May I have your attention please....
Pete Jutras Ph.D., NCTM, is Assistant Professor of Piano, at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music of the University of Georgia in Athens, GA, where he serves as Piano Pedagogy and Class Piano Specialist. Prior to his recent move to Athens, Pete maintained an independent teaching studio in Dallas, TX for ten years. His research on adult piano students has been published in the Journal of Research in Music Education, and he is a frequent presenter at national and local conferences.
Does it feel like this is becoming a more and more difficult request these days? Are students less attentive than they used to be? For that matter, are we less attentive than we used to be?
Many authors and researchers contend that the answer is yes, and that today’s high-tech world is impacting our attention spans.1 Remember the time when everyone worried that TV would kill attention spans? The theory was that short programs broken up into shorter segments by commercials would condition us to lose interest in anything after just a few minutes. This was before we had 500 channels to flip through!
In 2009, however, TV is losing its place as the medium of choice. The Internet surpassed television as the number one source of entertainment for children and teens six years ago. Teens now spend more time online than they do in front of the tube.2 (There has been a recent surge in online viewing of television shows — I’m not sure what category that fits into!) If you think our attention is capricious when channel surfing, consider that some researchers report our average online attention span to be in the neighborhood of nine seconds — by then we’ve often clicked off to another page. According to the BBC that’s about the attention span of a goldfish.2 We are becoming increasingly conditioned to receive information immediately, in small bites, and move on to the next bite. One study indicates that the majority of online video viewers on sites like YouTube have clicked on to another video within the first 60 seconds.4 One of the newest and most popular online sites, Twitter, is built around posting ultra-short messages: those messages are limited to 140 characters (not words characters)!
In the political arena, consider that the Lincoln-Douglas presidential debates of 1860 featured a one-hour opening statement from one candidate, a 90-minute response from the opposing candidate, and then a 30-minute rebuttal.5 Contrast that with the two-minute (or less) responses allowed in 2008, and tell me that times haven’t changed. While it is very difficult to scientifically pinpoint trends like diminished attention spans with accuracy and certainty, the anecdotal evidence suggests that in modern times we are demanding more immediacy from everything and everyone while dividing our attention between more and more sources at the same time.
Possible responses What does this mean for piano playing and piano teaching? For one thing, if you think that students are less attentive than they used to be, you may actually be right. At the same time, adults and teachers may be losing some of their attention too. As with most developments in culture, one natural reaction is to bemoan the changes and long for the good ol’ days, reminding children that they’re somehow inferior to our generation.
You kids today don’t appreciate anything. When I was a kid I walked four miles, in the snow, uphill (both ways) to my piano lessons, while carrying the complete works of Bach and Liszt! When I got there, we did scales for two hours and repertoire for another three! And you can’t sit still for five minutes to learn your key signatures!
While such an approach may be tempting (and perhaps cathartic) it probably doesn’t do a whole lot of good. Kids today didn’t grow up in those times, they grew up in these times, and that isn’t their fault.
A second approach would be to give in and figure we can only play the hand we’re dealt. If we have to, we’ll adjust our teaching to meet the needs of our students. This approach has some merit (it is always wise to connect with our students’ worlds), and it is always healthy to plan a variety of changing activities to keep students engaged. Problem is, I’m not sure we can do our lessons in nine-second bites — that would be pretty choppy even for a short sonatina.
Perhaps there is another solution — if our students live in a short-attention-span world we can acknowledge that and make some adjustments, but we can also do our job as teachers — affect change in a positive way. We can teach students to increase their attention spans and perhaps endow them with a valuable (and increasingly rare?) life skill.6
Teaching focus Playing the piano demands a great deal of attention and mental energy — more so than most everyday activities. With so many details to heed, (notes, rhythms, articulations, dynamics, balance, voicing, phrasing, pedaling, etc.) playing the piano requires much more than just “simple” attention. It is one of a relatively small number of pursuits that requires diligence from multiple senses simultaneously — we need to concentrate and pay attention to aural and tactile information all the time, while responding to visual stimuli (the score and/or the keyboard). And we all know how lapses of attention affect our learning and performance.
So, if kids need to be more attentive in their practicing, let’s teach them to be more attentive — this may be instruction that they’re not getting elsewhere. My wife (a Suzuki violin teacher) often reminds me that lessons with very young children involve games designed to teach focus and lengthen attention. No matter what the age, there’s plenty we can do with our students to help them focus.
For one thing, are we truly demanding that they pay close attention with their ears? Do they even know how to do this? Are we consistently asking them to listen critically to everything they hear, or do they treat music as background noise for other activities? If we teach our students to be active and attentive, rather than passive listeners, we are giving them a skill that will be a lifelong benefit. Students are welded to their iPods, so send them home with listening assignments that will sharpen their ears. Assign a representative piano work and ask them to listen and write down timings of musical elements (staccatos, pianissimos, diminished chords, whatever is appropriate). Be sure you require attentive listening to the entire piece. A more creative approach might ask them to write descriptive adjectives at every minute-mark in the music.
Teach students the magic of closing their eyes and just listening — with all the bombardment of modern media it may be something they rarely do. If they can listen attentively to a piece for ten minutes, without interruption, you may have made an important breakthrough. Even better, if you can get them to completely immerse themselves in the sound of the music, they can learn the wonders of the colors, nuances, and details they’ll discover. They’ll learn that by shutting out distractions they’ll find more in the music than they ever dreamed possible! This can lead to great life benefits and more recognition of detail and quality in non-musical pursuits as well.
Teaching students the skills of error detection can be another way to sharpen their attention skills — play games in the lesson where they have to watch and/or listen for mistakes of various sorts in your playing, and gradually hone their skills to identify higher levels of detail and subtlety. Then record your students’ playing and have them self-analyze in the same manner. With practice, they will learn to direct more of their attention to the music and all its details.
To help them stay focused in their home practice, discuss the importance of a calm, uninterrupted practice environment. Make sure mom and dad know the importance of turning off the TV, computers, cellphones, and other electronic wonders during practice time. If parents can help “turn off ” brothers and sisters, all the better. Set a good example in your own studio by eliminating all outside distractions and focusing completely on your student and the music for the entire scheduled time. No calls, no non-musical paperwork, and absolutely no checking e-mails and messages! With all respect to Liszt, conveniently ignore his alleged advice to read a newspaper or book while practicing technical skills — instead give your students challenging self-evaluation assignments, even for technical practice, that demand aural attention and mindful awareness. Be insistent on the observation of all the musical details, and you’ll eventually set a good example that will help your students immerse themselves more in the music and less in the outside world.
Show your students that turning off all the distractions and throwing one’s complete attention into the music isn’t limiting — in fact it will open up all kinds of sounds and touches to occupy our attention, and the experience will be infinitely more rewarding. This type of experience may be rarer and rarer in today’s fastpaced world, and that is all the more reason to share it with our students and help enrich their lives.
True confession: I’m fully aware that some of the above is easier said than done. I’ll freely admit that much of the above column was conceived while practicing the piano, and I’m sure my practicing suffered because of my wandering attention span. As I found sources online, I was completely guilty of spending just a few seconds on other sources, rejecting them, and moving on.
With this column now written, hopefully I can return to the keyboard and fix some of the problems that likely snuck in while I was going through the motions! Now, were you able to read this column from start to finish without getting distracted???
Endnotes
- www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google. Retrieved 2/15/09.
- http://docs.yahoo.com/docs/pr/release1107.html. Retrieved 2/15/09.
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1834682.stm. Retrieved 2/15/09.
- http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20081126/short-attentionspan-theater-web-video-watchers-bail-fast/. Retrieved 2/15/09.
- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95734507. Retrieved 2/15/09.
- This column is not intended to address the needs of AD/HD students and other students with diagnosed learning challenges. This is an important issue concerning an important part of the population, and some excellent ideas on working with these students can be found in the print issue’s Perspectives department on page 52.
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