Food is important.

Food is important Originally written on Medium: November 4, 2018

Food is important.

And for a long time, farming has been a major part of human development and settlement.

And I’ve always seen teaching students as though I am the farmer and they are the crops.

My job is to ensure that the environment and conditions that they are developing in is consistent and ideal. But the reality is for all piano teachers, that you only get to water your crops once a week, maybe twice.

But they really need daily watering and care. If you consistently water and care for your crops, the total success of the harvest will be bigger. More crops will survive and grow properly.

So what if a farmer started to see 80% of her crops fail with every harvest. Would that be scary?

What if the worlds best farmer could successfully grow about 50% of their harvests within a 3 year period? Would that be good?

Those are averages, some piano teachers are yielding a top rate of 50% of their students stay on and “succeed” after 3 years, while other piano teachers are securing a 20% success rate (an 80% dropout rate over 3 years).

Either way, these rates sound insane to me. Why isn’t a 80% success rate or 85% possible? That would be really impressive to flip the fail rate and the success rate.

According to the 2015 — 16 ACGR, the US national average for students successfully graduating from high school was 84%.

I would see 84% and above as a great starting goal for a new piano learning program. By having daily lessons is the 84% success rate possible?

I’m not sure yet, but anything better than the current system’s success rate will be extremely popular with parents. Especially when they find out it will work and not require them to fight over practice.

So close.

The tortoise always wins,

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