Bad Student Piano Insight

[Ron Nossaman]

>  I seems to me piano
>teachers are more divorced from the instrument of the trade than these other
>instructors. I wonder why. I think that is what I might have been asking.
>Why is that?
>
>Terry Farrell


As always, no guarantee on the validity of my thoughts, but I still have a 
few. The tennis and marksmanship instructors have likely been professional 
performers for some years before becoming professional instructors. As 
such, they spent a whole lot of time with their "instruments", maintaining, 
tuning, and repairing them. The vast majority of the piano teachers I've 
known aren't full time professional teachers, never made a nickel 
performing on the instrument, and took up teaching because they could make 
some money with virtually no personal cost in training, and very little in 
materials (stickers and such). The tennis and marksmanship instructors use 
instruments that are vastly simpler than those of the piano teacher, and 
the knowledge required to minimally maintain these instruments is 
considerably less. Yes, these instruments can be buried in a fog of 
subjective mysticism just like pianos, but as basic tools, they are 
relatively simple compared to pianos. The requirements of the instrument 
are an important consideration here too. Both tennis and target shooting 
are ballistics. Both require a rather high level of precision performance 
as a minimal requirement. We are taught that we should clean, protect, and 
pamper our firearms, and purchase new tennis rackets and balls 
periodically, or possibly re-string our rackets if we are serious about our 
performance. If a piano makes a noise when the key is depressed ("It's in 
great shape - all the keys work"), it's just fine. We learn this in 
childhood, and it is reinforced through "education" right up until the time 
some suspect technician tells us that our piano is sub-standard. Pianos are 
immortal, and never need service as long as all the keys work. Ask anyone. 
The marksmen and tennis players that aren't serious, don't know their 
instruments nearly as well as those that are. Pianists tend to be the same. 
Dependance on an instrument for high performance levels demands greater 
understanding of the instrument unless you wish your performance (and 
livelihood) to be at the mercy of random circumstance. In teaching 
(beginning) piano, performance is of little to no consequence. It's so much 
a half hour to pound in the basics. Tennis and shooting can be taken up 
with about fifteen minutes of quick briefing to tell you everything you 
need to know to participate in the sport. Playing the piano badly is 
somewhat more difficult to learn than pointing a firearm and pulling the 
trigger, or smacking a tennis ball over the net, so many people never 
progress far enough to get beyond the basics and into the desirability of 
learning something about the instrument. But they can still teach.


Ron N