A Tech Dinosaur in the Days of COVID-19

Spoiler alert: I am not a tech junkie. I do not rush out with eager excitement to get the latest smartphone. I do not have an Apple Watch. I don’t seek out new ways to incorporate devices into my studio and teaching. I don’t download apps that can track my steps or my hours of practicing. I do not use my phone as a metronome.

And in all my 25 years of teaching piano lessons—years where I have enjoyed the comfort of a full studio of committed students, years where I have had an active waiting list, years where I have watched students go on to be music majors and doctors, both—in all these years, not one parent has ever walked into my studio and said, “I wish you taught using more screens.” Not one. Ever.

Enter COVID-19.

Last week I taught 26 lessons on FaceTime or Zoom. I did an additional 15 short follow-ups by phone to check in about scale fingerings or a sight-reading assignment. I watched 23 videos sent by text or email that students had made to demonstrate some skill or piece and then sent back responses with corrections or new ideas. I wrote dozens of texts and emails to set up this new schedule and world of piano lessons. Too many to count.

My head spins. When not staring at a screen, I find myself recoiling from all devices. I walk. I garden. I practice. I read books with tangible covers and pages made of paper.

For years, I have been skeptical of our profession’s technological push. I’m not convinced drilling notes from a computer program is better than a real live person and a set of flashcards. I haven’t supported the belief that a child moving across the country should keep taking lessons with their former teacher on Skype because “it is just as good!” I wonder about our diminishing attention spans as we chatter excitedly among our colleagues about a clever new rhythm app. Is this really better? I’m not sure.

If anything, I hope the social isolation and escalating use of devices will serve as a reminder that one of the things we have always done best in our profession was to give one-on-one facetime to students. Through performance classes and studio recitals, we have built communities, tiny villages of people who watched each other’s kids grow up and move from playing “Happy Hippo” to Chopin. I don’t want to simply teach students piano skills; I want to teach them to be pianists. Or, better yet, to be mindful, honest, creatively thinking people. I have always taken this part of my work at least as seriously as my ability to coach a tasteful execution of Haydn ornaments. Maybe more so. On our best days, we teachers are artisans ourselves, one bespoke lesson at a time.

Having said all of that, I am grateful for how easily even a dinosaur like me was able to shift into these online and phone lessons options. I’m thankful they exist. I do not take for granted how smoothly my studio transferred over to this format, my young students being far more equipped to handle this than I am. Every day I figure out more about what is or isn’t possible. Assigning lots of sight-reading pages? No problem. Nuancing and polishing a Debussy prelude? Much more difficult. We are zooming through scales with lots of practice variations and chord progressions in all the keys. Check, check, check. We chomp through little pieces in elementary method books. Notes and rhythms correct? Good enough for now. I nag about hand positions and posture; we discuss composition titles and themes.

More than anything, I am holding the space for their practicing, reminding them in our screen time together to make their practice charts and to keep working. The most important question I ask these days is not so different than any other week: “So, how did you practice this?” An attempt to gently nudge our attention to the process, the task immediately before us. We’re pianists, I remind them. Never mind all the canceled festivals and recitals. We are pianists, and pianists practice.

There are things from this time of technologically-enhanced lessons that I will take back to my real world of live piano lessons. Students making and sending me videos of scales or Bartók exercises or chord progressions is a good use of technology, and a helpful midweek checkpoint for kids of all ages. My recording short videos to send of a new skill or a short musical passage so students have a reminder to reference while they practice is also something I will continue in the future. And while last week was a steep learning curve and plenty frustrating at times, it had its moments. I laughed at the charming video I received that captured not only the short cheerful elementary piece played by a young child, but also showed him high fiving his mom after a successful take. The photos of practice assignments the kids have written in their notebooks, each assignment in a different color, just like I usually do, made me smile. I loved the text that consisted entirely of emojis one seven-year-old made me and the high school senior who ended her video of Tchaikovsky with “Hi Amy! We miss you.”

I miss them all desperately. I cannot wait to be back.