It is at the end of the year, listening to my students play on recital, that I renew my commitment to my calling as a teacher, to this part of my spiritual path, as my friend says, yet another access to the divine.
Listening to my students at the recital is a nerve-wracking thrill. I play along with many of them, my heart rate faster, my mood elevated. I listen to the songs they have worked so hard on for weeks, and hope to hear the details: that crescendo, that bit of pedal, the slow quiet of an ending phrase. But it’s not just the music I hear. I listen and remember. One phrase might remind me of the fact that this boy, with his quiet, calm demeanor, did not smile for the first three weeks. Now he bows with a smile as wide as the keyboard. The next one up and I remember that this one would bang the keys for every mistake, slap her forehead and groan. At recital, she wades through mistakes like a pro, faking it when necessary. This year, I’ve learned a lot about teaching, even after having finished over 35 years of it. One main thing is to let go, not force. To talk about playing from the heart, not the head. To make jokes and laugh more. And to listen.
It's about a whole lot more than the piano. There’s the girl who came in crying after a hard day at school, feeling misunderstood by teachers, forced into a ‘stop and think’ room. Or the boy who can’t sit still one day, who had lost both recess times to an unfinished math test in third grade. The girl who watched her cat die in her living room and wrote a song for him. The one whose uncle passed away and who wants to play the same song his uncle played when he was in high school. The one whose brother’s truck rolled over in a ditch. It’s about listening.
Music is about feelings after all. There are moments when a child truly feels the phrase for the first time, not just shaping it because I say music has shape but feeling the shape and mimicking it with her body. Or maintaining extraordinary focus on a one-minute song, creating startling intensity to convey the sense of aT - Rex or a shark, or drifting clouds or shimmering stars, or whatever the composer intends in her song. The moments when their hearts and fingers are in sync and the feelings come out. For me the experience is profound whether the source is a 5-year-old beginner or an advanced high school student.
Then there is the arc of years. The experience of sharing a life from age 7 to 15 years, through middle C to Clair de Lune, through giggling to disdain to mutual appreciation.
I imagine college level piano students might consider a lifelong of teaching kids to play their instrument torturous, perhaps beneath them, boring and uneventful, humorless. Not all of them will have the opportunity to experience it. Many of them hope they never have to. But in the world of piano teachers, our little secret is that above all the tedium of thousands of middle C’s, we are lucky to be able to do what we do. Boring, sometimes, humorless, never. Meaningful, always.
I have weeks when my skin is crawling, and I don’t know how I’ll face another child at the piano. But those weeks are rare. And at the recital, listening to each studied crescendo and ritardando, I feel a love unlike any other of the loves in my life, for these children. I love their vulnerability, their pride, their work, their goofiness, and the music that comes out of their grubby fingernails. There is something about it that elevates me, deepens me.
I guess I’ll be one of those eighty-year-old piano teachers, with gray hair, smelling of lavender, whose five cats take turns at the piano bench next to a student whenever they get a chance. I hope so, anyway.