Sometimes I get this shocking response from my students to why I teach “regular” piano beginners. “But you have all these credentials. Why would you teach us??”
The real answer is, I love teaching piano to anyone who loves to learn to play the piano. It doesn’t matter if they are young or mature, beginners or advanced, piano students or piano teachers. As long as they want to play and put effort into their learning, I am in.
As a matter of fact, I believe it is the “regular” piano students that I should focus in helping them. I was once a “regular” piano student, who had received tuition from piano teachers who didn’t actually care that much about their students, but focused rather on the students’ results on paper, so that they could use that to promote their own teaching. Sadly, the students’ learning progress as well as their confidence in playing were jeopardized. Because I had personally such horrible experience myself, I vowed to do better and more. And all these years I can safely say I have kept my promise.
My focus has definitely shifted gradually, from teaching beginners to more advanced performers, to teaching piano teachers. I believe helping piano teachers is a better and faster way to reaching out to more piano students. That’s why I’ve spent time, money and effort into developing our own piano beginner coursebooks, online learning platform, and online community.
High-quality piano teaching does not have to be reserved to music students in prestige graduate schools only. As a matter of fact, children (and beginners in general) need great piano teachers to learn from and be inspired earlier on, right from the start of their music education journey.
I believe teaching is not to just feed information to students- it’s rather to inform and guide them, so that they are well-equipped with data they need to form their own judgment and apply their knowledge accordingly. And especially with piano teaching, we are making music! So there’s definitely a lot of creativity and imagination involved. Of course, fun is