Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Top ten reasons to stick with piano over the summer

Every year we have a few students that decide they want to "take a break" from piano for the summer. The upcoming summer activity schedule can quickly get pretty thick. First there is that trip to the Caribbean coming up, then baseball, or swimming, or tennis, or soccer, or all of the above. Well here are some arguments for sticking with piano through the summer that may have slipped your mind while you were off shopping for shorts and sun-tan lotion.

  1. Competition! Students who continue with piano lessons over the summer have a huge edge over those that don't. Consider this: Our summer session is 2 months long, and it takes about a month (sometimes two) to get back into the swing of things after such a long break. So every year, the students who continue with lessons over the summer will be 3 months ahead of where they would have been if they had taken a "break". That means that a student who misses every summer for 4 years will be a full year behind where they could have been if they had continued through the summer.
  2. Maintenance. Think about other things that without a certain degree of maintenance would simply fall apart, or worse, if we decided to "take a break". Have you ever quit a membership to a gym with the intention of starting up again? How did that work out? Well, students who don't have lessons all summer not only lose momentum, they get really rusty. Muscles used in creating music at the piano atrophy and the patterns of fine motor coordination begin to fade. In fact, after two months of neglect, their playing can take two months to recover. Two very long and painful months for all involved. I'm sure you can imagine what this might do to a student's motivation.
  3. Focus. Even though summers can be filled with lots of extra activities, think about all of the things you don't have to do! No school and no homework means 6, 7, 8 or more hours a day suddenly free! What are you going to do some of that time? Practice! Not only that, your practicing won't be constantly interrupted by thoughts like, "I have to remember to finish my science project", or "How on Earth DO you spell 'podzolization' anyway?" Summer is likely to be the most productive 2 months of practicing all year!
  4. Fun! Student's schedules are generally much more relaxed in the summer, allowing for the possibility of more group activities like duets or chamber music. Since students have more time available for practicing, they might add that fun Star Wars or Hannah Montana piece they have always wanted to play. As long as you commit to practicing your regular lesson stuff, your teacher should be on board!
  5. New Projects. Summer is the perfect time to start projects that, for many students, just aren't feasible during the school year. Students may decide to compose a piano sonata or start work on playing a piano concerto. They could pick a composer and listen to his or her complete works. The possibilities are endless!
  6. Extra lessons! Another possibility is scheduling up to 6 extra lessons during the Summer. But the cool thing is, these extra lessons can be totally different than your regular lesson. Students can use this extra time to get help with their summer project (see above), or we could spend those extra lessons focusing on a special area of interest. Some ideas include intensive studies of rhythm, sight reading, composition, music history, improvisation, listening, harmony, Beethoven, technique, tuning, and more. The important thing to realize is that your hour a week lesson really only allows us to graze the surface of the great depths of music. We could easily fill several hours a day just covering essential musical skills.
  7. Keep your spot! Some of our students don't realize that if you quit piano during the summer, you run the risk of losing your spot permanently! We have a maximum of 50 hours a week (although we try to keep it down to 45 or so) to dedicate to teaching students after school, and we always have students waiting to get in. So when a student leaves, the spot goes to the next person in line. Just like everyone else, we have bills to pay and we need to keep our studio full in order to keep our rates low and our heads above water.
  8. Camp! Camp is one of the funnest things about taking lessons with Gould and Fall Piano. Just ask our students who do it every year! We offer two, week-long summer camps every year available only to students registered for summer session. While we have made exceptions to the registration rule in the past, we are no longer allowing students to quit for the summer and still do camp. If you are not registered, you are no longer a student of Gould and Fall Piano, and you lose any benefits that go with registration.
  9. Continuity. The loss of structure that comes with summer vacation can be a challenge. "Huh?" you say, "what can be better that no school?" Well, after a couple of weeks, having little or no schedule can mean boredom. Furthermore, continuous piano lessons can provide a bridge that makes the transition from school to summer and back again a little less shocking. It also helps students stay motivated, because they don't have to deal with the atrophy that occurs with an extended vacation. (see Maintenance above).
  10. We miss you if you leave! Believe it or not, we like you. We love teaching our students, and we miss them if they leave. Teaching and playing piano is not just our livelihood, it is our life. When students leave, our long-term dreams for them are at best postponed, and at worst cancelled. We invest not only our time and money into teaching our students, we invest ourselves. We ache when students leave.

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