Piano Lessons

I now am a piano teacher at a seminary. My aunt is my assistant/translator. Everyone wants very much to learn music, but there is almost no one to teach them. These seminary girls are finishing school, often marring into the ministry and wishing very badly that they could play for church – at the very least play the melody line.  My aunt suggested I teach piano, so I have been praying about it and working on learning musical terms in Spanish for a couple weeks.

Ten students signed up for the class. Fifteen showed up last night – about half the seminary. Like everything else, a group piano lesson is a time to socialize. We started out with a rather class-roomy feel and nine students, all girls except for Constantino, who had been working by himself to learn what music he could. A few more girls trickled in, I got more comfortable and we interactively worked through some beginning theory; it was fun. The preacher-boy class ended about halfway through my lesson and five excited guys invaded the classroom, ready to learn. And smile at the blond gringa. We divided the students into three groups. While my aunt reviewed theory with two of the groups, I did a piano lesson with the other. Two or three students sat on the bench and played the same song at the same time in different octaves. The other students looked over their shoulders and pointed out everything they did wrong. It was very funny, but the collective knowledge of the group helped everyone out.

Instead of getting out at 8 pm, the last student left around 9:15. I don’t know if we can keep up this style of piano lessons after everyone has had a couple weeks of progressing at their own pace – they will be playing different songs from each other much of the time. Since no one has piano music, I am having the whole piano book copied and leaving the copy on the piano for their use. The students were strictly prohibited from taking it off. I don’t know how much my students learned, but I picked up quite a bit; sometimes the students knew more than I did. I didn’t even know the Spanish terms for the notes. So they had fun teaching me, too.