the book next time.
• I also will be patient with the student who stopped practising for some reason. I remember myself as a teenager. I was not practising for months. But later I got serious about piano, started practising a lot and won 1st place at an International piano competition in USA. I guess if I was your student I would not have a chance.
• When I was preparing for my first performance with an orchestra at the age of 12 my piano teacher was giving me some extra lessons and coaching me for that event as if he was my Personal Piano Trainer. I am very grateful to him for doing that. Thanks to the coaching I felt very confident at the performance. I guess if I was your student I would not receive any help from you.

Sorry but I do not see how is your approach flexible or accommodating.

Obviously you did not read what I wrote: I said FREQUENTLY. I did not say "now and then". I would estimate that one or two of my students end up in lessons without music each week, and often the reasons are understandable. They do not do this FREQUENTLY.

NO practice? Did you go months, week after week, doing NO practice at all between lessons? That is what I was talking about.

Wrong. I did the same thing for at least two students. I spent hours working with them. But that was help in additional to regular help, and they were working. I assume your piano teacher did not give you this extra help when you did *no* work on your own.

Well, since you barely know me, you are free to draw any conclusions you wish. As I said, I teach three autistic students. I also have two students with dyslexia, two who have attention deficit problems and one who is hyperactive and is on meds for it. My schedule is full, and often the children I teach recommend me to their friends. I do not have astoundingly talented, hard-working students. Just fairly average students, but most of them are nice people.

I still make them start from where I want them to start from. I'm the teacher. That line in the sand remains. I do not recall losing a student because of drawing that line.