Simpedia

Sheri R., California

And people don’t want to move to California because of earthquakes!

I’m not going to comment on alternative plans should this happen again because I’m sure others who have dealt with this before will write, but I do want to say that the kids with the electric keyboards would have benefited greatly had they played their playlist anyway. Playing without sound, even once a song is known, is something I ask my students to do regularly. Not fun for most but it does sort of force people to see more what they are doing when the ear isn’t in the mix which is another component in helping demystify music.

Guess you got sort of a taste of what the first New Englanders were up against. . .

Mark M., New York

In a nutshell re: weather, since many times when there is a snow for the local school districts roads are fine by the time a lesson time rolls around later in the day, my default position is that lessons are always assumed to be on, 52 weeks a year. I will cancel a lesson either due to my own other commitments/vacations, etc., or in the case that weather seems severe enough that I personally feel bad expecting anyone to brave weather conditions to try to get to me. In any of these cases when I cancel a lesson, I provide a one-lesson credit toward the following month’s tuition.

This, to me, is an effective “co-opetition”-based middle ground between the polarized attitudes of 1) my time is valuable, and you pay for it, and that’s that, and 2) clients deserve to pay for what they actually get.

That said, if the outage was truly likely to be several days or longer, I would look for alternatives — a generator, an alternate location with appropriate lighting and either an instrument or a place for me to plug in an electric keyboard, etc. Sure, absolutely, and try to plan for such things in advance if you think it will be a common enough problem.

But the bottom line is, extreme weather conditions are just that, extreme. Maybe you can plan something in advance. Maybe you can figure an alternative without advanced plans. Maybe despite your best efforts even far in advance you just can’t make it work. Simply Music is about natural learning process. And while it may be true that daily practice and weekly lessons are best for learning piano, it’s also true that life sometimes gets in the way. And this is, whether we like or not, one of the ways that life gets in the way — and learning that is, to me, one of the big parts of working with natural learning — and, in turn, learning about “nature.” If an extreme circumstance like this causes you to have to cancel lessons for a week because you don’t have an alternative, that’s what your week looks like — and there will be lessons in living with that for all concerned, perhaps even more valuable for our lives as a whole as a week of regular piano practice and lessons.

I meant to mention this as well — I agree. Indeed, I believe there is research that shows that even sitting still with your eyes closed and just mentally going through the finger motions for a song, even keeping your fingers absolutely still, can actually help you keep in practice better than not doing it.

Doing the actual finger motions without sound is obviously a step up from that and definitely worth recommending to students as a way to keep practicing when no instrument is available.

Music is one of relatively few whole-brain activities. It draws on left and right hemispheres, and it draws on sight, sound and touch. Working on any one or two of these senses will always be better than working on none.