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Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, is a common childhood disorder that piano teachers are likely to encounter during their career. This disorder can continue through adolescence and into adulthood. Common symptoms of ADHD may include extreme difficulty maintaining focus, paying attention, and regulating emotions and behavior, ...
THE PIANO PROGRAM In the spring of 2012, I began a small program for piano study at a women's correctional institution in Columbia, South Carolina. Over the past eleven years, the program has been through numerous changes. The lesson location changed from Goodman (2012–2016) to Camille Griffin Graham (2017–present), when the two women's inst...
What do weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs, quinceañeras, and other celebrations and rites of passage have in common? How many times does someone say they relate a particular piece of music to a specific event? What can invoke a meaningful childhood memory? For some it may be a mother's lullaby that was passed down through generations. For othe...
Kayo Anderson is a musician with LA Community Action Network (LA CAN), who works with Skid Row artists, many of whom are former industry-level musicians, to understand their unique challenges and help them facilitate their return to employability. In the United States, employment brings personal satisfaction but also stability for necessities such ...
Choosing repertoire for our students is often a matter of subjectivity. A desired scenario is one in which a student and teacher both agree on the pieces and the occasion for which they are to be learned. In the case of a traditional neuro-typical student, selection of lesson repertoire typically is guided by musical depth and attractiveness and th...
A Call for Representation In 2016, the movie, Hidden Figures, based on the novel by Margot Lee Shetterly, put a spotlight on African American female mathematicians who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the 1960s. This biographical film exposed the significant contributions that Black females made to NASA du...
According to dictionary.com, to adapt means "to adjust, or modify fittingly to requirements or conditions."1 Although the demands are many, piano teachers routinely adapt instruction to meet the needs of their students and should consider three ways of adapting piano lessons to the individual student. First, ...
Children are excited by sound, they want to make sound, and they want to explore possibilities and express themselves at the keyboard. Children are brilliant— until someone tells them they aren't. When faced with too many rules and layers of abstract concepts at the beginning stages of study they are often just overwhelmed by information they don't...
As a piano teacher, I love working with students who catch on to new concepts quickly, who are respectful and obedient, who are able to give polished performances, and who progress rapidly. Yet, over my two-and-a-half decades of teaching piano lessons, I feel my biggest success stories are students who did not do any of these things. My biggest suc...
Walk a mile in your neighbor's shoes: Diversity in theteaching studio by Rachel Kramer and Bennyce Hamilton Music is the universal language. This phrase has been in my vocabulary since I was young enough to understand what it meant. As I have become a performing musician, music educator, and community arts participant, I continue to believe ...
In her book The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Learn to Let Go So Their Children Can Succeed, Jessica Laney writes,"... why do so many teachers cite the challenge of dealing with their students' parents as their main reason for abandoning the classroom?" 1 Throughout the public and private school systems, the relationships between parents...
During the late 1990s, I taught piano privately in New York City to supplement my income while working on my doctorate. From time to time, the phone would ring, and I would find myself talking to prospective students. I soon learned that I did not need to feel very anxious about it, because only one thing mattered to them, and I could deliver....