Music composition is a lot more part of the creative arts than music performance is, so the notion of “creative arts” is vague at best and deceptive at worst. But you still get examples

Continue reading: The Reality of Music and Creativity

First, let’s discuss the part of the article that everyone probably expects will be 7 pages long, but in reality, it is the simplest and shortest part to describe

Continue reading: Teaching My Own Children To Play Piano

In my previous article, How Music Teacher Directories Hurt Private Music Teachers, I began with the same quote and compared music teacher directories to farmers using cows for milk (and to the mafia demanding pay for protection against themselves). If those comparisons seem wild and crazy, be sure to read the article to find out why they are not. In that article, I promised to discuss another example of how certain business people exploit private music teachers.

Giving lessons in a music store is one of the best ways to start out teaching. Teachers pay an hourly or monthly fee to rent a teaching studio in a store. A teacher usually gets a considerable number of referrals from this, and stores also benefit from this deal since teachers bring a lot of people into their stores every week, generating sheet music sales and instrument rentals. Perhaps most importantly, it creates great loyalty between teachers and stores. Even after leaving a music store I taught at for several years, I remained loyal to this store, sending them a great deal of sheet music and piano purchase business.

Unfortunately, many stores take it further than the simple rental scenario: they tak

Continue reading: How Multilevel Music Stores And “Schools” Hurt Private Music Teachers

I’m not sure where this quote originates, but I heard it in a Leverage episode from season 3 titled, “The Studio Job”.  The context in this case was to ask, “Why write songs yourself when you can steal others’ songs and sing them?” In other words, it’s more profitable to let others work for you than to do the work yourself. This abuse can surely be found in every profession, but I’d like to discuss one way it manifests in the context of private music lessons

Continue reading: How Music Teacher Directories Hurt Private Music Teachers

Still, I’m not quite at the point where I have consistent time every week to write quality blog articles, so I thought I’d hold my readers over with one more post on YouTube picks.

Continue reading: Chad’s YouTube Picks 4-6

Continue reading: Chad’s YouTube Picks 1-3

1. Sometimes we start losing track of who is assigned to what issue.
2. Every time we have a class, there is a different number of students, which means there will be a different number of issues to rotate between them. It’s a pain to have to spend a few minutes each class prioritizing what musical issues to cover.

So, after a class yesterday with 7 advanced high school students, I finally decided to make charts that would cover anywhere between 3 and 8 students that we can refer to in future classes.  I decided to share these charts with other teachers so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel

Continue reading: Advanced Group Piano Class Listening Goals

Why is music teaching a female profession?  I don’t know of any research that addresses this issue to my satisfaction, but I’d like to offer three ideas.

1.  The Day Care Effect

It’s a rare thing to observe a man working in a day care, although men who do so have my complete admiration.  If I had to take care of a room full of 20 two-year-olds, I’d probably jump off a cliff within an hour, and all of my male buddies with parental perspective on this issue seem to feel the same.  While there is probably a certain amount of societal nurturing involved in mens’ incompatibility with child care, I believe that most men are predisposed not to have the interest and/or empathy to properly nurture a bunch of unrepentant sociopaths.  (See this Onion article if you’re wondering where this half-joking term came from. Also see this article for the truth behind it.)

Since the “age 12 and under” category represents such a huge portion of those who study piano, it is very difficult to earn a good living giving private music lessons without accepting younger students.  College professors can avoid it, but they are not relying on private lessons to pay their bills since they have a university salary that includes the significant benefit of health insurance.  When demand for piano lessons is mostly created by children, those who fulfill this demand are going to be people who work best with them.

In a well-intentioned and short-lived attempt to expand my own comfort zone of teaching very young children, I tried Music For Little Mozarts with a four-year-old beginning student a couple years ago since traditional piano courses progress at too rapid a rate for kids so young. I didn’t last long before referring the student to another teacher. Using the method correctly involves starting the lesson each day by singing a cutesy song, using stuffed animals, etc.  After two lessons, I knew that my distaste for this type of teaching went far beyond environmental nurturing/programming, and that additional exposure was not going to help.  I absolutely hated it, despite having the parental experience that comes with having three kids of my own.  I’ve even watched all 18 Barbie movies with my two daughters!  Having said that, I am fairly comfortable teaching four-year-olds 15 minutes per week by writing down finger numbers to their favorite songs as a kind of preliminary training to method books.  It is quite beneficial to students, because they learn early on to memorize what they do.  They work on hand position, they develop good clarity in playing, etc.  As long as the teaching materials do not require me to behave like Elmo, I’m fine.

This isn’t just specific to the 3-4 age group;  we can see this in elementary schools too (5-12 age group).  Male teachers are already a rare breed in any elementary school, and they’re almost unheard of as kindergarten teachers. This phenomenon doesn’t occur because elementary schools discriminate against male applicants.  It occurs because there are far fewer male applicants than female applicants².

I don’t believe that giving private piano lessons to young children requires anything near the patience of teaching kindergarten or running a daycare class.  Giving private lessons is a one-on-one experience, so there is no chaos that results from children feeding off of each other, and the time in a piano lesson is severely limited, usually either 30 or 45 minutes each week.  But it still requires a certain amount of interest and/or empathy that I believe is more abundantly found in women than in men.

2.  The Minigolf Volcano Effect

I expanded this point into its own blog post, Prospective Male Piano Teachers Are Like Volcano-Prone Golf Balls³), in which I pointed out a kind of “Goldilocks Effect” when it comes to male students who might become successful, competent private teachers as a career.  To summarize, a disproportionate number of prospective male students:

1. are turned away from teaching by the perception that it’s a career that is part-time, low-paying and provides an unsteady income (the porridge doesn’t taste right)
2. get Ph.D.s and become college professors (the porridge is too hot)
3. don’t go far enough in their training and impersonate master teachers or try to make as much money as possible by doing very little for their students (the porridge is too cold)

3. The Macho Effect

Growing up, playing piano was never a “cool” thing to do.  In my K-8 years, I never told anyone at school that I played piano, and the only friends I had who knew about my skill were those who were over at my house when my mother made me practice (I was supposed to practice before playing with friends every day – if I ever tried to accidentally “forget” this rule, my mother would have me practice while my friends waited).  I resisted social pressures fairly easily, especially since I had no desire to hang out with people who engaged in ridicule of others based on activities they enjoyed, but not all boys resist these pressures as well.  I don’t believe girls experience nearly as much (if any at all) social pressure with regard to piano.

Even high school students engaged in ridicule.  I recall on many occasions football players walking by the boys tennis team, pointing out to us that we were a bunch of “pansies” not playing a “real” sport.  Childhood piano or tennis lessons aren’t branded as feminine interests as much as ballet or fashion design, but it’s still there.

Because of this macho effect, I don’t think we see as many boys opting to sign up for piano lessons as girls, and we probably also see a higher percentage of them quitting before high school than girls.  After many years of teaching, I sense that boys are giving their parents more trouble at home than girls are because of the perception that they’re aren’t engaged in an activity that is reinforcing their boyness enough, and I suspect this effect would be even more pronounced in my studio if I were a female piano teacher.

What Is To Be Done?

To say, “We need to encourage more males to be piano teachers” would be beyond cliché.  This is the kind of conclusion we read and hear all the time in articles, papers, news reports, speeches, etc. after some study or report reveals that some demographic group is “underrepresented” in some new way.  The problem is that it is only “under” representation if we first assume that all professions and areas of study should demonstrate a 50-50 ratio of men to women. In every profession, there are a large number of factors that contribute to males’ and females’ interest, and these factors must be studied thoroughly and honestly.

Some people on the outer fringes of science continue to insist that we give trucks to little girls and dolls to little boys, but science has moved beyond this type of wishful thinking. Girls invariably find a way to use the dump truck as a bed for their imaginary sleeping baby, and the boys end up launching dolls across the room.

Consider the predominance of males in technical professions and the fact that males score higher on technical aptitude tests.  This published theory about technical aptitude suggests that women score lower on technical aptitude tests only because they simply aren’t as interested as men are in certain things (I also think this is a great example of Occam’s Razor).  What further reinforces this is the fact that girls perform better (and boys perform worse) when technical things are taught in a more feminine context.  But even with more gender balance in teaching, we’re still going to see a manifestation of natural gender preferences in the sciences: more males will become electrical engineers and computer scientists since the “geek factor” turns women away more than it does men while more females will become obstetricians (see conclusion of that study) and pediatricians since men have less interest in babies and toddlers. We don’t need to artificially compensate for these differences through affirmative action – it only creates injustice where no injustice existed in the first place.

That is why I feel that the day care effect is here to stay, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that.  As for the minigolf volcano effect, I think too many people (both sexes) assume that teaching music privately simply isn’t a very practical career, when in fact it is.  A private teacher can earn almost as much as a professor does, but without the slave labor:  no constant requests to accompany recitals, no obligation to teach academic classes, no pressure to become tenured through research, and no pressure to fulfill an administrative obligation by becoming department chair.  There is a bit of a trade-off since piano teachers have no built-in retirement plans and they have to buy their own expensive health insurance packages.  But for me this trade-off has been well worth it.  One might have said several years ago that the professor has a more secure position, but I have to question this assumption given the university budget cuts I’ve seen over the past three years (2009-2011) while I myself haven’t even felt any effects of the economy at all within my own private studio.  That’s why I try to make sure all of my best students who have good potential as teachers (whether male or female) are made aware that private piano teaching is a very legitimate option on the table.

Obviously, the macho effect is also not a good reason for a boy with potential to quit lessons, although I’m not sure what female teachers can do to fully counteract this, short of the unrealistic option of suggesting a male teacher who can serve as a role model.  But I think that it will already be of great help for female teachers to simply be aware, since it would likely affect everything from how the lesson is conducted to what repertoire is assigned.

(c) 2012 Cerebroom

Music teacher conferences such as MTNA’s national conference have offered technology sessions that address distance lessons for several years now.   Many teachers are doing it, and it’s filling a much-needed gap in society’s need for lessons, especially for students in rural areas who don’t have access to music teachers. I’ve given some piano lessons quite successfully via Skype and Google+, and when I relocate to a different city in June 2012, I will be giving distance lessons to any of my current students who are interested

Continue reading: The Pros and Cons of Music Lessons Via Skype or Google+

We’ve all experienced endless struggle with the dreaded volcano at miniature golf courses. Volcano obstacles have the effect of repelling balls away from the hole since even the slightest miscalculation in aim or distance results in the ball ending up somewhere at the bottom of the volcano. If we define “successful career private piano teacher” to be the hole in the middle of the volcano, male piano students behave a lot like golf balls rolling toward the volcano

Continue reading: Prospective Male Piano Teachers Are Like Volcano-Prone Golf Balls