Help Kids Achieve Music-literacy.

By Mary Ann Anderson

Suppose you send your child to school at 9 a.m. Monday morning to work one-on-one with his reading teacher until 9:30. She gives him some instruction, hears him read for a little while and then gives him several pages of homework and tells him to return at the same time next Monday.

At home, he is somewhat unsure about some of his assignments, but no one there has enough knowledge to help him. Some days he is reminded to work on his assignments, but other days he doesn’t get to them at all. Knowing he hasn’t done very well, he is a somewhat reluctant student the next Monday. Since he hasn’t mastered his material, he must work on it again with only slightly increased understanding.

After six months of such unrewarding effort, his parents decide he “isn’t talented” in reading, and he is allowed to make the decision to stop his studies.

Under such conditions how likely is the student to become a good reader? Not very, obviously. And yet, this is the manner in which our children study the piano. As a teacher of more than 40-year's experience, I have some advice to encourage the frustrated family.

Now, in regards to music-literacy, first of all, once the decision for piano lessons has been made, consider it equal in importance with the other subjects of education - reading, math, etc. To practice or not to practice shouldn’t be an issue for discussion every day any more than going to school is. To expand the comparison with learning to read, consider each day of missed piano practice as a day of absence from school. Would you allow your child to miss half his school days or more?

Pick a consistent daily practice time and decide that play and activities come after homework and practicing are finished.

A parent should attend lessons frequently and then function essentially as a “home teacher.” She should be on the bench with the practicing child younger than 8; until the child is 12, she must be within earshot. Even the non-playing mother can set a timer for the required number of minutes, keep the child on task, commiserate with difficult passages and rejoice in mastery.

To send the grad-school child off alone to practice while other family members are playing is exile. On the other hand, one-on-one time with mom, when others are not allowed to interrupt is reward enough to get most children on the bench.

Now, does the above occur every single day? Well, no! But it should be a goal, and it must occur more often than not for success in this matter of "music-literacy." And keep in mind that the goal is musical literacy - the knowledge to understand the meaning of notes on a page and the ability to respond to them appropriately on a musical instrument.

We accept without discouragement the fact that a skilled language reader requires six to ten years of schooling, and then the achievement is literacy, not professional use. Look at time spent at the keyboard the same way: It takes hours over years to produce a literate, competent musician, not necessarily a composer.