Little Eyes and Finger Numbers

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If you teach with any of the popular method books, you've had the following experiences.

• Student sits down at the piano and asks, "What position am I supposed to use?" before even looking at the notes on the page.
• Student comes back after a week of supposed work on a piece and says, "I couldn't figure out where to put my fingers" even though you've been drilling with flashcards for weeks.
• Student encounters a note that isn't under his hand, but plays the finger number above the note on the wrong key, even though it is wildly higher or lower than the written note.
• Student, when asked to identify D above middle C, calls it a 2.

I'm willing to bet you're nodding your head.

I once had a student say, "I feel like I've been hypnotized by the finger numbers."

She was absolutely right. But, while I understood that she had been conditioned by "position playing" - you know, the directions in most popular method books to use C position, middle C position, G position, etc., I still didn't understand the root of the problem until recently. The problem lies with the eyes.

In my college pedagogy classes, while considering how to teach a piece of intermediate literature, my professor made an interesting comment. "Sometimes, you have to teach a student to choreograph his eyes." She was referring to situations like the need to look at the keys for a big leap and then to return the eyes to the page, or in the case of both hands simultaneously leaping, which hand to look at first. The idea of choreographing the eyes stuck with me, and I've used that concept with many students at various levels over the years, not to mention in my own practicing. We have to be intentional about where we look first and where we look second.

In the case of almost every student who starts learning to read music with pre-reading notation, the student looks at the finger number before they look at the position of the note on the page or staff.

I understand the benefits of starting with pre-reading notation, particularly for students younger than about age 7. The Fabers have a good page that defends the value of it. I heartily agree that there are benefits in not introducing staff reading right away. Pre-reading gives the student a chance to internalize simple note values, steady beat, reading left to right, etc. But, there are some cons to pre-reading, too, especially when it comes to directional reading. On paper, it seems that pre-reading would help with directional reading because the contour of the notes on the page is so obvious. But, practically, I'm not finding it to work well. My students tend not to feel a huge need to play in the right direction; their overriding internal need is to play the right note. The thing that insures they're playing the right note is the finger number. So, the eyes look at the finger number first, the direction of the notes on the page second. So, when they move to the staff, if there is a number above the note, they have been conditioned by weeks or even months of pre-reading notation to look at the number BEFORE they look at the note's position on the staff.

These kids are still sounding out words - looking at the individual words rather than conceptualizing the entire sentence. The same is true with reading notes. They can't hold the contour of the melody in their mind while trying to figure out what the next note is. They only see the next note.

So, how do we get children to see the note's position on the staff BEFORE the finger number? One good way is to use modified staff reading early. I've begun using modified staff reading with Jennifer Fink's sight-reading cards. These are great - and free! The students enjoy using them, and there are no finger numbers above the notes. These require the student to see up/down direction and steps/skips and condition them to use the lines and spaces to determine the next note. You can also choose to use a different starting finger, emphasizing that there's more than one way to play those notes.

Another is to introduce notes on the staff one or two at a time. I like Susan Paradis' Animal Alphabet songs which introduce the notes from A below Mid C to G above Mid C. The old John Thompson easiest piano course (which has been updated from gnomes to monsters) also introduces staff notes one at a time rather than introducing a whole position. Just 3 or 4 weeks of this approach before beginning the C position, middle-C position, G position tonal approach found in the Faber and Alfred methods can make a huge difference.

Once students are beginning to play pieces in the method book, I try to help them choreograph their eyes and to understand that there's an order of where to look first, like the order of operations in math. Did you learn to say "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" to remember that in an algebraic equation, we do the operations in this order:  parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction? We look at the note on the staff first, then we look to see what finger we should use for that note. If I find that they are dependent on the finger numbers - and you can often discover this is true by hearing them name a D as a 2, for instance - then, I just cover up the finger number with white out. And we do some more of Jennifer Fink's cards!

I am interested to hear what other readers do to combat finger number note reading. Have you found an approach that works for you?