Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum when a parent requests an interview

If a parent doesn't request an interview, I think that would be inappropriate behavior on the part of the parent.

Parents are better at this sort of thing than you may think, because of course many parents have lots of experience in making such decisions and monitoring the outcome of these decisions.

If I take my own situation, my 8 year old daughter currently has piano lessons, has dancing lessons, goes to the Brownies and goes ice skating. She has also had swimming lessons in the past.

The dancing school she attends now is her 2nd one as the 1st one she attended wasn't great as the person running it did very little of the teaching herself and left it to young inexperienced helpers to do the teaching. In the dancing school she attends now, the person running it does all the teaching herself, has been running her dance school for approx. 30 years and watching my daughter's progress since moving and also the yearly dance shows, the difference is night and day.

The swimming lessons she used to have - she initially had 1-1 lessons in the Health Club I was a member of at the time. The young girl who taught her was an excellent teacher and my daughter was making really good progress. The girl left the Health Club and we continued 1-1 lessons with her in another location but unfortunately, despite her excellent instruction w.r.t. swimming, she became increasingly disorganised and unreliable and we finally gave up and ceased lessons. We then enrolled her in a group class, but although the instructor seemed to be very knowledgeable, the format of the class and the number of kids in the pool at once meant that the kids received very little of the teacher's time, improvement was minimal and my daughter didn't enjoy it. I now take her swimming myself, largely for enjoyment but I insist on 5 mins of actual swimming time. She normally brings her friend and she has a ball.

My daughter goes Ice Skating every week with her mum. She has never had any lessons, her mum has helped her learn to skate and she loves every second of it.

This year is her 1st year in the Brownies. There were a number of options about which Brownies group to join, but based on feedback of parents with older kids she joined the one closest to our home and it is proving to be a good decision so far as my daughter loves it. She goes away for a Fri-Mon long weekend camp next weekend and cannot wait. Mummy isn't so keen that her 8 year old baby will be away all weekend!!

Finally, Piano. After showing my daughter a few simple tunes she could play learned by rote, her first teacher was the teacher I was also with at the time. That didn't go too well and I stopped it after a period as it was becoming increasingly apparent to me, as someone with a decent musical background, that our teacher, while very pleasant and well meaning had next to no idea what they were doing. I then tried to teach her myself while also learning myself, perhaps confused with a false sense of confidence based on comparing my own knowledge and skill set with my previous teacher. That went reasonably well and she made some decent progress, but I was always uncomfortable at the back of my mind that there must be so much that I didn't know so how could I teach it.

We found another teacher and started with her this past October, a final year student at the RSAMD in Glasgow. She is an excellent teacher and confirmed that there were plenty of holes in my knowledge w.r.t playing & teaching Piano - massive great chasms!!

So now I am back in the role I am comfortable with i.e. supportive parent, with someone who actually knows what's what doing the teaching. We are both making very good progress.

But sadly, the draw back of starting with a final year student is she will graduate in the summer, and as she is not originally from Glasgow, she may be moving and therefore I'll have to find a new teacher.

In the meantime, I'll continue to be thankful for the time we do have together, learn as much as I can and continue to put off breaking the news to my daughter that the Piano teacher she loves will be moving on.

So in summary, if the parents are interested in their kids and the activities they choose to send them to, they will educate themselves and be able to make good decisions.

A point, Gerry,

You had that background. You were not in foreign territory.

I have no background in dancing, ice skating, swimming or Brownies but was equally able to make the correct decisions in these situations too.

The other part you wrote was:

That was the crux of the matter. We need to have information so that we can make those decisions. In essence we're agreeing.

Our circumstances were different and that may be part of it. I did not have a young child enrolled in various activities. I had a child who started music lessons at almost age 13 who four years later had to compete in auditions for university placement. He got in, btw. Still, there were things that I wish I would have known.

One thing that I learned late is the role of communication. There is a line between trying to order a teacher around, and following silently in a state of "wonder". You wonder what the teacher, or whether the teacher, or whether you could.... The teacher wonders about the student's thoughts. And while everyone is mystified wondrously, they are in each other's presence weekly and could actually say something. Just a side thought.

Knowing HOW to communicate something. How often in this forum does a student or parent come across as know-it-all, or cluelessly ignorant, because they can't put themselves in the context and speak the lingo? Or Elissa's observation of the parents who were mystified because they could not understand her instructions since it was a different world for them. How do you express something in a way that will not offend or create confusion?

Keystring, what do you mean to say, that when he started studying music at 13 it was already in view to audition for a music major 4 years later?

And what do you wish you had known?

A 13 year old enters grade 9. High school finishes at the end of grade 12. University starts when gr. 12 ends. Auditions to get into a music program are held around March of the 12th grade, I think. Most students competing for placement will have started lessons when they were 4 or 5 years old, and so have 12 or more years of instruction. Hence, four years.

We did many things right, but above all I wish I had known about communicating.

What I meant to say is that under those circumstances being well informed were probably more crucial than in Gerry's tale. After all, his daughter seems to be doing well.

Well that is a frequent problem with people recently ariived on earth! Had it myself the first years!

Ha, just kidding!

But I am curious as to what you mean. What were the problems that never got put on the table?

Also, I still don't follow about your kid. He was decided to study music in college before he had ever started lessons? Is that what you mean?

He started lessons at age 12+ while in gr. 8. By the time he entered high school, he realized that he wanted to study music at university. He would need to be at a particular level by the time he auditioned for university placement. Most students who do that start at ages 4 - 6, not that late.

Go on, go on, how did you proceed?

I would go further and say that once one knows how to acquire and develop skill on a musical instrument one then has an understanding of what constitutes good one-on-one teaching, and therefore how to assess the qualities that teachers in any other outside-of-school learning environment bring to the lessons, and how to communicate more-or-less effectively with those teachers and how to create a good learning environment at home for that skill-acquisition.

I have friends (who are parents of young children) with no great experience in learning skills outside of the classroom environment and while they are well-educated in an academic sense (Masters degrees) they are unfamiliar with the notion of 'practice'!! On the other hand, some of those friends have acquired several languages (either at university or in the field) and they are brilliantly proactive at setting up their children for success in language acquisition.

My mum knew exactly what she was doing with me as a child taking piano lessons, and was entirely unknowledgeable regarding acquiring a second language. She was a great mum, but she just didn't know anything about learning a second language.

There is a book some may find helpful. While it is written from a Christian perspective, there is much good information about guiding a child through private music study. It's called "Raising Musical Children" by Kavanaugh.