(Reprint: Advisory Committee News - MENVI News 4, Winter 1998)


     THE EDUCATION OF AN EDUCATOR
                     by Stephanie Pieck

When I graduated from high school and headed for
college, I had no idea what I would be doing. All I was sure of
was that it would be something with music. At that time, I was
torn between four instruments: the voice, the organ, the cello,
and the piano. I was so uncertain that I auditioned and was
accepted as both a voice and a piano student at Ithaca College.
I chose to study piano as my primary instrument, doing a lot
of singing on the side in various choirs and on my own. I
began as an education major, doing all the course work to
become a public school music teacher.

One of my first discoveries was that my braille music
reading skills were abysmal. Bar-by-bar baffled me; slurs
looked like ties; and it was anybody's guess how I would play
chords when they weren't written out note by note. I also
realized that someone would not be around at all times to
separate piano music into parts for each hand, and record
those parts slowly enough so that I could learn them
accurately. Finally, there was some music like Hindemith
sonatas and song accompaniments by Ned Rorem and Debussy
that couldn't be learned in this way. So I embarked on an
independent crash course in sight-reading. Any music that I
could get hold of, I read and played. I sang through most of
that wonderful and terrifying book, "Elementary
Musicianship" by Hindemith. And in the course of one
semester, I advanced from struggling to read Bach's two-part
inventions to playing Brahms intermezzos and Chopin
ballades from braille scores. 

I had a tremendous revelation in the first semester of
junior year when I took the classroom instruments course.
When I had to teach a guitar lesson after only having played
the guitar for a few weeks, my principles called a halt. If I was
going to be a teacher (and a good one, at that), I wanted to
teach something I knew about. So I entered the piano
performance degree program. I was having some serious
problems with my wrists by now, and I was smart enough to
figure out that there was no way I would be doing six hours of
practice a day, concertizing worldwide, and making a living!
What was I to do? The only course on piano pedagogy
was in the second semester of senior year. It met for an hour
once a week and culminated in a 20-page term paper. It was
an excellent overview, but it offered no practical experience.
So I taught on a volunteer basis throughout my junior and
senior years. My students ran the gamut from a professor of
business law (who later adopted my first guide dog when the
dog had to retire), to a theater major who couldn't tell a
quarter note from a fly. 

With that unusual experience in hand, when I came home
after graduation with a few students already lined up for fall
lessons, I knew the following: (1) Bartok's "Mikrokosmos" is
not suitable as a first book for beginning pianists with no
musical background. (2) Never laugh at students' mistakes.
(3) "Ask me again in five years" is not a suitable answer to
any question beginning with "why" or "how come." (4) Braille
music is a MUST for any blind teacher working with sighted
students. Most importantly, I knew I had found my true
calling: I loved to teach. My first recital featured seven
students including two boys who hated piano but agreed to do
a duet together. 

Of the original eight, five returned the following year,
along with twelve newcomers. I had used my first summer off
to add adult teaching materials to my library. (I had also
decided not to make adults perform, even if their recital was
completely separate from the children's.) In the two years
since that time, I have continued to learn. I may no longer take
formal piano lessons, but as a teacher I realize I must never
stop educating myself. And as a blind teacher, I must work
twice as hard as sighted colleagues who have unlimited access
to print music and literature about teaching.
I must find braille copies of the print music I want to use
with students. I have to know the pieces I teach well. While I
can play from memory, I rely on my sight-reading now more
than ever. I can follow along in my scores when students are
playing and make corrections for them when they have
finished. I  must also be very aware of what print music looks
like, especially when I'm teaching beginners of any age.
"What does that little curvy thing mean?" First, you must
require students  to be very specific about which "curvy thing"
they're looking at. Then, you must know how to explain in a
way that will make sense to them. 
My studio, The Music Suite, is more correctly a piano
school. It's now located completely outside my home, and I
have a very small business selling restored pianos on the side.
My student roster hovers somewhere around 45 during the
year and drops to about fifteen in the summer. Since this
studio has become a full-time business, I am also learning
about the non-musical side of being a successful teacher.
Keeping accurate ledgers, sending out notices of upcoming
events, planning lessons and making arrangements for student
performance opportunities are all things I heard nothing about
in college.

Does blindness affect the way I teach? Of course.
Sometimes, I am forced to work with music that is second-rate
when I can't obtain anything else in braille. Other times, I
must wait for the braille to arrive which postpones my
teaching plans. I often ask parents to help with the first few
lessons when their child is seeing music notation for the first
time. No matter how familiar you are with a particular book,
a student will always come up with something unexpected to
ask or get confused by. The parent can make sure the child is
looking at what I am describing. Parents are also good about
noticing things their children do that get past me. Sometimes,
they can catch kids playing with weird fingerings or sitting
incorrectly.

The responsibility of a teacher is to know as much about
their field as they can, and then to share that knowledge with
others in a meaningful and understandable way. I don't only
teach piano. I teach people about the joy of music. I also teach
them that hard work and creativity are indispensable if you
want to succeed. I arrange music for recitals and encourage my
students to compose. This coming March, the studio will be
hosting its first Piano Olympics with competitions in solo and
duet performances, scale playing, composition, and a
"Jeopardy"-style musical quiz game for teams. 

When I first went to college I had no idea what I would be
doing. Now I only hope that I can continue to provide
excellence and innovation in music education at the piano for
a long time to come.