[Menvi-discuss] Blind music teachers

Sat Sep 4 23:01:37 UTC 2021

Hello Ying-Shan,

I am totally blind and have taught piano lessons to sighted students since 1993. Most of them were beginners. A few strategies that have made this successful:

Know what print music looks like and how to describe it clearly. Books for beginning musicians are all about showing them the symbols they will have to know in order to read. The books usually contain very simple descriptions like, “The staff has five lines and four spaces,” but you’ll also need to know things like what the different note values look like (quarter notes have filled-in note heads; half notes have empty note heads; a whole note is an empty note head with no stem). What do clef signs, accidentals, rests, and other commonly-used symbols look like? I was fortunate to have examples of musical symbols to touch as I was learning, and of course I’ve also refined those descriptions over the years. One way you might tackle this if you’ve never touched 3-D versions of musical signs is to ask a sighted musician to draw some of them on pieces of paper using puff paint or anything else that will result in a raised image. You could then label each piece of paper and keep them handy to refer to, adding more signs as you get more involved in teaching.

Choose a method book you can get in Braille or whatever other specialized format you might use, and then know that book inside out, including how the print pages are laid out, what color things are on the page, etc. One of the things you will be teaching beginners to do is find information in the music, so you need to be able to tell them where to look for it. For example, for many years I used the Alfred Basic piano books. When new information was presented, it appeared in the print in a box at the top of the page. I can’t remember now whether that box was red or blue, and it doesn’t matter. (If you tell a student the wrong color and they’re comfortable with youk, they might say something like, “The box is red” if you say it’s blue, and that’s when you file away that little tidbit of information so you can do better for your next student!) Anyway, you can guide your student by telling them to look at the box at the top of the page, then describe whatever new type of note, rest, etc. is there. Or, as another example, the Hal Leonard piano lessons books use a blue line when introducing the F and G clefs to show the “landmark” notes of bass cleff F and treble clef G. These notes are both close to very distinctive visual features of each clef sign, and teaching students to pick out those lines and then read notes by comparing their distance and relationship to those landmark notes is one effective method to introduce staff reading. If your student consistently has trouble finding particular notes, you could ask them something like, “Is that note higher, lower, or the same as your landmark note G?” Or, “Are these two notes both on lines, both in spaces, or a line and a space?”

Regarding method books: Try to have two that you’re comfortable using. You’ll use one most of the time, but the other will be for any students who don’t seem to do well in that main book. For example, I use the Piano Adventures series for most of my students, but I use Pauline Hall’s “Tunes for Ten Fingers” and “More Tunes for Ten Fingers” along with Piano Time (from Oxford University Press) for very young students or for anyone who is struggling with the more fast-paced presentation of Piano Adventures. Also, if you have two siblings from the same family who are very competitive, having each one in a different book may help keep peace at home—and make back-to-back lessons more interesting for you since you’re not teaching exactly the same thing twice in a row!

The hardest thing a totally blind music teacher will have to deal with is how to teach technique (posture, holding the instrument, fingering, etc.). For kids, I ask the parents to assist by keeping an eye on the students during practice and letting me know if things aren’t correct. We’re all socially distanced now, so hands-on demonstrations are even harder to provide. There are some good technique books out there that include descriptions of how to do things on a particular instrument, but mostly, you’ll have to figure out what you’re comfortable doing, and be willing to do a bit of trial and error to see what works. Be prepared for the thing that works with one student not to work with another; we are all individuals, after all!

I hold group study sessions several times each year. During these, I have students play pieces as well as scales and other things. I teach my students to evaluate each other (and themselves) and to provide constructive feedback. At first, they’re all scared to say anything negative, so there’s a lot of, “That was good,” or “I liked how you played that piece.” Those sorts of very general feedback aren’t helpful, though. I tell students that they can say whatever they want about a performance as long as they can give a specific example to support what they say. Pretty soon, they’re coming up with things like, “That tempo was really fast and exciting, but I think maybe you need to work on the ending more because you couldn’t play that part as fast as the rest of it.” As the year goes by, suddenly you’ve got this group of students that are all encouraging each other, analyzing their own practicing and playing more honestly, and getting really excited about how everybody in the group is progressing.

Playing duets with students is also a good way to find out how their technique is, especially at the piano.

One challenge is getting those first students to give you a chance to teach. If you can get a few and keep them going for a year, word will spread about what you can do. Hold recitals whenever possible, and if you can, take your students to play at community events if possible. Here in the U.S., many nursing homes and assisted-living facilities welcome musical performances. (Of course, this has changed dramatically since COVID, but you could hold Zoom concerts, or compile a video collage to post on your website.)

Most of all, be creative. Don’t be afraid to say, “Oops! That didn’t work!” Then try something else and keep trying until you find what works. We all studied the theory of music education, but actually doing it with real people is the best way to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Good luck!

Stephanie Pieck

From: Menvi-discuss [mailto:menvi-discuss-bounces at menvi.org] On Behalf Of Ying-Shan Tseng via Menvi-discuss
Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2021 5:18 PM
To: This is for discussing music and braille literacy
Cc: Ying-Shan Tseng
Subject: [Menvi-discuss] Blind music teachers

Hi all

I'm currently a music student and thinking about what I'd like to do in the future after graduating. I very much would like to teach but thought about the fact that I would never be able to teach beginners or theory because I read braille music and not normal sheet music because I'm blind. Are there any blind music teachers who have experience in this and how do you overcome this obstacle and how do you go about it?

Thank you! Looking forwards to hear from you.

Ying-Shan

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Kind regards,

Ying-Shan Tseng

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1oihlqmi85-Zd5-trSHJDg

The world is a song and I'm here to sing it.🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶📚📚

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