How To Win Over The Trust of The Perception
If you don’t want to bump into something, don’t walk around in the dark.
When I only just started learning, I found a treasure: a small knick on one of
the keys of my piano. Thank you, whoever it was that put it there! It served me as a loyal and honest hint for several years, before I completely memorized the keys of the piano. The knick was very close to Do; it was on Re! When learning new pieces, I looked to it like a ship’s captain looks for a lighthouse. Even now, I think of this tiny little scratch with appreciation and fondness. It saved me like a life vest saves a man overboard!
Because of this, I made some stickers that can be applied to every key.
This is like a map of the entire space. It gives a beginner all of the information he
needs. On each key, I placed its name, whether it is on a line or space
(depending on its color), and in confluence with sheet music, I added the lines of
the treble (green) and bass (brown) clefs. The keys, the grand staff, and the
keyboard’s sound are united by stickers into a single entity. The kids are spared
from many hours of impractical mental work, and the attention has been focused onto coordination and the reading of notes.
When I did this, I received many letters with questions from my colleagues:
won’t this damage the student’s ability to think independently? And I’ve always
wanted to ask: tell me, what does the student come to you for? To learn to play,
or to learn to think?
When you have to drive to a different city and don’t know the way, you take
a map with you, or print out directions. And you will continue to check them until you learn the route. Imagine that you’ve gone to the store to buy a map, but the clerk won’t sell it to you! “Don’t take the map, you won’t ever learn to think
independently and solve your problems that way! You’ll never be able to develop
a biological compass!” How would you respond to that?
The natural desire of a person is to get to the end of the journey rather than
get stuck somewhere in the middle. Why is it that in music education, we’re
supposed to sit in one place and think long and hard instead of freely exploring
the keys and gaining pleasure from it?
Many educators are convinced that when he gets a hint, a person will
spend the rest of his life relying on it. They don’t understand how a person’s
perception works when he is learning. It has two habits. First, new information is only taken in when it is needed. In order to understand anything, a person must be able to have an applicable use for the new information. Second, having
understood something, the perception widens at once. It doesn’t stay in one
place! Receiving a hint and feeling secure, the perception starts to take in
everything around it, traveling farther and farther from its safe spot.
Think of your first day at a new job. Did you go home with a crystal-clear
memory of the room you were in, the color of the walls, and the names of all of
your co-workers? More likely, all of this information was assembled after you
became more comfortable in your environment, and gained the confidence that
you were doing your new work properly.
Within each of us lives an explorer! But what is most important for any
explorer is his ‘home,’ a place that he can always return to so that he doesn’t get
lost. And the wider our world becomes, the wider the safe zone is. This way, after
starting in a ‘cottage’ of a few counting fingers, we move into the ‘house’ of the
table of multiplication, and later we can even build ourselves a ‘palace’ of
integrals.
I often witness these ‘house warming parties.’ Coming in for a weekly
lesson, a toddler proudly announces, “I don’t play with stickers anymore!” And
just try to force him to do it! To him, that is a personal insult. Learning and
mastering a certain level, the perception gets bored and starts to push it away,
like an older child does a lullaby that he’s outgrown. In my studio, there is always an instrument without stickers, but with a small guide behind the keys that displays that same ‘map.’ After a little while, kids that sit down at the piano
ceremoniously take it off. At that point, it even distracts them!
I am convinced that the use of guiding stickers isn’t simply humane to our
students. It is also an act of respect of their inexperience. Giving a beginner
guides and warning him of his hardships, we display a huge amount of loyalty to
his perception. We shouldn’t punish the child for the fact that he is a child. We
shouldn’t torture him like cruel jailers, giving him a problem and watching how
he’ll save himself from it. We should give him a helping hand, like friends: lean on me, while you need to. I trust you, and you’ll definitely get better. And the
perception, feeling our help, starts to work with us. With every new achievement, the individual develops self-respect and trust in his own strength.
Here is what happens with the perception during a “jailer’s” lesson…
Much Ado About Nothing: The Search for The Do of The First Octave...
What does the keyboard of the piano look like? A vast collection of
absolutely identical keys. And at least the black keys, luckily, are a little
asymmetrical. The pair of black keys in the center of the keyboard are suitable
for one’s orientation. To the left of them is the Do of the first octave. “Here, right
in the middle,” the teacher tells the student with an enigmatic voice. “Just to the
left of these two black keys is the note Do!”
Let me assure you that even the most inventive Disney film about where
Do ‘lives’ won’t give a beginner the ability to find it right away on the keys. The
white plane, separated into tens of straight identical slices, is the same thing as
an untouched snowy field in which one must find a white mouse. To adults, it is a simple matter of ‘twos’ and ‘threes’, but for a child, it’s completely different!
He still doesn’t have the necessary skills. First, he needs to pass the stage of
sounding out: “One two, one two three.” Then, he must figure out the difference
between the numbers, and learn to catch it with his eyes on the fly. And only
then, gradually, will he develop the ability to mentally count and figure out the
difference in keys at once.
It takes a few weeks of practice for my young students to easily understand
how the keys are grouped in twos and threes. I cut out figures of dinosaurs and
horses out of paper. I showed my students that the dinosaurs belong on the three key groups, and horses on the two key groups. The kids, in turn, would place the figures on tops of the right key groups, but without them, they struggled to answer at once where the two- and three-key groups were.
This means that here too, most teachers ignore the gradualness of the
perception. They assume that the student can already count quickly in his mind,
and that the keyboard is already a familiar and studied space to him. But a child
isn’t an adult! To wait for a beginner to take the entire keyboard in with an eagle
eye, quickly group all of the black and white keys and separate the octaves is,
simply speaking, na?ve. If a child is concentrating on the black keys, then he can’t easily keep up with the white ones. And if he’s focusing on the white keys, he just isn’t in the condition to distinguish between the black keys, two here, and three there. Think of all of the mirrors in a car. A beginner is in just the same confusion when he sits in front of an ocean of keys. But this isn’t all!
See, Do is located to the left of the two black notes that are located in the
middle. As I have already explained, “to the left” isn’t much of a hint for a
beginner. This word doesn’t say much to a kid if he hasn’t memorized it tactically yet. “In the middle” is also a mystery to him. And thus begins the second act of the drama of “The Search for Do.” It goes something like this:
1. Wandering aimlessly one way or the other along the keys, the eyes try
to separate two keys out of a mass of black and white. At last, they stop
at a pair of them. They sort of seem to be in the middle, right? The
student hesitates, trying to figure out exactly how close they are to the
middle… by comparing the keys to where he is sitting on the bench.
2. Now, a test in mathematics. Two or three, that’s the question. It seems
that it’s two. Hooray! We’ve found the place that’s been prescribed.
3. And which is “left?” Hmm… It seems that “right” is the side I write with,
so “left” is the opposite! That way!
4. Look at the keys: which is closer to the hand that I don’t write with? That
one is “left.”
5. From that key, I need to shift over to the white one, again to the left.
Here it is. Hooray! I found it! Now what?
And now, all that’s left to do is to seek out the remaining notes just like this,
one at a time. This is how things go when you don’t know the music alphabet!
Hooray?
These are the questions and confusions that innocently fly by when a
student that is learning about the note Do. Seems quite a way off from playing
fluently with both hands, no?