Hey ya’ll. Paige here.
I wanted to share a conversation I’ve had several times over the past few weeks with several of my students. For context, most of my students are elementary school aged kids, with a few teens and adults sprinkled in there for flavor.
The other day, I had a student learning how to tell when to switch hands on the piano. It can be a tricky thing to learn if you’re not used to reading music, since piano, unlike any other instrument to my knowledge, has you reading two lines of music at once as soon as the grand staff is introduced. It’s enough to make anyone go cross-eyed!
So we did all the reliable methods such as color coding the hands and covering up one of the staves so we just see only the top or only the bottom. This student was making all the common mistakes, such as reading only the right hand part, then reading only the left hand part and getting really frustrated trying to figure out when each hand was supposed to play.
This was a completely new skill for this kid! They had never seen anything like this before and they were so quick to attack their own self worth over this struggle! As humans, we are so quick to judge ourselves and focus on what we “should” know.
Well, the truth is, what you “should” know is completely irrelevant! If you “should” too much, you’re going to “should” all over yourself! Mistakes when you’re learning music have no bearing on you as a person! Personally, I believe this all comes down to social media and hustle culture! Remember, no one is posting about their failures!
At KSM we try really hard to replace that thinking with “Well, this is what I do know, and this is what I can do,” and “This is just new! I’ll get it eventually!”
When we approach things with the “It’s just new!” mindset, we really allow ourselves the freedom to fail! That is one of the most liberating places to be! To be able to make a mistake and the only thought you have about it be “Hmmm… What happened there and how do I fix it?” is wonderful!
By allowing this kid the chance to fail, the freedom to make a mistake and not be judged for it, I was able to pull out a side of this student I had never seen in our around a year of working together! They still apologize profusely when they make a mistake, even though they don’t need to. But I can tell they’re working on that, and I feel like we’ve taken a step in the right direction! It’s all new territory, after all!