Pink Pre-Fab Piano Lessons

I was just googling 'creativity kids" with what I thought was the simple aim of finding an image of a kid covered in paint standing on their head on a piano pretending to be a hedgehog.  Or something.  But no, all I saw was page after increasingly depressing page of "creativity products".  Pre-fab fairy gardens and the like.  Stuff you would assemble, not instigate.  If you could manage not to die from boredom and the overdose of pink graphics. 

Here in the magical pink fairy garden of piano teaching, it seems that almost everyone who is not a musician assumes that being a musician is a creative activity.  Artistic, yes.  Creative, hardly ever.  The sad truth is that the vast majority of musicians basically re-assemble the works and interpretations of those who actually did manage to "invent something new..that has value".  And this sorry state of affairs does, of course, begin at the very beginning.  Which is where I come in.  Because I like teaching beginners.

Parents and colleagues tell me all the time that I am a "very creative teacher", which is nice I guess, but shouldn't that be a redundancy?   Isn't that kind of like an unmathematical astrophysicist, or a surgeon with no opposable thumbs?  How can you be an uncreative teacher? An instructor, maybe.  A teacher, no.

I deal with kids, for the most part, and all kids have imagination, flair, and creative abilities far beyond the inane assignment of assembling a pink plastic fairy garden...or the musical equivalent.  By creating something new, students teach themselves.  I just provide suggestions and the necessary information.  New skills must be mastered in order to make sense of and develop their ideas:  composition is the absolute best way to learn theory and to some extent technique as well. 

The little piece above was written by one of my first students, and it was the first time someone brought me something they'd created, just because they wanted to, in their own words, with this language I taught them.  It is one of my favorite things.  Ever.