Friday, July 13, 2012
Epic failure
I'm feeling like a big fat failure right now, because I've been unsuccessful at teaching Sarah to play the piano. I spent a whole year teaching her out of the first book, and at the end of the book, I realized that she didn't even know how to read music. So I started over and taught her the entire book again. About a year ago, after an extremely frustrating lesson for both of us, I realized I had to stop before one of us ended up dead. I decided she must be too young, so I told her we would start again after her 8th birthday. For the last few weeks, I've been having her do piano theory lessons, and she did ok, but today was the first lesson playing the actual piano. She just doesn't get it. Can't or won't do it. She is the one who wanted to learn in the first place. So today I admitted defeat. I told her that I would pay someone else to teach her, because I don't know what else to do. She said she doesn't want to learn anymore. That makes me sad, because not only did I fail to teach her something she once wanted to learn, but I killed her desire to learn it at all. Epic failure.
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2 comments:
Uhhhh Huuummm. Nope not an epic failure.
I did the same with one of my daughters that requested me teach her to play. So we did a method that required no music reading. Suzuki. Very easy and listened to the audio CD daily. I eventually did take her to another person to teach her lessons, but guess what!!! she didn't like the regular traditional lessons. She wanted to listen and then play. The good news is that both her AND her older sister have begun to play beautifully on their own.
Second part of this is that I have had them both in violin lessons (suzuki as well) since they were 4. It transfered very well to piano I guess. Even though it's distinctly different.
I'm glad to be a friend of a "so called" epic failure. :)
A failure is just a reason to try again. :) There is still plenty of time for her to learn to play the piano and read music. She may not be ready just yet. Grade school children grow so much from year to year, she will be a whole different person next year. When you are ready to try again, maybe in a year, you could just state it as a fact(like an objective expert/think doctor, police chief...) such as: "IL schools should teach music. "In our school all students must read music before they (take the camping trip to _____)" and/or "All students must play the piano thru the Beginner Praise book by ___(6th grade or whatever...). I think there are even free online sites to learn to read music and for listening/ear-training. Hugs to you both, Susan T
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