While it’s certainly more expensive than teaching one’s own children music lessons, hiring an outside music teacher has much to recommend it.  As I mentioned in a previous post, I taught our oldest two children piano for over two years, largely because of financial necessity.  The push to look for an affordable option came for two reasons: our kids needed a performance venue, and we began homeschooling.

Performing is an extremely important piece of the puzzle.  Each student of an instrument should perform – even a child who does not care to perform, or who gets very nervous about performing.  The need for a deadline, a moment of accountability, and an outside audience cannot be overstated, regardless of the child’s affinity for the experience!  If the student’s experience of music is always alone, in isolation, it can quickly lose its life.  While there are ways to do it, providing a performance venue was not something that I had found a way to do for my kids.

Furthermore, we began to school our children at home.  I was now not only their music teacher, I was their everything teacher!  And since music lessons are easier to outsource than, say, character development or Latin, we opted to look for a piano teacher.  Thankfully the option we found worked famously, and it confirmed several other advantages to having an outside teacher.

First, their new teacher was able to offer them instruction in areas that I couldn’t offer, because she has advanced training in piano pedagogy, and I don’t.  By the time I finished graduate school, I had had seventeen years of individual piano instruction from five different teachers, but I was not a piano pedagogy major.  And having pedagogy training matters.

Our children’s new teacher has instructed them in, among other things, improvisation, ear training, and composition – all skills I know are useful, but which I don’t know much about teaching, especially not to elementary-age children.  And I needn’t have worried about my son’s attention span issue; his teacher has been able to make allowances for his kinesthetic learning tendencies even better than I.  In addition, she knows which materials work best for children of various learning styles, ages, and personalities.

Setting the kids up with lessons has also given them the all-important performance opportunities.  In addition to their semester-end recitals, they are able to perform at group lessons and in contests put on by various teacher organizations in which their teacher is registered.

So the outside teacher may be the right option for you and your family.

Image by Oude School - Creative Commons