What if the piano teacher said "Don't practice piano, spend time with your family instead"?

If I were taking an hour piano lesson every day Monday through Friday, and demonstrated that I was learning during the class, and was walking out each day having mastered a small skill, then it would make sense.

And if I couldn’t show by the end of the day that I had it down, the teacher told me to go finish mastering it at home, that would make sense.

That’s what the teacher in Texas is doing, and it is a breath of fresh air for teaching.

But a piano teacher doesn’t get you for an hour every day, they get you for an hour a week. And learning piano is different from learning arithmetic. Piano requires a lot of muscle memory and practice even at the most proficient levels.

A 3rd grader should not have to practice single digit addition every week like a concert pianist has to practice scales.

@zenvelo I can respond to you but I don’t think you will comeback and say I see what you mean @flo

I would get a new piano teacher. Piano teachers cost a pretty penny and if I wanted to simply spend more time with my family I certainly would not pay a piano teacher to tell me this.

The best teachers I ever had didn’t give homework. At all. They used their class time to teach the material, which left us with all the after-school time to study as needed for our unit tests and exams.

They did not fill class time with busy work, and give us more busy work to take up our out-of-school time. They respected the fact that we had the ability to know for ourselves whether we were learning the material, and gave extra help when we needed it. They did not assume we were idiots and needed to memorize everything under the sun by rote.

Extracurricular activities (like piano) have absolutely nothing to do with this.

If you already had piano lessons for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, yeah, I think you already have plenty of practice.

I think @zenvelo puts it very well, and there is also the factor that practicing the piano is about physical training, not comprehension. And the children the teacher is exempting from homework are 7 year olds who get enough intellectual stimulation in a properly run classroom for the day, and need a diversity of activity to develop properly.

” @zenvelo I can respond to you but I don’t think you will comeback and say I see what you mean @flo”
Now I’m confused again, @flo. You don’t want to respond to posts on this discussion? Your question posed a query of the “What would happen if…” type.
@zenvelo posted a response, not an argument. Do you need us to agree with an argument you haven’t made?

Just because a teacher or for that matter any professional knows his specialty specialty doesn’t mean he’s the right teacher (or doctor, or whatever) for you. I discovered this myself many years ago.

If you really want to learn piano, shop for a new teacher who’s more in, er, tune with you.

My father was an only child and forced to take piano lessons while his friends played ball. He hated it. His parents were busy teaching school and working on the railroad. I think he’d rather play ball with his friends.

What if your piano teacher told you not to go to school and instead to spend that time practicing the piano?

After all, the piano teacher doesn’t care if you can read, write, or add.

Learning piano and learning academic subjects are two different kinds of learning and require two different kinds of approach.

Find a new piano teacher.

Does practice outside of class improve piano skills?

___

The research internationally is pretty clear that homework loading does not improve student’s results, particularly in the lower grades.

Edited:
According to the teacher you become a good student if you do everything else like learn how to cook maybe play ball, whatever else, with your family everything that doesn’t involve school work? As much as learning to cook and sports are great things it doesn’t help them remember what they were taught in class, and pass tests easily without much studying. It doesn’t, the same way there is no bikini nor a burqa in the outfit so called Burkini.

@flo As @YARNLADY said, learning piano is much different from learning academically.

There is much research that has been done on how people learn, and how the euro-plastcicity builds new pathways in the brain by doing a variety of tasks, all of which reinforce academic learning.

Human brains are incredibly complex network, where the repeated action of emptying the dishwasher and putting utensils properly in a utensil tray in a drawer can help with reading and speech and math, because it enhances the ability of the brain to recognize patterns. Learning to play piano also helps academic learning; music skills arise from the same part of the brain as math skills.

But learning academically does not translate into the muscle memory of piano playing. So comparing the teacher’s statement about homework to a piano teacher’s possible statement is a poor analogy.

http://neatoday.org/2015/09/23/the-great-homework-debate-whats-getting-lost-in-the-hype/
That article says nothing about no homework just not a ton of it.

I’m a homeschooling parent, so all of my kid’s school work is homework.

My little boy has this crazy perfectionist thing going on, where he becomes extremely anxious about writing. He’s not a great speller yet (c’mon, he’s eight) and he hates getting things wrong more than he likes being right, so it’s hard to get him to try.

I could force him to complete a bagillion worksheets, standing over him while he wriggles and cries and tries his damnedest to get out of it (I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I need a nap, I’ll do chores, Mama, ANYTHING!) or I can let him do other things.

Those other things might be writing emails back and forth with his uncle Billy about video games they like to play, or chatting online with other kids his age in a Roblox server. I could force him to read boring textbooks, or he could read some unofficial Minecraft novels or old Goosebumps books on his Kindle Fire, or the next Harry Potter book in the series.

Do we have to do worksheet upon worksheet to teach decimals and percentages, or can I take him to the grocery store and have him compute the sale prices for me?

Say what you want about homework, but I have an eight year old that knows to find the total price of something that’s 20% off you multiply the base price by .8, then multiply the total by 1.07 to get the total with tax. And he’ll do it in his head.

@flo : So you do need us to agree with an argument you haven’t made.
Coulda just said yes.~

@Seek How does it help the no homeworkers‘s argument? None of the pro homework people would argue that one can learn math the way you taught your son. Actually they know that’s a more fun way. But you can’t do that with all the subjects. A very small percentage of parents can be a substitute teacher.

@flo – Because if the kid is stuck at the kitchen table doing worksheets after school, they can’t do other things that help them learn naturally. Like talking to their parents, shopping with them, or chatting with friends online.

@Seek What you thought your son, (how to figure prices) is not alll the there is to math. Also that can exist in addition to homework, for fun.

They’re in school six hours a day, having every standardized test under the sun drilled into their heads. Then they come home and spend 3–4 hours on more bullshit busywork drills.

Between that and the eleventy kabillion extracurricular activities kids are expected to have if they’re ever going to earn a scholarship, when exactly are they supposed to be allowed to be children?

@flo: I don’t remember, do you have children?

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept10/vol68/num01/Five-Hallmarks-of-Good-Homework.aspx

Parents learn a lot, from children who go to school, and they unlearn the bad info like school=bad slave master teacher =mean slavemaster etc. by some parents.

^ ^ ^ That makes no sense.