Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum What is your merit system? Are we materialistic?

It doesn't matter, because reading is not about numbers but content, thinking, and interest. In fact, if a student or child of mine won by reading more books than anyone else I would consider that to be failure.

Upon reflection, I would like to read books for money. Could someone (anyone!) put me in contact with the treasurer manager of such a study?

I contacted the New York Times Book Review division several years ago, asking for the same information, and hoping to secure the same type of arrangement. I have not heard back from them yet . . .

All the better!

About the "western world", I understand what you mean now. As an aside, though, I can say that in France the idea of motivating students with stickers and the like is close to, if not completely, unknown. I do know one piano teacher, however, who gives her students a hard candy after lessons; I have never interpreted that as a reward but simply as an expression of her affection for kids, a kind of a way to say to them "I know who you are, Kiddo", a kind of a wink of the eye that escapes the parents' radar.

In France, if there were a discussion among teachers as to whether one ought to give from time to time a little hug or say something nice to a student, the subject of the discussion wouldn't be about how to motivate students. The subject would be about a teacher who has difficulty in his relations with kids ands who needs help in this respect.

OK. But that is normal, isn't it? I mean, kids grow up, things that seem meaningful suddenly seem stupid, bogus ... but that doesn't change that they truly seemed meaningful and that beyond that they truly were meaningful.

Hang in there P-Lo, maybe in 2013!

You would consider it a failure for a child to read a lot? I don't understand.

No. Let me try to explain. If you are competing or trying to earn points in one of these schemes, then the more books you go through, the better. If you go through simple short books with easy vocabulary and the typical predictable plot - good guy wins, bad guy gets defeated - then you can chock up lots of books. A thicker book with heavier vocabulary and more complex structure takes longer. If you are reading something thought provoking that makes you ponder then it takes even longer to go through that book. Supposing that you read something that makes you want to research things, write down your own ideas, or discuss ideas? You'll only be able to read a few books, or maybe even one.

When I ponder these various scenarios, I would prefer the latter for any student or child of mine. But it is the former that will get rewarded by a tally of number of books "read". Something deeper is lost. What does "reading" mean? Is it just glossing over meaning and devouring as many words as possible? That's why I used "go through" instead of "read" for the first scenarios.

You may want to think of your music studies. You probably want depth and substance. If we want kids to read, are we giving them things that are meaningful? Are we compensating for poor material and poor teaching approaches in mass education be rewarding something simplistic like zipping through books? I'd like a child to really read.

Addendum:
This also goes toward motivation. Reading should be for the purpose of being entertained, learning things, exploring ideas. This is also a personal dialog between you and the book. It is your activity and it is meaningful. If it becomes something where you please others by doing it, where the quality of your activity or the quality of the books you are reading don't matter, that is an empty affair.

You might be interested in this book:
Punished by Rewards
Alfie Kohn

http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm

It looks interesting.

keystring, thank you for explaining. I don't think of "most books read" as necessarily being synonymous with "only short, simple books read.". But I haven't seen these programs in operation to know how they usually turn out.

For the parallel with music studies, I'm not so sure that the comparison so obviously shows that trying to encourage children to read a lot of books by counting them is wrong. Elissa Milne has recently written, approvingly, on her blog about a challenge for piano students to learn forty pieces in a year.

Perhaps counting is a second-best measure, but I don't think it's necessarily bad.

KS, have you ever heard that quantity means quality? There is a challenge going around teachers, they intend to implement the Hal Leonard forty pieces in a year and quite a few teachers agree that this is not a bad idea. Depth and substance doesn't always have to come in big lengthy pieces, you can still learn a lot from reading lots of two page pieces.

"Depth and substance", it seems to me, would come from WHAT is being (learned or read or played); and from HOW WELL it is being (learned or read or played).

KeyString can write for herself, obviously, but her complaint about the "contest format" is that it may reward skimming the pages of many books, as opposed to reading for getting the most out of a book or two.

Is there intrinsic value in "reading" a large volume of works in a compressed time? Exposure: One can practice speed-reading with books, and can work on sight-reading with music. Beyond that, QUALITY that you mention suffers, naturally.

Do you know if the teachers who are subscribing to this Hal Leonard One-Piece-per-Week program are implementing it to solve (a) specific problem(s) with certain of their students?

Ed

No, I haven't.

The fact that a group of people have decided something like this is not a bad idea does not tell me much. I am actually aware of this venture. The teaching ideas behind it are that students need to be exposed to a variety of music in order to build up their experience. It is also to counter an alarming tendency to only teach 3 or 4 pieces a year for the purpose of getting high grades in exams. 40 pieces a year is less than one piece a week, or if there are 2 small pieces assigned at a time, each piece has two weeks preparation time. It also depends on what is done with the pieces, and what is being taught.

The size of a piece (or book) was never an issue. The consideration is what we put into things and thus what we get out of them.

An additional thought is that if the teachers decide to teach 40 pieces in a year, that is not the goal they are presenting to the students. The goal the student aims for is to play the piece well, learn the particular thing about it that the teacher introduces, and similar things. The goals you set for yourself in your learning activity will influence outcome. If you are in a race to read as many books as possible, chances are that you will not pay as much attention to the content, or learn from them the same way if something can be learned.


I haven't read that blog entry but heard about it. You could call me a fan of Elissa Milne and I have a great deal of respect for her. I know that she is also about exploration, depth, enjoyment. Even her small pieces have a lot of thought behind them, and their simplicity belies the substance they hold. 40 pieces a year of explored pieces sounds good to me.

Would you really? That sounds terribly hard, to me.

Encouraging kids to read a lot sounds good to me. Regardless of whether they read short books or long ones, good ones or bad ones, whether they read closely or just chew 'em up and spit 'em out. Even comic books. Doesn't matter, reading is great, let's hope kids get the taste for it young and we'll see where it takes them. Anything that helps a kid along on this way has merit, in my opinion.

I'd be willing to bet, furthermore, that a teacher who has the silly idea of a "read the most books during winter vacation" contest is a great, great teacher, and that he knows how to handle the thing with a great deal of humour.

Of course, you as the parent need to monitor the materials being read, just to make sure they are age- and content-appropriate. And make sure that there's a balance in genres (i.e., don't let the kid read 40 mystery novels and nothing on science, math, and mythology).

I've heard that phrase in context of teaching kids to read books, up to around age 13. Before age 14, experts do advise teachers to encourage kids to read as many books as possible without regards to comprehension or "quality." I actually saw a chart in which the experts say how many millions of words each kid is supposed to read annually, and they chart the numbers by age. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the sheer number of words is staggering, like 2 million words a year for a 12 year old.

Unfortunately, such studies don't take into account the student's home culture. What are the chances that the kids will read books if their parents don't read, or can't read?

I do wonder about that myself as well. The thing is, my parents never read to me... I loved stories are a six year old and then when I was seven I started to read a lot on my own. My brother never had an interest in reading so my parents tried reading to him.

I sometimes wonder with books, this is going totally over the OP but as adults, we might be depriving ourselves of pictures. I started to read children's picture books last year just because I was involved in a kids music concert project and after a few books, I actually felt overwhelmed by all the pictures. The pictures felt like they were overstimulating. It makes you think...

Anyway, as far as music goes, I've heard the same idea expressed - reading/listening and learning several pieces that are in the same style, or by the same composer normally brings more quality to the piece being learned.

Anyway, I've noticed this thread kind of went into a tangent... I couldn't help but wonder when students are rewarded - when a piece is done and polished and the student 'passes/moves on' or during the learning process - if the student shows that s/he practiced and worked adequately. Everybody here seems to agree that material rewards and merit schemes ideally shouldn't happen in a studio.

I want to stop at: "experts" advising teachers, which then follows with the studies that these "experts" base themselves on. Good grief, AZN, you are a teacher yourself!

As a primary teachers we got training in teaching young children in these areas, in educational psychology (how different ages learn), etc. After that comes the observation of hundreds or thousands of children on a daily basis while working with them, their parents, and specialists who are brought in. Can this compare with someone involved in hypothesis sending out studies that result in some statistical results to a number of questions? This one phrase really struck me: "experts do advise teachers" --- The teacher IS the expert. I mean, a teacher is a trained professional in the specific field of teaching that age level.

When you teach grades (K) 1 - 3, you are setting up everything. Later when I tutored older kids, very often their difficulties in the higher grades stemmed from what they didn't learn in the first grades. When you teach reading, there are a lot of different things going into that, which as a teacher keeps in mind. At the same time you are teaching other subjects, and you are also teaching things such as thinking, planning, research, attitude. These will go into your reading. There is also the notion of "integration", meaning that the subjects flow into each other. As a simple example, if you learn about electricity or energy in science, you may have the invention of electricity in history, math. gets involved, and you are reading and writing about it - which gets you into spelling and vocabulary.

So as teachers teaching at the level where reading skills are being set up, we look at a larger picture. That's what I had in mind when I wrote my comment which in some quarters seem to have been taken literally.

I don't think that any trained teacher needs to be told by an "expert" that lots of reading is important. At the same time, that advice is much narrower than what teaching reading involves. These things look impressive to the general public which wants to be assured that something is being done, in terms that they can understand.

Anyhow, this was supposed to link back to music and having a bigger picture there, and somehow that's lost and I can't find my way back either.

What?
I for one strongly disagree.