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I know I've been harping about how horrid the transfer wrecks have been.

But I thought I should write a positive thread about all the talented transfer students I've been getting lately, and some of them can actually read notes! Fluently! What a novel concept. None of these students are past the early intermediate stage, but at least I don't have to waste another year just getting them to read treble clef.

Their wonderful teachers deserve the recognition for having done a great job. Bravo!

AZN, it sounds like they are also well taught students - maybe well taught with a good work ethic and attentiveness since an excellent teacher who is ignored can't do a good job. Glad you're having this positive experience.

I've gotten a few great transfer students myself this year it's very exciting. I hope my students who move away or transfer will do well with their new teachers too.

Doreen Hall

Hmm, if they were well taught previously, i wonder what led them to become transfer students then?

Also AZN, i think it is very thoughtful of you to add a positive thread to keep everything fair and balanced. Although I still enjoy your Transfer Wreck rants!

I wouldn't call them "well taught" because they would have been much further along had they truly been well taught. But I appreciate the fact that some of these students were taught to read music fluently instead of being taught by the "copy me" method, which I still see from time to time.

As for the reason, I know one of the teachers quit teaching, and one family just moved from Northern California. Not sure about the others.

How refreshing! I agreed to substitute teach for a young piano teacher who was going out of town for a couple of months for a piano seminar. All 3 were working on Minuet in G, and one of them really could only play by ear. Technique was not even touched on with any of them, and there was no effort to teach them good practice habits.

But they are all sweet kids and want to learn how to play piano, so that's good. I'm just hoping I can impart on them some ideas while I have the time with them.

I'm amazed that parents let such teachers get away with this . Surely, even if those parents didn't know anything about music, something would have twigged in their minds when they realized that their child couldn't associate a note on the page with a key on the piano.

My parents were (and still are) musically illiterate, but the first thing they expected me to learn as a kid, when I started lessons, was to read music - not copy what my teacher did.

I've met a number of people who used to have lessons when they were children, but gave up early on. One or two had less than six months' worth of lessons. Yet, all of them still remembered the basics of music notation and could work out any note on the staff by counting from middle C (they all remembered where middle C was on the staff and on the keyboard). That was also the way I was taught how to work out what any note is - within the first lesson or two.

Something must be wrong with the teaching system some of today's teachers are using (assuming they have a system......).

What you are describing is precisely what's wrong with piano pedagogy of the past that pioneers like Frances Clark were trying to correct. Unfortunately, many piano teachers insist on using what their own teachers used (and what their teacher's teacher used, etc.) because they are unwilling to try anything new and better, or, worse, they don't know how to try anything new. The result is predictably poor.

The "counting from middle c" method is about the worst way to learn to play piano. I shudder to think that anybody would teach that way in the 21st century.


No, most modern methods are great. As the recent thread on the pre-staff/pre-reading music indicates, lots of folks are not even aware of the advances in piano pedagogy in the last 60 years.

Scary, isn't it? There's only so much you can do in a few lessons.

So, why is it that the musically illiterate students are the ones being taught by Frances Clark teachers? (As I discovered on a recent thread).

Using so-called "pre-staff" so-called notation, which has the advantage of confusing intelligent students, and slowing down the acquisition of reading skills (as I discovered on a recent thread)......

Do teachers in Russia (which has produced the greatest number of world-class pianists in the past century) use the FC system of pre-staff notation to teach beginners? Do teachers from the great European music tradition use it (Germany, Austria, France, Czech Republic.....)?

Or is it just that everything is dumbed down here?

To accommodate teachers and students who want short cuts?



Again, why is it that students who learnt how notes are notated on staffs from first principles are the ones who can always remember them - even after decades away from looking at music scores?

If there's one thing I learnt from having to master a new language (English is my fourth language), it's that when you learn from first principles, you understand how the language is constructed, and it stays in the memory. And then, you can easily build upon it. Even after decades of disuse, when everything has become fuzzy - you can still 'reconstruct' the language, because you have the basics lodged in the long-term memory.

Whereas the languages which I took short cuts to learn (using phrase books, DVDs etc) without taking the trouble to understand the basics get lost almost as soon as I stop using it regularly. And even when I was using it, I kept making elementary grammatical and other mistakes.

The same applies to everything else - from mathematical principles and theorems, to chemical equations and formulas, to The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (with apologies to the creationists out there..... ).

As a sage once said - "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."

I think that some teachers have forgotten that.

There are many kinds of transfers.

1. Families that move.

This is benign. There is no reason why these students should be particularly bad or particularly poorly taught.

2. Families that shop around for a "better deal."
3. Families of neurotic parents who are always searching for just the right teacher, and Johnny never gets into a groove with anyone.
4a. Families who transfer because Johnny isn't progressing, even though the problem is Johnny.
4b. Families who transfer because Johnny isn't progressing, and the problem is mom or dad.

These, of course, are perfectly sensible reasons for crappy transfer students. The prior teacher is indeed bad or the family situation is not conducive to learning music.

5. Students who progress out of a teacher who was well suited to bring them to intermediate or early advanced level, and the family (or the first teacher) seeks to place the student in the right hands to continue making good progress.

Again, there is no particular reason for such a student to be a train wreck unless you believe you are somehow gifted among teachers at all levels of instruction.

Ha! I love your choice of the word "neurotic." It is spot on for so many parents I've worked for. It's the "teacher hopper."

I have no idea how you arrived at this conclusion.


?

I'm not sure I agree with your position that learning to read by counting up or down form Middle C is a good "first principle". To me it seems very inefficient. This is how I "learned" and I was not taught intervallic reading. When I learned to read the intervals, then all of a sudden I could sight read and learn pieces much more quickly. So perhaps your assertion that the people you know who learned to read by counting up or down from Middle C had learned in a better way is a false conclusion: it could be in spite of rather than because of.

I think most modern method books actually help to standardize and raise the bar a bit on what students learn. It has been my experience that students whose teachers use all of a method (the lessons, solos/performance, technique and theory) actually do quite well.

It is the teachers, like the one I am substituting for these next few months, that make up their own method where there are so many holes. Or ones who only use the lessons book, jump around, and neglect to teach theory and sight reading.

So method books aren't a short cut at all. In fact, many of the better teachers I know make use of them with positive results. Of course, how long a teacher stays in them and moves out to repertoire and more advanced theory can vary, but having the same foundational principles taught in the early years of piano is so important, and these modern methods are excellent in providing a systematic approach.

None are perfect, and supplementing as is needed for the individual student is a must. But it's a good place to start.

Beginners need to have a starting point. Just like the starting point of learning English (if you were brought up on Mandarin, say) is the alphabet - not recognizing complete words.

At least, that was how I learnt English when I was 10. (I don't know how Americans learn it.)

If by "intervallic reading" you mean students are taught fifths and thirds straightaway, rather than teaching them how to work out what any note is on the staff by counting up or down from a known note, it seems to me that what you're doing is skipping several basic steps to note-reading - because all beginners who learn from middle C on both staves from the start will eventually get to that stage where they 'read' intervals (in both hands), and eventually, any note without recourse to intervals.

That was what I meant by 'short cuts' - just like that 'pre-staff' notation stuff you're using, which apparently skips staves and have notes hanging in space on the page, just to get beginners to play 'tunes' on black notes from day 1, relying on fingerings instead.

Sure, that's more 'efficient' if what you mean is that beginners start playing pentatonic tunes in fifths, reading the fingerings, straightaway.

But what about other intervals - when do students learn to read them, and how many intervals do they have to 'learn' before thay can work out what a note is on the staff?

Using maths as the example I'm talking about, we all know (I hope) that 8 x 8 = 64. But can you work that out from first principles? If you haven't been taught the principles of multiplication, you'll always need a calculator (which is of course, more 'efficient' - except when you haven't got one with you) unless you've memorized the multiplication tables (which is even more efficient, except when you can't remember them, or the numbers involved are too large).

As I said, even beginners who only ever had a few lessons in their childhood (and were taught in the traditional middle C method) can remember how musical notation works, and how to work out what any note is on either staff, several decades from when they last touched a piano or read a music score. How long is it before beginners taught on the pre-staff method learn to read proper music not based on learnt intervals on staves?

This was addressed in the thread regarding pre-staff notation. It's a matter of a few weeks before they get to the staff, assuming the student practices. Intervals larger than steps are taught shortly thereafter, beginning with 3rds, then 4ths, then 5ths, etc.



Agreed. And this starting point is learning to read the rhythms and direction of the notes rather than get bogged down with trying to read notes on top of that.

I'm not sure why you are so against pre-staff notation. It's been around for a while now. Have you ever tried it? It seems you don't really even know what it is, yet you criticize it because that is not your experience. Why not study it yourself before poo-pooing it?

And by "efficient" I mean that students learn the concept of reading much faster, more thoroughly, than if having to stop and count up or down for every note they play.




By "intervallic" I mean by looking at the interval between two notes and determining how to play that on the keys. So from whatever note you are on, you can quickly tell what the next note is based on the distance it is from the current note. This, again, is standard in most modern method books.

This post shows a complete lack of understanding of what intervallic reading is. It's like discussing a novel with folks who didn't get past chapter one.

I'm done wasting my time on this issue.

I couldn't agree more.

If I remember correctly, after a month as a beginner, I was playing all five notes either side of middle C (using JT's book).

In which case, it seems to me that the pre-staff stuff is slowing the reading of music down.


What I know about pre-staff notation is what was discussed in this forum, and the examples given on Google-search, as I'm certainly not going to buy a beginner's book on it.

And it all makes no sense to me, nor to an adult beginner I know (who's being taught using the traditional method by his teacher). Why teach rhythm before notes, if that involves notes floating around with no fixed background (which never occurs in music notation)? The traditional method uses whole notes to introduce students to notes, without the distraction of changing rhythms, and has the advantage that it is recognizable as standard notation, right from the start.

So that there's no possibility of confusion, of having to look at notes from a different perspective when a 'background' is introduced.



If that's all you mean by 'intervallic', isn't that how all beginners learn to read notes - by counting the interval between two notes from a known note? On the staff?

How is that modern, or different from the way I learnt to read (other than that I had a set point to start from - middle C)?

The example a teacher gave previously showed a tune based entirely on fifths, on black notes.

I thought the pre-staff notation was specifically designed for younger beginners?

For young ones who are not readers yet, it sort of makes sense.