By MARY L. GRADY

For The Reporter

Let’s face it: Most of us consider a piano teacher to be of a certain type.

A kindly, proper, but strict lady. Less often a man. If so, he is a professorial-type perhaps with a rumpled tweed coat.

Not an elementary school teacher with five young children and a baby blue Elton John-like piano.

But then there is Maple Valley resident Rob Darling, a first grade teacher at West Mercer Elementary School.

Darling, 36, is in his third year of teaching elementary school, the last two at West Mercer Elementary School.

The teacher is a Port Angeles native who hated his piano lessons as a child. His mother stood over him, he said, prodding him along. The oldest of six children, he muddled through until the seventh grade, when he joined the middle school choir, “made up of 40 girls and me,” he said recently in his West Mercer classroom.

The girls were impressed, he remembered, and he became a minor celebrity. “You can play,” they would say in amazement.

That made the difference, he said.

Obviously, his male classmates saw the success, he noted. Choir suddenly became popular with both sexes the following year.

Darling and his wife, Erin have five children, two each from previous marriages and a baby boy, Simon, born late last December. Darling teaches all four older children in between teaching private lessons both before school on the Island and after school at his home on a baby-blue piano upright of an undetermined quality that he painted himself. In all, there is a total of 25 students.

The baby sleeps through the lessons, he said.

Parents here start lessons for their kids when they are very young. Darling has at least one student in kindergarten.

Music plays an important role in learning, he said. In some ways, it is all about math. The notes represent fractions; there is timing, counting and repetition. And a bit of anthropology as well. No doubt our early ancestors communicated with music and singing, he added.

There are other advantages to learning a musical instrument, he said. Playing in front of others gives young students confidence and praise from people other than their parents.

He is amazed that parents who know how to play themselves, do not teach their own children, he said.

He does think that parents sometimes let their children quit too easily when the going gets tough.

The payoff for him has been huge.

It was a music scholarship that got him into college at Brigham Young University at the Rexburg, Idaho, campus. But it wasn’t for music, he said. He wanted to play baseball.

After a year in Rexburg, he went to Brazil for a couple of years, then went back to school in 2003. He later earned a Master in Education in 2009 from the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

His advice for learning to play?

It is the commitment to practicing, he said, not the lessons.