By Jaime Luna
“Make sure to add an accent on every 3rd beat. That way, you can create a crescendo going louder and louder to make a grand ending,” Ms. Perez said to her student who sits intently but playfully on the piano chair while she swings her legs back and forth. “And then when you get to this line, press the keys softly and go slower to play in legato.”
“Did you get all that, Chloe?”
“Yes, Ms. Perez,” Chloe responds.
“Do you think you can do all that?”
The child thinks for a moment, putting her index finger on her lips as if wondering, but then quickly responds,
“Yes, I can do that miss,” in a confident tone.
The 2-hour piano lesson ends, and Chloe is dismissed and then instantly called by the other children to play tag inside the house. Chloe runs gleefully as she spends the rest of the afternoon with her friends.
“Your child is quite talented, Mrs. Heidi,” Miss Perez tells the mother. “She’s only seven, but can already play Chopin’s music after only one and a half years of teaching. She’s almost done with the Nocturne series, and we’re about to start on Fantasie.”
“Is that so? Well, I’m glad to hear that, Miss.” The mother, an accountant by profession, responds positively but is unsure whether Miss Perez really meant what she said or is just casually praising her naive child.
“To be honest, that’s all she does, Mrs. Heidi adds. “The moment dinner ends, she runs back to that old piano room and plays her songs all night. Sometimes, we even have to ask her to stop practicing, because it gets difficult to sleep while she’s playing late at night.”
The old Miss Perez, a piano teacher for 20 years, responds with a light laugh.
Later that week, at school, Chloe again finds herself in front of her teacher. It’s Mr. Eddy, a fresh graduate math teacher, giving instructions to 1st graders. Chloe had already started on multiplication and division, but the child struggles quite a bit. Her once pure white paper, now blackened and ragged from all the erasure marks.
“Which part do you find difficult, Chloe?” Mr. Eddy walks over to the young girl’s small blue-green classroom table, littered with erasure dust.
The child looks intently at her paper, clutching her pencil very tightly, never even looking up at Mr. Eddy.
“Do you think you can finish this page before the afternoon break?” The teacher inspects the child’s paper, full of concern.
With squinted eyes, full of focus, and ridden with guilt, Chloe responds in a rather shaky tone,
“Yes, I can do that, Mr. Eddy…” (to be continued in the second issue.)
THE BARRISTER 