Simpedia

Neil Moore

Here’s my response to Unmani’s question:

Teaching Advanced Pieces to Beginning Students (i.e. Moonlight Sonata)

Mark M., New York

The trick is that this includes allowing and even encouraging students to feel free to explore any pieces outside the Curriculum materials in whatever way they want. That, though, is tricky when they have no idea what the future of the Curriculum holds in terms of which famous public domain pieces are in there. Nobody even as far as TFMM or FL8 is likely to have any idea that Moonlight Sonata appears in Development Level 14 — even teachers up to TFMM or FL8 are likely to be just as clueless about that. All too easy for a student and even a teacher to have no idea that self-studying tutorials of Moonlight Sonata fall under the “not allowed” dictate of “trust the system.” No way to know they’ve done anything wrong. Even when a teacher does know that that piece is coming in the future, unless they communicate to their students all the famous public domain pieces that await them through the entire SM Curriculum, there is no way for the student to know they are doing anything wrong in those cases, and they could go ahead and do that, and the “damage” could be done by the time the teacher finds out. So there are definitely these loopholes to the question of “trust the system and do only what I ask you to do.”

Laurie Richards, Nebraska

I’ll offer a different perspective. I think it can be beneficial, depending on the song and on how you as a teacher manage the situation. I once had a teen student who said he was learning Bohemian Rhapsody from YouTube. I asked him to play what he had learned so far, and he had done a nice job with it. So I gave him an assignment that week to create some learning strategies and teach it to his classmates. We spent just a little time on it each week for a while, everyone loved it, and my student got some great practice with applying learning strategies in a self-generative way.

So, I allow students to learn something outside the curriculum, *always* with the caveat that their playlist must be solid.

Here’s Neil on the subject in a webinar from a few years ago. This subject is addressed specifically starting at 37:00 –

Webinar Series: 01/23/2018 – Piano – Remaining Influential in the Digital Age – Simpedia

https://simpedia.info/ws-01232018-p-influential-digital-age/

Mark M., New York

Laurie FWIW, I was only referring to pieces of music that are in the Curriculum but originated outside it and can therefore be found by students outside it before they get to those pieces inside it. I’ve always thought the default was that it’s fine to let students do anything they want outside the Curriculum, that it’s even to be encouraged, as long as, as you say, it supplements the work we do in lessons rather than getting in the way of it.