"So little time with each student, so little chance each week to impact their lives musically, and you want me to waste time letting them choose their own stickers?"

This is the question I asked myself the first time I turned over my sticker "wallet" (an inexpensive school pencil pouch) to a young piano student who wanted to find his very own sticker. How could I refuse the pleading eyes of a seven-year-old? Stifling a sigh I watched restlessly as he rummaged through the contents, ruining the order and testing my need to control at least one small part of my life - like a sticker wallet.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, he carefully peeled a piece of blue backing away from a sheet of brightly colored butterflies and proudly applied it to his well-practiced masterpiece. "Honey, that's not a real sticker," I said with less than my usual tact. "Why did you choose that?" His gaze branded me as hopelessly dense as he replied, "Because the music feels like empty sky."

Empty sky? The work was a typical student piece introducing the pentatonic scale: lots of damper pedal, lots of slow sustained notes, a picture of a pagoda, all designed to give the student a sense of Asian music. Empty sky? As I thought about it, I realized I might have said that the first time I heard Debussy's whole tone scale sliding in and out of my ear's familiarity with tonal structure. I recalled the emptiness found in sections of Gorecki's Third Symphony and some of the exquisitely slow choral passages by Tavener. All of these sounds played through my mind echoing one flash of inspiration uttered by a small child: "Empty sky."

All of my students choose their own stickers now, from the youngest to the eldest, and it has become an adventure. One student with a brand new repertoire book noticed a ballerina sticker, and pointing to a song at the very end of her book entitled "Dance, Ballerina" asked, "Will you save that for me?" Carefully I cut the sticker out and tucked it away in my teaching notebook, hoping I'd remember where it was in several months. The following week she returned with not only her assignment carefully practiced, but also the new piece, which was more than a bit challenging, practiced to perfection. The smile on her face was reward in itself as she lovingly placed the ballerina sticker on the first page.

Now I haunt local discount stores in search of odd lots and peruse stationery stores for end of season sticker grab bags. No sticker is dismissed as unworthy, having seen that creative spark light up in my students. No longer am I dismayed to find a sheet of fishing vests and lures in a grab bag, because there will always be the student who puts a vest on a Snowman, creates an imaginary person by adding a pencil-drawn head, or uses it to create a geometric shape in the case of a piece with a vague title like "Prelude," or "Impression."

I have learned to no longer consider the search for a perfect sticker to be wasted lesson time. My students are learning to verbalize and express their feelings about music in a more concrete way, as art meets art within the confines of thirty precious minutes. As Gershwin said, "Who could ask for anything more?"