That's not really what I'm getting at Jenny. More that a teacher who pushes their pupils more is more likely to have situations arise where the pupil hasn't reached the level required because they have slacked for a couple of weeks. When they don't have 9 months with the exam pieces, a few weeks of laziness can be a disaster! However for 99% of pupils I believe they will learn more from a varied diet.

I haven't had any failures in piano either and my pupils get around three months to prepare up to around grade 4/5 and longer for higher grades.



I am not surprised!

For what it's worth I think your response is very sensitive and hopefully will do much to soothe the parents' feelings. Whether or not you 'should' have to pay for the exam, I think I too would return the money as a goodwill gesture.

Your post also, I think, explains why the situation occurred - you expected a 14-year-old to be mature enough to understand what was required of him and to keep his parents fully informed of the situation. Unfortunately that's not always the case, and I have made the same assumption! I now try to keep parents in the picture until the pupil in question is at least 18!

I hope that your response satisfies the parents and that this all blows over soon.

I haven't had any failures in piano either and my pupils get around three months to prepare up to around grade 4/5 and longer for higher grades.

[quote name='funkyfairy' post='806491' date='Mar 23 2009, 02:53 PM']

I've deleted some of the quotes and I always make a mess of that so apologies if this doesn't make sense any more.
Your timing guidelines really interested me.
For information my daughter is 11, 12 in April and is taking her Grade 3 piano at the beginning of April. I have been surprised by how long she has taken to learn her Grade 3 pieces. She passed Grade 2 last Easter with a merit and spent a term on Up the Grade. She changed teacher in September, her last teacher left, and started on the Grade 3 material straightaway although she does play quite a bit of other music with the teacher as well. My daughter always starts with piano practice, usually before school, does a full half hour almost every day. I would say her practice average is well over 5 1/2 practices a week. She is very committed and knows how to learn, she has Grade 5 Flute and Theory and is taking Grade 5 Sax this time but as I say always starts with the piano and obviously loves it.
It took her a long time to work the pieces up, compared to her other instruments, and even now although all the dynamics are in place and she sounds really good she still makes slips many times when she plays the pieces.
It took so long for her to get up to speed I finally mentioned it to her teacher who looked surprised and said that she thought my daughter had picked up the pieces really quickly.
I'd assumed that because you have two lines of music, the top line of which looks way harder than the single line of music on other instruments, that the piano was inherently "harder" than other instruments and that it took longer to prepare for a Grade.
Obviously this is of academic interest only. My daughter loves her teacher and is obviously doing well in terms of the standard she has achieved. Piano isn't her first instrument and I have no intention of changing anything. I'm just curious about how long it takes a reasonably good student to tackle music for a grade at, say, Grade 3, 4 or 5. I have met one boy who passed Grade 7 aged 8 and won the prize for the highest mark in Birmingham so I know that some children can do amazing things. I'm just asking about good children.
Dora

Dora,

I don't think your daughter sounds as though she's taking a long time to learn her pieces especially if she changed teacher. (New teachers always need to spend a bit of time covering things that the other one didn't do so much of - everyone has their own way - and, equally importantly, a new teacher has no experience with that student so doesn't know if they normally practise like mad and pull it all together in the last month, for instance, or struggle with scales or whatever. I'd always start a new pupil off on her pieces a bit before my regulars, just to be sure).

My students all start their grade pieces in January to be ready by June. This sounds ages but but where I am there's 2 weeks holiday in February, two at Easter, countless Bank holidays in May, not to mention the normal colds, parties, school trips etc.etc. that always crop up. I try to have covered quite a lot of the scales beforehand.

I find that most can get through the pieces (in a very ropey fashion) by the end of March (won't happen this year as I missed 3 weeks for an operation - hello stress !) and the pieces usually all come together some time in May. I must say though that my pupils don't practise anything like your daughter, wish they would . . . .

I think we all worry too much about what other forum teachers will think of us.

I don't think it seems ages. I think it's fair enough. When a pupil of mine is successful at a grade, we do get the next book almost striaght away and look at scale requirements, maybe a study or two (I enter mostly for TG), and maybe one piece. As well as this we think about what else we'd like to do for the exam and think about what the technical and musical requirements might be, and I dig out a few short pieces that might provide good groundwork. Do I use the exam syllabus for teaching purposes as well as for testing purposes? Yes! It's great! Lots of lovely music at just the right level. I do encourage them to tackle as much as possible that isn't on the syllabus that they like and which I think is suitable, but I do place the goal of exams alongside this and it often is, all things considered, quite a long time from when we first get the book until the exam is actually taken.

(I agree, by the way, that the original poster seems to have handled this quite sensitively.)

I simply have to second this approach. It is all very well to say one shouldn't have exam pieces on the go for a long time but that is a wide generalisation which takes no account of the circumstances of individual teachers. I have exactly the same problems as dolce@piano. The French school year is something quite different from the English school year. The French system of education and the school day are nothing like the English system. I time and space my work here in an entirely different way from the way I did it in England. I don't know how it works in other parts of the world but I think rather than assume that everyone who has their exam pieces in hand very early is just an exam peddler it really is necessary to look at things from a wider viewpoint.

My children start one piece in September and I insist that all scales are learnt by Christmas. After Christmas we tackle the remaining two pieces. They are always worked or rested throughout the year. But this is done alongside and alternating with lots of other things.

To quote an individual case I have a girl who didn't do an exam last year because she needed to widen her repertoire and also was a weekly boarder with limited practice time.. This year she said she wanted to tackle Grade 4. and she added that she didn't think she would have time for much more than the exam work.
After three years in a sheltered boarding school run by a religious order she is now home again and a day student in a local mixed ability secondary school. So far we haven't done anything this year outside the Grade 4 syllabus but she loves the pieces and for the short time she has to practise it is more than enough. Next year she will have another year off exams.

Spacing out the work of any syllabus is a very individual thing.

Apolgies for being slightly off-topic but I wish my daughter had her exam pieces for longer. She is taking a French exam which consists of one own choice piece and one imposed piece (no choice at all) which has to be learnt in eight weeks (two weeks of which are holidays with no lessons). There is only one session a year Daughter broke her arm in the October half-term, the week after she had been given her "own choice" piece to learn. She couldn't play at all for six weeks and consequently her own choice piece could have done with a bit more work when she got the other piece. The other piece is much harder than anything she has every played before and also much longer. In last week's lesson she was told that the exam date had been moved forward a week. OK a week shouldn't make that much difference but in this particular case I think it does and I'm starting to feel quite nostalgic for the British system.

I agree. Starting exam work early doesn't mean that we're concentrating solely on it! For summer exams, I also start work on the pieces in January, having worked on the scales since straight after the previous exam - sometimes even before - and I include sight reading in every lesson with every student.

We also start on new exam pieces straight after an exam. But then, having special visits, I only hold two exam dates per year, April/May and November. We also learn more than one song from each list - probably three. Alongside that students learn new and different songs for three festivals, March, May and November. They also do a solo for a themed concert and take part in duet and group work in three parts for that, twice a year, June and December. So we have lots of deadlines throughout the year.
I should hastily add that all this is voluntary - school work and exams must come first - but the majority of my students are adults.
I agree that we worry too much about what other forumites think of us - we know what works for us and our students.
To the OP - I think you must have had doubts over whether you did the right thing to have posted the question. I might have done the same as you, but would not have taken the decision unilaterally, and wouldn't have left it to the last minute before discussing it with student and family. Anyway that's water under the bridge now, and you will have made up your mind how you will handle this in the future. All the best.

Nicely put, David.

It sounds like Beth is not atypical. She has done lots of other things in the last two terms with her teacher. This week she was given another new piece, I think only Grade 1 or 2 level but Beth is loving learning it and it is quite different to anything else she has learned. She is also teaching herself one of the other Grade 3 pieces because she wants to.
Thank you for the comments everyone. Very interesting.
Dora

It's probably a safe bet not to enter people until they can play everything to at the very least a comfortable pass level before actually entering them. If they then reach a high standard well before the exam you can always get them working on new repertoire as well while revising the exam stuff from time to time to avoid boredom. Some kids just aren't galvanised by the iminence of an exam....

One of my students has decided that maybe she would like to take Grade 2 in the summer after all because she likes the pieces so much. Especially Mozzie.

(Sorry, a bit off topic, but I was so pleased!)