The “Merder” Scene: What Happened When I Let Go of My Lesson Plan

Throughout my years as a private piano teacher, I’ve experimented with many forms of lesson planning and preparation. I’ve attended classes, workshops, and conferences on the subject, and I’ve taught both meticulously timed lessons and ones with little pre-planned structure. 

From these experiences, I’ve learned that structure is another tool in my teaching kit. For learners, it’s a bit like seasoning in a recipe: there may be general guidelines, but the final amount depends on individual taste. That doesn’t mean I walk into every lesson empty-handed. I love planning activities to keep learning fresh and engaging. But the students who challenge my go-to methods are often the ones who help me grow the most. Their refusal to conform often stems from a deeper creative necessity. And as their teacher, I believe it’s my duty to meet them where they are and help them find their next step forward. 

This looks different for all students. Some of my students thrive with structure. They work very well with a warm up or technical etude, and a 2-3 repertoire pieces they know which sections we will review each time. They know I will let them choose the order (besides the warm-up, of course), so they know what to expect, and I can imagine gives them a sense of control. 

But some of my students aren’t just reluctant to structure, they’re downright defiant. I don’t mean that in a negative sense. It’s more like they repel structure the way two magnets repel each other when you try to force the same poles together. 

This is where spontaneity comes in. Unlike structure, though, that is a tool or a seasoning, spontaneity is the baseline, or ground zero. There is no structure without spontaneity, but there is spontaneity without structure. You get me? As teachers, we must be ready to pivot when something doesn’t click. Some students need only the occasional pivot; others, we’re doing U-turns, roundabouts, three-point turns, whatever it takes. But that doesn’t mean we won’t reach the destination.

These detours are actually what often lead me to some of the most fulfilling and scenic of my teaching experiences. Recently, I had a lesson with an elementary age student, “Sally,” who is very bright, energetic, and unlikely to follow immediate directions. For her, lessons need to feel more like an active experiment or discovery process, instead of a list of directions or rules to follow. But thanks to her different learning style, she has led me to craft several music games that many of my students benefit from in their lessons. 

This past week, leading up to Easter weekend, I had pulled out some fillable Easter eggs to use with my youngest student (3 years old). I filled each egg with a different number of counting stones (1-4), and when he opened it, he had to count them and then play that many notes on the piano. 

But when Sally came into the lesson, these eggs immediately caught her eye. My gears started turning as I picked up a sharpie and some sticky notes while she told me about her week. I started jotting down letters of the musical alphabet one-by-one on a sticky note, then folding them up, while telling her about our next performance class.

“What would you like to play?” I asked. 

She pulled out her most recent piece. I (perhaps unwisely) prompted her to go ahead and play it for me, which unsurprisingly, did not elicit the response I wanted.

“What are you doing there?” She asked, pointing to the colorful folded up sticky notes in my lap. 

“Oh these? Well, I’m preparing a game for us—for after we play this song.” 

She turned to the front page and immediately played the song through, beginning to end, no help needed: for the first time ever. 

“Game time?” 

You got it, Sally! 

I placed each note in an egg and told her we were going to compose our melody by deciding how many eggs to choose, then playing the notes we find inside, in order. First, she decided on a three-note melody. She drew F, G, D. Pretty simple.

“Can you do it backwards?” Yep. 

“How many other orders can we find for those three notes?”

“Will you count for me while I play each combination?” She asked.

Six! Time for another melody. 

Next, she opened all the eggs, added dynamics, sharps, and flats to each option, and closed them back up. 

“Let’s do five notes this time, but you choose the eggs, I’ll play,” she said. 

Sounds good to me! (D-F-Ab-C#-Gb-E#, with a crescendo) was the drawn pattern, and much more difficult than any pattern I would have assigned to her naturally, as we have never played a piece with sharp and flats, let alone an E#… Sally played it immediately, dynamics and all. 

“What does that sound like to you?” I asked, listening to her repeat the pattern over and over.

“Like someone is creeping up behind you in a scary movie!” She said, playing it again, and again. 

Then, she grabbed a piece of paper and wrote the whole thing down to preserve it outside of sticky note formation. 

The Merder Scene she named it (her phonetic spelling), and I couldn’t agree more… The melody could have been straight out of a 70s horror flick, foreboding the death of the main character. 

So, no, if I had lesson-planned this lesson, I probably wouldn’t have landed on aleatoric Easter egg horror movie music writing. But by letting her lead the way, we ended up in a space that was far more creative, engaging, and educational than anything I could have prepared. 

That doesn’t mean that I’ll never give her structure. I do know, though, that her learning “recipe” is easily over-seasoned: My goal is to gently pepper in the guidance she needs to become the best learner she can be. 

And that’s my goal for all of my students. 

—Keytress