Mashed Potato Moments

Mashed potatoes.

Yum, right? So many recipes! So many techniques! Yup, gotta love mashed potatoes—except when they pop up at the piano lesson in the form of a Mashed Potato Moment©*.

Mashed Potato Moments© are notorious for appearing when teaching a new concept/technique/passage. Typically, the session goes like this:

• You explain

• You demonstrate

• You get the student to try it

• Then you duck out of the studio, bang your head against the wall 12 times, return to the studio, and explain again and demonstrate again

• Then you get the student to repeat five times

Usually by the third repetition, the student is starting to get the hang of it and by the fifth, they’re competent. However, sometimes around the fourth repetition, things fall apart, even after several satisfactory attempts. This is what I call the Mashed Potato Moment© (cue epic orchestral music). It arrives when, after working hard and achieving results, the brain suddenly stops, folds its arms across its chest and says, “Honey, I am DONE with this.”

At this point in the lesson, the student often gets frustrated. “I just did it,” they complain. “Why can’t I do it anymore? Why are my fingers so stupid? Why are you turning red and laughing so hard?” It is at this juncture that I tell them they have experienced a Mashed Potato Moment©.

Now, I am no great cook and have managed to burn boiled water (don’t get me started on the sugar cookie fiasco of 2007), but I do have my mother’s tried and true mashed potato recipe:

• Peel and dice potatoes

• Pop potatoes in a pot of cold, salted water; boil

• Boil potatoes ’til cooked; drain

• With a potato masher (and this is the important part), you MASH THOSE POTATOES INTO PULP

• Then you perhaps add a little more salt, butter and milk and BEAT THOSE POTATOES WITH A WOODEN SPOON until there’s no resistance and no hope of them coming back out of the pot and attacking you

• The potatoes are now not only mashed and beaten, but also starchy, gluey and dense—which is the same condition as your student’s brain. Hence, Mashed Potato Moment©.

Now, sometimes after this little cooking lesson, I get an inquiry as to whether I ought to be prosing on about cooking when the student’s parents are paying good money for piano lessons and anyway who needs to cook when there’s delivery pizza? My response to is to inform the student of their Miranda rights and refer them to the studio policy. However, this side trip inevitably does the trick, allowing their brains to relax by focusing on something else so that when we return to the above-mentioned concept/technique/passage, they are able to execute it without difficulty.

And they also know how to make mashed potatoes.

Hope this helps in your studio teaching.

Keep playing! Keep learning! Keep loving!

_________

*Actually, I haven’t copyrighted this phrase, so feel free to use it. Liberally. With lots of butter. 😉