<HTML><HEAD> <META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <META content="MSHTML 6.00.2900.3132" name=GENERATOR></HEAD> <BODY style="FONT-SIZE: x-small; COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: Arial; BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent"> <DIV> <DIV>Israel:</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Your otherwise extraordinarily fine discourse on schools was marred by your unfortunate (but I can only conclude intentional) use of a word which is demeaning and dismissive. The entire disclaimer phrase would have been a truthful and meaningful statement without the ad hominem. You demean only yourself by this. I remain unhurt, but curious. </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Squawkingly,</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>Paul </DIV> <DIV> </DIV></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV> <DIV>"If you want to know the truth, stop having opinions" (Chinese fortune cookie)</DIV></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>In a message dated 08/05/07 11:03:49 Central Daylight Time, custos3@comcast.net writes:</DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"> <DIV> <STYLE type=text/css> .aolmailheader {font-size:8pt; color:black; font-family:Arial} a.aolmailheader:link {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; font-weight:normal} a.aolmailheader:visited {color:magenta; text-decoration:underline; font-weight:normal} a.aolmailheader:active {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; font-weight:normal} a.aolmailheader:hover {color:blue; text-decoration:underline; font-weight:normal} </STYLE> To the list, I have been watching this discussion with a great deal of interest, because I have been involved in aspects of technician training through my work with the PTG in various capacities for many years now - first on the chapter level, then on the national - and perhaps international - scene. For years now I have been observing technical skills attained through various learning paths as demonstrated on PTG exams and working on developing methodologies to fill the voids left by the typical trial-and-error or correspondence school training that most practitioners in our field bring to the profession. So to the extent that I can, I'll share my observations. My own background is an echo of what others have posted. After a career in commercial photography fizzled out, I got interested in piano technology (after having built a kit harpsichord -  but that's a different story.)  First I tried to tech myself using the Reblitz book - after all, how difficult could it be? I found that book quite flawed - there were a bunch of processes and procedures described, but no overall understanding of why one was supposed to do things this way or that way and no good understanding of how to judge the results (most obviously of a regulation, but in other contexts too). It was sort of flying blind - you follow the recipe and trust that the result is correct, because Arthur says so... I then signed up for a correspondence course - not Randy Potter's - and found the same problem. I was doing assignments, learning nomenclature and processes, but the piano I was working on didn't seem to be improving much... And I had no idea what my tuning sounded like, objectively speaking - even though I counted beats until I couldn't hear them any more... Then life intervened... Some years later I got an opportunity to move to Boston and attend the North Bennet Street School for 2 years, and I found out that my initial judgements about the Reblitz and the correspondence course were basically correct. The processes and procedures being taught in those media were hit-or-miss at best and plain incorrect in some cases. I did have a leg up on the other students in terms of nomenclature - quite a bit of money spent on something I would have learned anyway... I did come away from the correspondence course with a nice three-ring binder which still holds some of my NBSS notes... At NBSS I got a good background on which to build a comprehensive approach to piano technology - both the tuning and technical end of it. And passed the RPT exams on the first try without a hitch before completing my first year at school. And after a bit of struggling (I am not very good at promoting myself) I have been able to make a decent living at it, build two businesses - one in Boston and after moving another one in California - worked  Steinway C & A in Boston a couple years after finishing school, and now also hold a half-time University job which gets me health insurance and retirement benefits - besides running a very busy practice. I will concentrate on the technical end - because that's where my testing and educational efforts have been concentrated. Without a good conceptual grasp of the nature of the technology on which the piano is based, the properties of the materials from which it is built or which are used to service it, the goals of the procedures one undertakes and the various possible pitfalls of various approaches one is a very incomplete practitioner. To be fair, some self-trained or correspondence-school trained technicians develop this knowledge on their own after years of experience. Many do not. And most don't have nearly enough of it in the first years of their practice - resulting in misdiagnosed conditions, misapplied remedies, misregulated instruments and much wasted time. And clients being charged for - what? In a school environment one gets to internalize all of that theoretical and intellectual underpinning as one is learning the tools and the procedures. And in a school environment one gets immediate feedback on the quality of one's learning. But more on how important that can be later. Soon after graduating from NBSS I got involved in PTG technical testing - a lot more heavily than I intended to. It was a funny story. This was the time the PTG was introducing the current Technical Exam (late 80s) and our committee chair couldn't make heads or tails of it - since it is based on an empirical approach to regulation rather than just plugging in specs from a book. Apparently a novel concept for this grandfathered RTT. So he dumped the whole thing in my lap. I went to a convention and learned how to run the exam from an experienced examiner... Boston was (still is) a very busy testing venue - so I got a good overview of the skills that technicians of various backgrounds bring to the trade. Later on I went on to head the Technical Testing program in the San Francisco Bay area (we have an Exam Board that test all comers - but basically covers the territory of 4 chapters), and for the past several years the technical testing at the PTG Annual Conventions. In addition, I have organized and taught various Exam Preparatory classes (that's actually a major con I have been perpetrating on the students - they are actually "basic skills" classes, but nobody would sign up if I called them that - pride...) So after a good 100+ exams administered and some dozens of classes taught I can say without equivocation that many, many candidates and students with a correspondence school, self-taught or mentoring backgrounds are still quite deficient in basic skills. To be perfectly fair, this is not entirely the fault of the correspondence courses, or the learning materials. Where there is no supervised practice and immediate feedback on technique and methodology, the opportunities for misunderstanding and miscomprehension are endless. I have seen this in classes I have taught and in some post-exam interviews - where I am pretty darn sure that what the candidate or student is doing is not what the author or instructor meant to convey. And sometimes it is a matter of a poor grip on a tool, or an unclear sequence of actions, or a misapplied technique due to poor understanding of the conceptual framework on which the technique is based, or any one of dozens of misconceptions and misapplications that  are easily corrected in the course of continuous face-to-face instruction at a residential program that are simply not addressed or not even noticed in correspondence courses or self-teaching. And all materials with which I am familiar - and that includes those published by the PTG (which I have been for the past 3 years attempting to revise) contain ineffective techniques and flawed approaches. They are all based on learning recipes for procedures - and not on understanding the underlying concepts, without which practitioners have no way of assessing their own work or dealing with unexpected issues. To be fair, some of the PTG materials do mention the importance of learning the conceptual framework - but then expect the student to extrapolate that from the procedures. Not effective... I hope to do something about it fairly soon - if I can find the time. With mentoring the problem is different. All depends on the quality of the mentors. In the past couple of years I tested several candidates from a specific location all of whom were taught by a mentor who appears to be superb. They displayed superior skills. Other mentors seem to produce poorer results - and in some cases even mislead their students with poor advice. How a beginner in the field is supposed to judge the quality of a prospective mentor is an insoluble problem... Over the years I have tested and taught candidates from NBSS, from the Western Ontario program, from Israel, South Africa, Japan, China, Spain, Norway. And many US-trained candidates who have not had formal residential training. Two patterns jump right out: 1. Foreign trained technicians do a whole lot better than US trained technicians. 2. NBSS and Western Ontario graduates in general do better than those without formal residential training. I don't know how those foreign technicians were trained, but the results speak for themselves. And the graduates of the formal training programs in general display a much more confident and methodical approach to the exam tasks than many (not all) of the others. I have on occasion come across students and candidates without formal training who displayed superior skills after a fairly short period of self-teaching. My conversations with them usually reveal that they have undertaken a very disciplined and methodical approach to training themselves - with substantial daily practice sessions, not going on to the next task until having mastered the previous one, a relationship with several mentors who could serve as a check on their progress, etc. In other words, they invested the time and effort in themselves to learn the craft properly - often at the sacrifice of some income. My conclusion is that a great many people who try to teach themselves - whether through correspondence courses or other literature - simply do not spend enough time or spend the time effectively enough to master the skills. And some who do learn a number of skills never develop the underlying conceptual framework on which effective practice must necessarily be based. Disclaimer: Before Paul Revenko-Jones starts squawking, I must say that - to my knowledge - I never tested a graduate of the Chicago School of Piano Technology, so I can't speak to the quality of their graduates' skills. OK, now to speak of some attempts at remediation. The PTG and some of its chapters do offer a great many classes by various superb instructors at conventions and special events, some sponsored by manufacturers and suppliers - others non-sponsored. Eric Schandall, Don Mannino, Rick Baldassin, Richard Davenport, David Betts, Roger Jolly are just some of the names that come to mind - people who try to provide that conceptual framework which is so often missing. The problem here is two-fold - information overload and lack of follow-up. It is just very difficult for the average student to completely understand and assimilate all that information in the course of a continuous two-period session. Or whatever time frame is devoted to it at a single event.  And by the time people get home and actually get to try it out for real - some of it has already gotten fuzzy. This is where a residential program would provide some corrective feedback, follow-up, reinforcement - whatever. And the information would be presented - to begin with - in more manageable portions, with opportunities for follow up in between  - not thrown at you all at once, because of the limited time-span of the convention or event. Again, some people are able to come away from some of those convention classes with that lightbulb lit up and thing falling into place - but many do not. As a result I have heard a lot of misconceptions and bowdlerized ideas based on what was taught in those classes - sometimes even misquoting the source. Just a simple example. Not too long ago someone vehemently disagreed with something I tried to teach, stating that "So-and-so in such and such a class said that letoff affects nothing, so how can you say that aftertouch can be changed by altering letoff" (let me say that I don't recommend this - I just used it as an example of relationships within the action) . Of course, "so-and-so" did not say that "letoff affects nothing". What he said was "nothing affects letoff" (which is true - letoff control is mounted on a rigid rail that never moves with relation to the string no matter what else you do to the action in the course of regulation short of altering action geometry) Which tells me that the person in question misremembered what "so-and-so" taught, and did not truly assimilate the basic relationships within the action that "so-and-so" was trying to convey - just came away with a surface meaning of the words. And I run across stuff like that all the time - in classes and in post-exam interviews. For the past few years several of us in the PTG have been trying to develop a methodology to convey this knowledge in a more effective manner.  We break the instruction up into more manageable chunks that can be more easily assimilated by students and combine it either with exercises on jigs and models (for the less experienced students) or with actual performance of the procedures - under the supervision of experienced instructors. Some of these classes have been offered at PTG Annual, State and Regional Conventions, some at chapter-sponsored events. I am in the middle of a series of all-day Sunday classes (one per month, three months) for the San Francisco Chapter. They do work, if the students go home and practice what they learn at the classes. Because we do spend a lot of time with each student on an individual basis - making sure that they understand and follow what they have been taught by correcting any observed technical flaws and missteps on the spot. So these classes require a continuous commitment - and we do have people who keep coming back and eventually develop good skills. And they are very resource and labor-intensive, and reach a minuscule number of people - compared to the need. And the nominal fees which we charge for these are typically supplemented by PTG or Chapter subsidies. In effect, the many pay to teach the few. At some point aspirants to this profession are going to have to realize that effective instruction requires time and resources - and it can't all be provided by experienced technicians at their own expense... I do have to say that some of the discussions on the PTG lists (Pianotech, CAUT, ExamPrep) cover some topics quite comprehensively. And provide some of that conceptual framework that I keep mentioning. And often debunk some misconceptions rife in the trade. But again, this is short of personal instruction, where one look, a few words and a simple demonstration can correct many errors and increase speed or effectiveness. And reaches relatively few people. And is episodic in nature. But every little bit helps. Before someone starts yelping that the PTG Exams are  "unrealistically difficult" and "do not reflect real conditions" so how can I judge effectiveness of instruction base on them - that's nonsense. A well trained, confident technician can cope with any situation, as long as he or she understands the basic principles of the instrument and the craft,  has a good grasp of tools and techniques and has developed fluency through repetition. I have seen this again and again. Most recently, a candidate who admitted to me beforehand that he never works on vertical pianos and has never in his life replaced a vertical shank did quite well on the exam, just using his conceptual grasp of the issues involved and overall technical skills. (He did have a brief demonstration of vertical shank replacement the day before the exam). And I have seen similar occurrences before. And the time allowances on the exams are quite generous - again judging by the performance of well-trained technicians (no matter how they were trained) who usually complete the task - and quite well - with about 10-20% of the time still left on the clock. I have seen technicians who accidentally broke a part, repaired it and still completed the task with a good score within the time allowed. If one is fluent in one's craft and has a good understanding of underlying issues, one can operate under all kinds of pressure and unfamiliar circumstances.  If one's training is too narrowly focused merely on following a series of "steps" in specific situations, that is not professional-level training, and people whose training does not go beyond that do have trouble under pressure. And pressure on specific jobs or from specific clients is just as much a part of the profession as anything else... OK, sorry for some of the rambling here, but I hope some of this stuff gives a somewhat realistic picture of the pitfalls of trying to teach yourself a profession. And they are not insurmountable - all it takes is time and commitment and some good contacts... And if you can see your way to going to school - do it. It will be worth every minute and every penny. Israel Stein </DIV></BLOCKQUOTE> <DIV> </DIV></BODY></HTML>