Today I taught my first ever piano lesson. There’s a school here in Nashville, the W.O. Smith School, that offers music lessons to kids from underprivileged families for just 50 cents. I am a new volunteer and it’s safe to say I have no idea what I’m doing. I have two students, their names are Debbie and Destiny. Debbie is 11 years old and her family doesn’t speak much English. Debbie herself barely speaks at all, so it’s hard to tell where her English is at, but since she’s so young and at that age where you can pick up language easily, I know she understands everything. I can tell she was scared, but I managed to see her smile once or twice during our thirty minutes together. She is a rank beginner on the piano, with no prior lessons, no experience, no sheet music whatsoever. She’s so quiet that she doesn’t say much beyond an occasional head nod or timid smile. She reminds me of myself.

Destiny is 14 years old and actually pretty decent on the piano. She’s been taking lessons for a few years now, and while there’s still a ways to go, she’s already sight reading sheet music, she can play any sharp or flat note you care to name, and she has a decent sense of rhythm. We spent a good five minutes where I had her play C-F-G chords over and over and I just kinda noodled and improvised in the treble clef. I think she really gets the idea of playing around with the notes and making up her own stuff.

I already love both these kids. I love how timid they are but that they are still showing up. I don’t even have a plan for how to teach them really, today I just sat them down and asked them a little bit about themselves, if they had any favorite piano songs or players (neither did) and then I showed them both how to play C-F-G chords and gave them the homework assignment of getting comfortable moving around the keyboard with just those three chords. It got repetitive after a while, especially Destiny since she’s older and more advanced, but at the same time, we were able to get more out of our jam session. Debbie, she’s so new and still quite timid, so she had a little more trouble with the timing and the rhythm, which made it a little harder, but still enjoyable to jam on top with my right hand.

With both Debbie and Destiny, I already know how I want to get them started and what I want to impart on them early. I don’t want them to grow up like I did in piano, where every song I learned represented the furthest reaches of my ability and once I had played them, I was forced to stop because I literally didn’t know how to do anything else. I always hated the feeling of not knowing how the pieces fit together, of not being able to create any music that was actually my own because I was so limited to the handful of songs that I’d learned from sheet music. I do still think sheet music is incredibly important, and that every piano student ought to have at least one or two Beethoven or Chopin pieces in their back pocket, but what’s equally important to me is that these kids feel, as early as possible, that they know how to “noodle” and make stuff up as they please. I don’t want them to feel constrained, I want to give them the tools to feel creative. I had to find that feeling myself over the course of 8-10 years once I stopped taking formal lessons. With these kids, it’s going to be the first thing they learn.

I know I’m probably getting ahead of myself. I still have a world of piano theory to teach them, the boring stuff that nobody really enjoys learning but is still crucial to figuring out how to play the fun stuff. I’m going to have to make sure they have decent sight reading ability and can employ basic concepts like intervals, time signatures, major/minor keys, the circle of fifths, stuff like that. (sidenote: I need to brush up on sight reading myself. We were looking at one of the beginner books and there was a “teacher accompaniment” section that I took one look at and said you know what. . . let me just try to play the simple version. You know, the one that the 14 year old was meant to play. And then I messed that up. Destiny kindly said she couldn’t tell.)

These kids will do better than me I think. I know how important it is to learn theory, but I deeply believe it should be learned for the sole purpose of having fun with it, for empowering and enabling young players to explore the keyboard and figure out their own sound. I’m 30 years old and I’m just beginning to find mine. It gives me a sense of freedom that’s difficult to describe or overstate. If I can convince these kids that they can sit down at a piano and just noodle, then I will have done my job.

I happen to be at a junction in my life where there’s a lot that’s up in the air. I have no partner and I’m losing my job at the end of the month. I don’t know where my next source of revenue is going to come from. Some smart people have said that when you’re in doubt about your own life, do something to help others. I may have a lot to figure out for myself. But after just one hour, I’m already certain about one thing: I am going to give these kids the gift of playing the piano no matter how long it takes. If I can give them one-tenth of the joy I find, then I can rest knowing that even though I may be broke, lost and lonely, that at least I helped make these two kids’ lives better in this small way.

Honestly, I think I’ve been searching for this feeling for a long time.