Just recently I encountered a student who is new to us, but apparently has been “studying” piano for quite some time with the family friend. By the way, trust me, I hate over-usage of quotes, but with Facebook I don’t know how to do italics so this just seems fitting and you’ll see why. This student clearly demonstrates an inability to read music or interpret rhythms, and so therefore simply cannot play the music you put in front of them unless you were to play it first. This is probably not the student’s fault. Yes of course it requires work and attention to detail to read music and follow the notes and rhythms on the page but it’s also quite obvious when a student has never learned how to do it in the first place.

 

This of course is tragically not uncommon because so many self-proclaimed music teachers today don’t actually teach students music as a whole, but rather teach them maybe how to play their instrument on a basic level, and how to copy what they’ve heard.

Don’t get me wrong, we are not against learning to play music by ear or by ear training, or by call and response or repeat after me exercises (we do all of that). These are all important things. But so is reading music for the bulk of the music world and especially if you’d like to earn a living as a working musician someday in most genres, which of course is what you need if you want to be marketable.

 

But the point is that this family has probably been paying for this young person to take lessons with this family friend for who knows how long and in fact we know for a fact like we’ve seen so many other times. They are also paying MORE than they need to be paying and more than what we charge for tuition in our 501c3 non-profit avademy of music. So they’re being overcharged and provided much less and even not enough. They’re getting duped.

 

If you are a parent, don’t get duped. I’d personally be very happy to chat with you if your student is studying music with someone and you want to be sure that you’re getting what you need. I or one of our other teachers would be glad to sit down and do an assessment with your students when we have an opening in our schedule to see where they’re at as well. We offer this year-round because we care.

 

If you play music and you teach lessons, and you’re not teaching the fundamentals, I would urge you to either get some lessons yourself and learn how to do it if you really care and want to continue to teach, or just do something else. Or at least let people know that you’re not going to teach them some very important fundamentals that they should learn somewhere else.