Simpedia

Vanessa M., Australia

The recent flux of accreditations (in Perth alone) has brought to my attention the fact that my year of being “licensed” is drawing to a close and I’d best get a move on with recording students. This I’ve done, and wow have I learned a lot from it. I can see now that I have fallen deeply into a trap of unfolding too much too soon, and the recordings showed me my consistent failure to address the basic issues such as getting the notes right, playing evenly, playing musically, etc. Mainly the problems occurred in the first two blues pieces, and sometimes the accompaniment, i.e. where the hand position changes.

I guess I had this idea that things would come together over time, and in some cases they have and will, but I can see now from Neil’s advice the need to confront the issues before moving on to other pieces. Since four of my students received copies of their recordings last lesson, my plan is to discuss the recordings during their next lesson. Having listened to these recordings myself before this last lesson, I have already addressed the issue of playing smoothly, and have given these students practicing guidelines to achieve this, e.g. breaking into LH and RH to get the feel of position changes without the added complication of BH, revisiting ‘leaving early’, SLOWING down, etc.

The whole recording exercise has been uncomfortably valuable for me as a teacher. However, I don’t think it wouldn’t grant me my accreditation. I get caught up (I think) with not wanting to discourage people about their playing. Yet, it’s when I am being direct with my students that I have this feeling of being on track.

So it appears that my students’ lack of grasping Level 1 is due to my reticence to address the issues when they present themselves. I hope that by addressing these issues now, the program can go ahead as it was/is intended. (Neil says, “Fortunately, Simply Music is a process not an event, and learning in hindsight is par for the course.”) I keep telling my students to SLOW down, I’ll now tell myself: SLOW DOWN; ATTEND TO THE PIECE IN QUESTION before moving on; follow through to ensure student practice has resolved the issue. It’s all so obvious.