> The students didn’t even distribute the keys among themselves in a plausible manner.
Then the answer to the headline is, "Have instructors who do not care about teaching." By the fourth "F major" announced, any musician with a working brain would know something is up.
> Each student chose an easy key to practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B majors.
B major fits the hand better than F major and is significantly more fluid to practice. The only two white keys are for your stubby little thumbs, and the black keys are for the other fingers. For both hands. It's a key that fits like a glove.
F major requires a "bump"-- the b-flat is played by the ring finger on the right hand-- this is a weak, long finger and it feels awkward to have to strike the higher black key with it. Edit: even worse, the stubby little thumbs are on white keys. A student lazy enough to cheat might start out shifting their wrist to accommodate the short thumb. When you try to speed that up you hit a wall and have to relearn the motorhythms of the scale. Relearning wrong physical motion on the piano is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than just learning the correct way. So now the student has less time for dates because they didn't cheat properly to begin with.
To learn to cheat properly you have to actually practice each scale and feel the relative facility. Oh, the irony!
As an advanced amateur pianist, F major and C major are my least favorite scales. F major has the awkward B flat and C major has no good reference by feel for where you are on the keyboard.
Personally, 3 sharps/flats are the easiest scales for me. A lot of people like B and C# because you have 5 and 7 sharps that make it really easy to find the notes (F# is marginally harder...).
Then the answer to the headline is, "Have instructors who do not care about teaching." By the fourth "F major" announced, any musician with a working brain would know something is up.
> Each student chose an easy key to practice, so there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B majors.
B major fits the hand better than F major and is significantly more fluid to practice. The only two white keys are for your stubby little thumbs, and the black keys are for the other fingers. For both hands. It's a key that fits like a glove.
F major requires a "bump"-- the b-flat is played by the ring finger on the right hand-- this is a weak, long finger and it feels awkward to have to strike the higher black key with it. Edit: even worse, the stubby little thumbs are on white keys. A student lazy enough to cheat might start out shifting their wrist to accommodate the short thumb. When you try to speed that up you hit a wall and have to relearn the motorhythms of the scale. Relearning wrong physical motion on the piano is at least an order of magnitude more difficult than just learning the correct way. So now the student has less time for dates because they didn't cheat properly to begin with.
To learn to cheat properly you have to actually practice each scale and feel the relative facility. Oh, the irony!