By now, you have figured out that the instruments that most adults play are at the top of my success pyramid: piano, band and orchestra instruments, and guitar.
There's a reason for that.
My idea is to always be building towards music that can continue after students leave my classroom and school.
I'm teaching music for life, not for the week or for the year.
Piano plays such a crucial role.
How does piano fit into your program?
I learned early on if there was one instrument I needed multiples of in my classroom, it was piano.
The first piano lab I had used in my classroom had mini key pianos which was better than no pianos at all.
The next piano lab I put together had six upright piano that were donated by families as well as seven-teen 61-key electric keyboards with full size keys for each keyboard.
For the last third of my career, I did some informal data collection concerning kids and pianos.
I was teaching in Title 1 schools.
I found that in several of these schools, only 26% of the kids had ever touched a piano before, which is sort of a bizarre fact given that they were taught music in public school music rooms that all contain a piano.
When many kids first approached a piano in my room, they attempted to play it with only their thumbs, as if they were texting.
I had a hard time believing what I was seeing.
Then again, consider this exchange I had with a music educator who was vacating their music room because they had been assigned to a new school.
I was coming into the room as they were carting out their last box of personal materials.
It was a standard elementary music room in our district: lots of hand percussion, old chromatic xylophones in need of repair, five badly out-of-tune auto-harps, over two dozen Orff tone-plate instruments, one upright piano, and no guitars.
As we were making small talk about the program, the teacher suddenly got agitated.
“Whatever you do, don't let these kids touch that piano, because all they do is bang on it!”
It seems such an odd statement for a teacher to make.
I did a lot of piano playing that first month to model what playing a piano looks like. I knew I had to model before attempting to change the piano culture in the school.
I took time – but things changed.
We “played” on paper pianos before ever using the real pianos. That was ostensibly so the kids could prove to me that they understood proper technique and hand positioning.
In reality, they were demonstrating to me that they had learned to respect the instruments.
This is what I ended up telling those students:
“When you do respectful things, you will be respected.
Treat the piano with respect and, in turn, the piano will show you respect.
Hit it, bang it, treat it with disrespect, it will shame you in front of all who hear you try to play.
It will make you sound like a 10-cent whistle and, even worse, make you look like a spoiled toddler.
Respect it, learn how it wants to be touched, give it time, treat it like a friend, don't ever give up on it, and the piano will make you sound like a million bucks, look like a winner, and be your friend for life.”
More on piano in “Stacking Skills for Success: Piano – Part Two”.
There's a reason for that.
My idea is to always be building towards music that can continue after students leave my classroom and school.
I'm teaching music for life, not for the week or for the year.
Piano plays such a crucial role.
How does piano fit into your program?
I learned early on if there was one instrument I needed multiples of in my classroom, it was piano.
The first piano lab I had used in my classroom had mini key pianos which was better than no pianos at all.
The next piano lab I put together had six upright piano that were donated by families as well as seven-teen 61-key electric keyboards with full size keys for each keyboard.
For the last third of my career, I did some informal data collection concerning kids and pianos.
I was teaching in Title 1 schools.
I found that in several of these schools, only 26% of the kids had ever touched a piano before, which is sort of a bizarre fact given that they were taught music in public school music rooms that all contain a piano.
When many kids first approached a piano in my room, they attempted to play it with only their thumbs, as if they were texting.
I had a hard time believing what I was seeing.
Then again, consider this exchange I had with a music educator who was vacating their music room because they had been assigned to a new school.
I was coming into the room as they were carting out their last box of personal materials.
It was a standard elementary music room in our district: lots of hand percussion, old chromatic xylophones in need of repair, five badly out-of-tune auto-harps, over two dozen Orff tone-plate instruments, one upright piano, and no guitars.
As we were making small talk about the program, the teacher suddenly got agitated.
“Whatever you do, don't let these kids touch that piano, because all they do is bang on it!”
It seems such an odd statement for a teacher to make.
I did a lot of piano playing that first month to model what playing a piano looks like. I knew I had to model before attempting to change the piano culture in the school.
I took time – but things changed.
We “played” on paper pianos before ever using the real pianos. That was ostensibly so the kids could prove to me that they understood proper technique and hand positioning.
In reality, they were demonstrating to me that they had learned to respect the instruments.
This is what I ended up telling those students:
“When you do respectful things, you will be respected.
Treat the piano with respect and, in turn, the piano will show you respect.
Hit it, bang it, treat it with disrespect, it will shame you in front of all who hear you try to play.
It will make you sound like a 10-cent whistle and, even worse, make you look like a spoiled toddler.
Respect it, learn how it wants to be touched, give it time, treat it like a friend, don't ever give up on it, and the piano will make you sound like a million bucks, look like a winner, and be your friend for life.”
More on piano in “Stacking Skills for Success: Piano – Part Two”.
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