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Elise_B,

I find it interesting and comforting that John v.c. Brook who is on vacation in Germany, is spending his last night there thinking about what he would say to you. You are the focus since we don't know your teacher either, but you have brought certain things to our attention.

I think it's great that so many teachers have responded to you here regardless of what their viewpoint is, they are interested in communicating with you.

May I offer an idea? When you go with your Dad to see the piano teacher, can you be a great listener to what is being said between them. If you claim a lot of the time to speak, you will allow the teacher to remain unspoken, or speaking minimally. Perhaps you could consider writing down your most pressing problem and stating the problem, and what you would like the solution to be. Give it to your Dad to be familiar with. Make sure you thank Dad for participating. I hope that your Dad and your piano teacher can think of you as "Elise" and not, my daughter, and my student. This is the "Elise" you have become in the present moment and who you will be in the future.

P (Problem)
C (Communication)
S (Solution)

In your last posting you said you had completed up to grade 4 with your Dad and brother's help, and then that the teacher especially in your first year had to correct your work. That seems to me to be a heavy number for you to have sat through. I hope you have made lots of good progress, but it required a certain mind set and a "sterner" relationship between you and the teacher.

Have you asked your teacher for a prediction for your musical future with him as he sees it?

I'm thinking that this situation is consuming to you. Think about good outcomes and how to arrive there.

Confidence. Courtesy. Communication. Cooperation. Competance.

Betty

Betty:

How many C's can you come up with?

Elise:

I'm a younger teacher, so it wasn't all that long ago that I went through the horrors of high school. I, too, had a ton of dumb, pointless, can-the-teacher-get-any-worse homework for my AP classes. I was too caught up in playing the "high school game" and did all the extracurricular garbage that wasted my life away. There were many weeks that I went to the piano lesson having a grand total of ZERO minute practice time. I would get my usual scolding from my strict piano teacher.

I, too, thought how idiotic adults are. I frequently asked myself, why am I doing all this work? Why wouldn't people understand that IT TAKES TIME to do all this work??? I was angry, bitter, and counted the seconds before I got to college.

In retrospect, most of what I suffered I brought onto myself. I didn't have to play the "high school game" and take all those pointless AP classes, which yielded a piece of paper that says "AP Scholar with Distinction." I wish I would have practice the piano instead, and I'd be a much better player now.

I've been there. I feel your pain.

Construct your posts more maturely and people will treat you more maturely; people can only infer who you are by your posts. Having skipped out on a recital doesn't help.

Know that you are posting on a board with people from different backgrounds. If your situation differs from average, you have to explain. Most students do not have much homework. When I was middle school aged, I was recommended for college and taking AP classes, been there. Choose your priorities, and yes, possibly choosing your future earlier. You can always change paths later. If you are interested in majoring in piano, you have to put in more time and most of what your teacher is trying to get to you will help in this path. If not majoring in piano, you are fine and explain this to you teacher; you are interested in pursuing the piano but not at the cost of sacrificing your studies. If the teacher doesn't understand this, dump him.

Everything you have written suggests that you run away from the problems and you ended up asking your parents to talk to the teacher instead. Be stronger and take it upon yourself to talk to your teacher. There has already been suggestions on leaving the classroom to talk on a more personal level. Even if your parents have already talked to the teacher, you should still take it upon yourself to talk to him. If you can't face him, write a letter. Also explain that you learn better when things are explained, for example, not just having him tell you what to do, but why it is important.

If all fails, work hard to succeed rather than giving up and running, and count down till college and/or independence. I ended up on this path as I had no way out of misery less going to the authorities. Sometimes, that's life. Complaining doesn't help, only empowering yourself.

I think stories cannot be well understood at a distance, and too much speculation can serve to muddy the waters. The Internet is a funny place for that.

Once again I'm bewildered and disappointed at our forum's sometime harshness towards a 14-year-old girl.

Here is a young person who has a dilemma she is unsure of how to handle. She has turned to a forum of adults, seeking help and, hopefully, some wisdom and kindness from us. Many of us are trying to help. But on this forum she has also been accused, in so many words, of everything from immaturity to laziness to cowardice. She isn't eighteen, or twenty-one. She's fourteen! Yes, she has decisions to make about her goals in music, and some of Elise's complaints are exactly those someone her age would make: shorts and gum-chewing, for example. But where has our compassion gone for a young person who is, among other things, afraid of her teacher's shouting and bad temper? Does anyone here really believe that intimidation goes hand-in-hand with successful learning?

Personally, I view Elise's reaching out to us for a 'second opinion' as highly mature, and her posts as unusually eloquent for someone her age. How many of us supposedly wise adults would tolerate for a minute a doctor, or therapist, or teacher of anything, who shouted at us, intimidated us, threatened us with punishment, and treated us with disrespect? If your young daughter were frightened of her teacher and miserable in his classes, would you blame her? (edited for misspelling)

faucon,

Betty P: It's spelled competence, not competance.

Elise_B: You make astute observations and write very well. Good luck next week. Boil your thoughts to 2 sentences in case you get the chance to speak. Let them be the headliners, the crux of your issue. They will want to hear more.

G#Major,

Oh, it's embarrasing to spell competance incorrectly - I should use the full reply form where spell check would catch that. How come I can't remember that?

It's amazing to me that out of all the postings I do so many people enjoy looking for the misspelled word. Oh, Oh! Did I misspell that too?

What about the content?

Betty :rolleyes:

I did not overlook your content.

Just to be sure, we all make mistkaes, hopefully minor...

I am wary of high-level lecturing. To prepare for a tense scenario, a person needs a sharp focus to hold their thoughts together.

Are you saying you are reading high-level lecturing here? Does lecturing mean lecturing or friendly advice?

And, about the tense scenario, and sharp focus, and holding their thoughts together....I doth think thou be a dissenter of the critical kind, but I can't tell for certain, it has me puzzled to the maximum.

I feel the red pen - I believe you to be saying "less is more" - and "none is better than some". Maybe!

I may be missing your point, but I think it was much more than the spelling of competence.

I'm willing to listen.

Honestly, I don't feel there's any "lecturing" going on here. The language isn't harsh or demeaning. Some people are more sympathetic than others, but I certainly don't see any finger-pointing here.

Let's keep things in perspective, shall we??

My point is that Elise -- or anyone, really, who's got a few longstanding points to make -- needs to be ready to calmly and succinctly state them. That will get people listening and wanting to hear more.

The problem is that emotions too easily will garble a message, especially a festering one. If an adult gets tongue tied, people will think he had too much coffee (or not enough), or maybe he just had a bad day. If a minor does that, adults will think he's exaggerating and should just grow up a bit.

That's not fair. It pained me to read Elise's posts, and I cringed at the belittling and condescending responses. Just as bad, people weren't listening. Again and again, people inferred things not said or implied, and attributed to her things they wanted to believe. I was shocked that this came from teachers. If that kind of response is normal, will her own teacher do the same? I don't know. So for her sake, I want her to be ready to deliver her message in a way that is taken seriously.

And what gets taken seriously? A cool, almost detached, descriptive and supported message. I find it ironic (and I'm not one to believe in much irony) that, culturally here, it is far more acceptable to talk about emotions and the reasons for them than to actually allow their expression.

So my message was to keep a sharp focus. Reduce all thinking and feeling to a handful of words that will compel a request for more.

I suspect now that I made more sense with my earlier post that used fewer words.

Have we got some sort of Chinese whisper going on here? I searched through and can't find any reference Elise has made to shouting. Technically it would be classed as child abuse. With such a litigious culture over there, does it still happen?

Monica, thank you. I hope we can all give Elise the moral support she needs.

Hi kbk. Don't know about litigation, but in one of Elise's earlier posts she writes: "And he gets all mad and he yells at you about every second measure.. I already walk in with a big gulp and sometimes I kind of freeze at the bench especially if he is in a bad mood already."
AFAIK, yelling and shouting are generally felt to be pretty much the same thing.

G# Maj:

Thank you for your opinion.

First, to respond to your objection that we are making undue assumptions, I have to say that by this token, we should suggest to the original poster that she talk to the teacher herself and handle it her own way. We cannot get involved because do not know the entire situation. This reasoning can lead to hypocrisy on your end, since making any suggestion at all relies on an assumption about the poster.

But maybe you claim that only certain assumptions made by other posters are undue. Where do you propose we draw the line for assumption-making? Can you do this in a consistent manner?


On another issue: a few of us have come out of high school very recently, and we have first-hand experience of high school culture. Our claim is that public high school is only as bad as you want it to be. It very well could be that the original poster is not exaggerating the workload - I will iterate again that we have no way of knowing. However, it would not necessarily be unjustified for one of us to make that claim, given our experience.

So, with this in mind, I will suggest explicitly to the original poster what I have been trying to imply with a previous post: you need to choose what you want to focus on. If you want to go with school, then do so. If you want to make piano work, you need to take it into your own hands to do so. YOU are responsible for YOU - there is no one else to blame.


Due to the sensitive nature of this thread, I would like to attach a brief disclaimer to my post. I want to strongly iterate that I am not attacking anyone in any way, and I am not trying to put any kinds of words into anybody's mouths.

Thank you for the discussion.

Thanks for that Faucon. I searched for the wrong term. I sure don't want to put any cats among pigeons here but I suppose technically it is child abuse (psychological). As for the homework issue - it has to be done, but mostly it's a waste of children's time; plenty of studies have shown this. If central government allowed, teachers would dispense with it pretty quickly. Then there are those heavy school bags...

This raises the question of how we should interpret "mad", "yells", etc... I don't have a proposal for how we might do this. This ambivalence shows that we really don't have much ground to "intervene". We do not have enough information to give good advice, as I noted in my previous post.

While language is never perfectly precise, I believe that Elise has clearly indicated that she is unhappy, anxious, and distressed at her lessons. Her discomfort comes across very well.

We do of necessity have limited information. We can only make the best suggestions we can based on the information we have: here is a young lady who is very intimidated by her piano teacher's manner. Regardless of the exact dynamics of the situation, the fact is that she won't learn optimally until her unhappiness is dealt with. She and her dad are planning to talk with her teacher. This might be all that's needed to get things back on track.

edit: currawong, amazing, isn't it!