For those of you that may not know, I teach music as a profession. I have taught anything from high school bands to elementary choirs. I even taught a very cool Junkyard Taiko percussion group at a middle school in Buena Park, CA. My current venture in teaching music has led me to owning my own studio where I mostly teach piano and a few band instruments like flute and trombone. Through my public school and private studio experiences, I have noticed something about today’s youth (most of them). They are missing a key ingredient that can help ensure successful learning in both their personal lives and in vocational pursuits.
I have a piano student, let’s call her Stephanie. We start out Stephanie’s lesson with a piano technique book called Dozen a Day. I ask her to play song #3 on the page and she does so but not without some trouble. So to ascertain what her problems might be, I ask her to play it again but this time only to play the first two measure where I suspect she is missing some understanding. She then commences to play the entire song. I ask her to start again but this time to play just the first measure of the 4 measure technique. She plays up to the middle of measure 3. Whhhaaaaaaaaa? Inside my imagination, I am the helpless conversational companion of Ted Striker just trying to find a way out of this horrible situation
Ted Striker reminisces about a love lost.
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