Piano Teacher Monologue

Whew! My piano recital had ended and I hadn't flubbed up which made the perfect end to the evening. As much as I hated performing, I'd finally reached the upper echelon of piano students. And then on the way home, my father burst my bubble.

"I'm yanking you out of piano lessons and signing you up with Mrs. Seabury," he announced.

"You're joking, right?" I asked, looking at my mom for support.

"I don't like the way you play," he said. "You're not playing music, you're playing notes."

An argument ensued, but no amount of begging and pleading helped.

Dad's statement had completely caught me off guard. The following evening while I cried in my room, my father called my piano teacher and told her he had enrolled
Seabury. Through her rattling dentures, she agreed wholeheartedly with my father. "You're playing notes," she snipped. "You have no feeling."

As if her words weren't bad enough, she proceeded to take me out of my intermediate books and start me all over again in my beginning books. Baby books! I felt as if she'd slapped me in the face. She had completely humiliated and devastated me. From that moment on I hated piano lessons and Mrs. Seabury.

Everyone involved in music knew Mrs. Seabury. Not only was she famous in the teaching world, but was an accomplished pianist. Her students adored her. Dad also told me she had a waiting list a mile long and that I should feel lucky she agreed to take me on. Instead, I felt
If I arrived early, which dad seemed to do--she had me up at the marker board, writing out scales and chords. Sometimes she kept me late.

During my lesson she crammed in finger exercises, scales, chords, theory, music history, sight reading, and finally the songs she'd assigned me. I even had written exams I had to pass---unbelievable!

My former teacher had always sat at the piano and played me my newly- assigned songs. That made it easier to go home and play them since I'd already heard the song and knew how to count it and where to start, but Mrs. Seabury made me struggle on my own. That meant figuring out the counting and notes by myself. And the song didn't get checked off until I'd perfected it. When it finally passed her approval she never gushed. Instead she'd say, "Now that's much better," or "That's more like it."

At her suggestion, Dad made me practice and hour a day instead of my usual half hour. That ticked me off.

I'll admit I had a stubborn attitude, and that's putting it mildly. Perhaps that brought out the worst in Mrs. Seabury, yet in our conflicts, she always won. Even as a teenager I usually left her home in