We would like to highlight the great work being done by piano teachers in our community by giving them a special mention in our upcoming newsletters. If you’ve come across a teacher, either personally or through your children, who you think is worthy of special mention please let us know and with their permission we’ll feature them in our newsletter either simply with an acknowledgement or with a short profile piece.
As we are sure you’ll agree, the importance of learning with a good teacher cannot be overstated. Although there are lots of book based learning programs and an ever growing list of online piano tutorials available, these shouldn’t be seen as replacements for real life, scary, stern, demanding, and ultimately wonderful piano teachers. In reality we very rarely come across overly scary teachers these days, the vast majority are warm, supportive and truly invested in their students. We believe our many thousands of newsletter readers will enjoy learning more about the piano teachers out there doing great work.
Learning the piano is a challenging long term pursuit. It’s certainly possible to learn on your own and if the cost of learning with a teacher is prohibitive then a less costly book based or online solution might be right for you. There are however many benefits to learning with a teacher, benefits which can make the journey a little easier. These include:
Someone to inspire you.
Someone to hold you accountable ensuring you maintain a practice routine that works for you.
Someone to provide a sense of direction and constant forward movement towards identifiable agreed goals like exams, performances or mastery of particular pieces.
Someone to demonstrate the right and wrong way of approaching various challenges.
Someone to help put your current challenges in context and remind you of overall progress, keeping you motivated.
Someone who will push you beyond your comfort level and force you to improve.
Someone to help identify performance opportunities.
Someone to give you a solid basis in music theory.
Someone to push you to improve your sight reading.
Someone to connect you to other similarly advanced students.
Someone to expose you to new music, either new genres or new composers.
To reiterate, we recognize the importance of our music teaching community and we would like to celebrate them. We would welcome any suggestion from our readers about which teachers to feature in future newsletters.