Two First Lessons

Even after all these years, I still get nervous for my first lesson with a new student.  I'm not the type of teacher who uses the same curriculum year after year with every student; rather, my methods are constantly evolving, and I try to tailor them to each student's individual abilities and personality.  So with first lessons I always feel off my game, because there are so many unknown variables to account for.  Does the student have any natural ability? Did their previous teacher set them up well, or do they have bad habits? What's their attention span like? Are they quiet and needing constant prompting, or do they march to the beat of their own drum, and you need to give them lots of space to express their potential enthusiasm? Will they try to take over the lesson, and I'll have to enforce boundaries right from the start? Will they laugh at my jokes? I could go on and on.

This week, I taught two first lessons that couldn't have been more different, and I thought they went rather well.  The first one was a five and a half year old named Angelica. Angelica was already waiting in the hallway for me when I got off the elevator.  She giggled and ran away before I could so much as see her face, so immediately I had an idea what kind of first lesson this would be.  And indeed, she started by excitedly showing me her dad's guitars and the demo mode on her keyboard, and ended by slowly and methodically demonstrating how she set up her kitty tower playset as I had one foot out the door, with her parents trying to hurry her along.  In between we were able to explore the three main registers of the piano, learn about finger numbers and black key groups, listen to the Carnival of the Animals, and set up basic posture. 

Part of my longstanding apprehension with first lessons is that my whole early curriculum is a hodge-podge of techniques taken from different method books.  I've never found a single one that incorporates everything I want to teach, so I tend to skip around and introduce things as the student needs them or can handle them.  My favorite method in recent years is the Musical Journey series by Irina Gorin, but the early books in particular require a bit of adaptation and feel a bit awkwardly fitted to modern American students.  In this case, I wasn't sure at five and a half if the storybook format would work well for Angelica, or if it would feel too juvenile.  Regardless of age, I feel the stories (while being a really neat concept) are way too long and verbose, so I breezed through them as quickly as possible, covering four chapters of content in a half-hour lesson, and that seemed to work well enough.  Angelica ended the lesson as enthusiastically as she began it, having gone ten minutes over time, and we covered enough of the basics to settle my conscience.  We'll get to those flat fingers next time.

My other first lesson this week was with an adult named Helene. First lessons with adults can be tricky, because they come with a vast range of experiences and often only have a vague idea of what they want, or know what they want but don't recognize the long and challenging path to get there. In this case Helene made it easy for me, because she had experience playing other instruments and some ability on the piano, but she downplayed it and said she wanted to start over from the beginning and focus on fundamentals.

This put me in a comfortable position where I could start from square one and make sure she was set up right with basic posture and technique, while still having a common language that I could use to get her to question what she already knew. How, for example, does one produce a staccato sound? How do we define it? What are the physical mechanics at play? Adults like to understand the why behind things, and one quick path into their good graces is to break down a familiar concept into its components in a way they hadn't previously thought about.

Helene proved to be a quick learner with a natural relaxed technique, once again making my job easy. After getting her set up at the instrument (a Yamaha grand, yay!), we learned the three basic touches along with the concepts of arm weight and effortless playing, explored some basic etudes to reinforce these concepts (again, in a Musical Journey book), and finally tied it all together with "real world" applications. That is, I put the theory into practice by demonstrating these concepts in a Bach minuet, and the music she already had out on the piano, which happened to be a Phillip Glass etude and a Faure song. Throughout the lesson, I tried hard to avoid my tendency to monologue on theory and kept her engaged with thought-provoking questions. By the end, she seemed energized and ready to work, and I felt I had done my job well.

First lessons may always be a challenge for me. With students typically staying on for years at a time, I feel like I don't get to practice them very often. And there's always the big questions of chemistry and rapport - sometimes you feel like you're meeting an old friend, and sometimes the kid runs into the closet and refuses to come out before you've even seen their face. (Okay, that only happened once.) But they almost never have one lesson and quit, so I must be doing something right. Now, getting them to stick with it during the teenage transition...that's a whole other challenge. I'll let you know when I figure that one out!