Right around the time I started homeschooling, I was told that it was IMPOSSIBLE to teach your own children piano. The woman who told me this?–a respected piano teacher, one of the organizers of the Gilmore Piano festival, for goodness sakes.

Then a friend of mine, who was briefly a piano major in college, echoed the sentiment. In fact, she laughed and said, conspiratorially how of course her daughter couldn’t play piano–’nobody can teach their own child piano. . .’

But, being contrarian in nature, I decided to try to buck the trend; to prove them all wrong. I remembered my composition professor at WMU. He had two piano students back when I was in High School. One of them was his son, who after a year or two as an engineering major at WMU decided to get serious in music. He transferred to Julliard and commenced to follow in his father’s compositional/piano playing footsteps.

So maybe he knew how to teach his own child? I called him and asked him for tips. I think Yanni was all of 3 at the time. My professor told me some of his tricks for ear training and how to make piano playing a game for the little ones. I took notes and tried things out on Yanni.

Another thing that I had heard about learning piano was that nobody should start playing before 8 years old. I hadn’t started until I was almost 11, and I had always felt at a disadvantage because of it. I ended up skipping a grade or two in piano and playing at a pretty advanced level by the time I graduated from high school, but there were always gaps in my skill and knowledge level.

Again, I wanted to buck the trend. I bought a piano primer geared towards young beginners, and proceeded to teach my 3 year old to play.

We hit a wall fairly early on. I attributed it to her young age, and we dropped it for a while.

We came back to piano when Yanni was in first grade or so. She learned chopsticks, and a composition I wrote called African chopsticks. We hit another wall trying to get through the primer. We dropped it again for awhile.

When we resumed lessons, I had a different goal in mind. I thought about Carol Bullock, the valedictorian of my High School class. Her father was the head of the school of performing arts at WMU, and her mother was a piano teacher. Carol was quite an accomplished cellist. She did not study piano, but she was proficient enough to play duets and navigate her way around the piano. I started teaching snippets of popular classical pieces, and the duet that Carol had taught me years earlier.

I was also teaching piano lessons off and on over the years. My last two students were my hairdresser’s daughter and a friend’s daughter. My friend’s daughter had a very difficult time focusing, and her lessons were very short. She brought a Suzuki piano book with her to one lesson. It was as if someone had turned a light switch for me. I could see how this method could get a child off the ground by teaching them to play melodic music, rather than the atonal plunking of the learn to read music stuff.

I bought a copy of Suzuki piano and put Yanni to work on it immediately. I also started Xay on Suzuki. Yanni progressed much faster than her brother did, and we limped through book one.

Meanwhile, Imani came on the scene. She had a different approach from the beginning. Imani wanted to learn to play. We had a little xylopiano that came with a song book, and Imani decided she wanted to learn to play Jesus Loves Me at the age of 3.

It took two years. It was excruciating. (to be continued. . . )