Why I Always Read Along

I grew up on a farm near a small town in North Dakota, taking piano lessons from a man named Elton Oppegaard.

Mr. Oppeguard was a band instructor who taught piano on the side, well into his eighties. Most peoplethought of him as strict — and he was. But I always practiced, so we never had a problem with each other. What started as lessons turned into something else entirely.

Every Friday night we'd sit down together for two and a half hour lessons--basically, we just worked until we had covered everything, and we had fun doing it. In the summer I'd go to his house, where his sisterwould bring out lemonade and cookies, and his brother — whose speech had been taken by astroke — would pick flowers from the garden to give me.

Mr. Oppeguard always sat beside me. Always read along. I didn't know at the time that this wasn't how a lot of teachers taught. I just thought that was how it was supposed to work.

At some point he figured out that I had a natural gift for sight reading. Occasionally I'd forget topractice a piece and play it anyway without saying anything — and he'd cross it off before I could confess. Eventually he started challenging me deliberately. He'd put a hymn in front of me and ask me to transpose it, add an extra note to every chord in both hands, all while sight reading in real time. Most of the time I could do it. It was extraordinarily fun.

It never occurred to me that anyone would have trouble with sight reading.That sounds almost embarrassing to admit now — but it's the truth. And it's actually where my whole approach to teaching comes from.

When I started teaching piano myself, I sat beside my students and read along — the way Mr. Oppeguard had. It never occurred to me to do it any other way. What I didn't know until recently is that many piano teachers don't do this. They listen. They hear when something goes wrong. But without the score in front of them, they're responding to the output — not watching the process.

I was reading along from the very beginning, which meant I could see what my students' eyes were seeing at the exact moment something broke down. And I started noticing patterns that no one could see from behind a student, or across the room, or without the music.

What I discovered is that sight reading isn't one skill. It's six — and they all have to work simultaneously, automatically, without conscious effort. When even one of them is underdeveloped, the whole system feels like it's failing. Most students have been practicing hard for years without knowing which one is the problem.

That's what I help people figure out.

I've been teaching piano for thirty years. I teach online, which means I work with adult learners wherever they are. I'm not interested in just getting through a lesson book. I want to understand exactly what's happening in your reading system — and give you a clear, specific path forward.

Mr. Oppeguard did that for me without ever calling it anything. I'm still doing it the way he showed me: sitting beside you, reading the same page, trying to see what you see.