A Piano Teacher

What It's Like To Be...

Dan Heath

Curiosity, Jobs, Careers, Business, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Human Interest

4.8 • 646 Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Delivering the perfect first lesson, working with 89-year-old students, and learning how to charge for your work with Christina Whitlock, a piano teacher in Indiana. How does she help students hear the "heartbeat of music"? And what is it like to teach a student from first grade through college? IF YOU LIKE THIS EPISODE: Check out what it's like to be a creative director, a tennis coach, or a mystery novelist. Learn more about StoryCorps and the Story Preservation Initiative at their we...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Imagine you're a kid sitting down for your first piano lesson.
0:04.8	She's sitting in front of this instrument.
0:06.8	You barely understand.
0:07.9	There's white keys.
0:08.6	There's black keys.
0:09.8	You're nervous.
0:10.5	You know your teacher's going to try to get you to play this.
0:13.0	You know you're going to be bad at it for a long time.
0:17.1	Christina Whitlock is a piano teacher in Indiana.
0:20.5	Her job in that first lesson, she tells us,
0:23.8	is to get you to trust that she won't let you fail.
0:27.0	Because I can't get a student to really do what I need them to do musically
0:31.4	until they trust me.
0:33.3	So she starts slow.
0:35.4	You know, how we number our fingers
0:36.9	or how the sounds move on the piano,
0:39.1	like that moving up is to the right and moving down is to the left.
0:46.5	They start to realize that I'm not going to ask them to do things that they are not going to be able to do.
0:53.4	And then she starts pointing out patterns on the piano.
0:57.0	Sure, it's 88 keys, but they're arranged in a way that once you understand it, it starts to make sense.
1:03.0	The black keys are built in sets of twos and threes, right?
1:07.0	And we usually find those first, and I give them permission to play them with lots of sound,
	...

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