Simply Music

I've been teaching piano lessons for about 6 years now. Boring, traditional piano lessons. After co-teaching a group piano lesson class during summer school, I looked into changing up my methods a little more, moving away from private lessons and towards group lessons. I "researched" group lessons on google to try to find ideas of how it worked. Now, I put researched in quotations because it last all of a half hour before I stumbled upon Simply Music.

In a nutshell, Simply Music is a non-traditional way of teaching piano lessons. We teach our children how to talk before we teach them the ABCS, spelling, and sentence structure. But when we teach piano lessons, we jump right into reading music instead of just letting students play.

Look at this:
There's a lot going on there. Straight lines, curved lines, and each line has a different letter, and oh by the way the lines on the top and the lines on the bottom don't have the same letters, symbols, numbers, notes that look different, letters... A lot to learn! And students learn all of that in the first 6 months or so in traditional lessons.

In the first year of Simply Music piano lessons (which are in a group setting), students don't even learn how to read music. They just play it! In the first 3 months, they have a dozen songs from various genres that they can play by memory. They even leave the first lesson knowing how to play a song. And that's what they really want to do. They want to play, not learn!

Simply Music is not sold in stores (infomercial alert!). You have to sign up on their website to be trained, send them a bunch of money, and then you get the training materials to learn how to play and teach the Simply Music way.

Through the website, I found a local Simply Music piano teacher and attended a free information session she held in her in-home "studio." I was hooked on the program. I knew I would be. She told me I'd definitely have to raise my rates by about $10 per lesson per student. This scares the crap out of me, but she reassured me that it will work because 1) students in group settings get a longer lesson 2) students get books and DVDs to practice with at home (which is an additional fee) 3) students will progress so much faster than students learning traditionally, which makes students and parents very happy 4) students will be motivated to play. Instead of that fight to go practice, there's a fight to STOP practicing, which, again, makes parents very happy.

Needless to say, I'm very excited about starting the process. I sent in my application and my money today and look forward to receiving a package in the mail soon. I am ready to use my time more efficiently and make more money to supplement our incomes. In turn, hopefully I can push our DMP payments to the max because every penny of what I earn teaching piano lessons will be going towards that.