Hi! I'm a new member, but have been lurking for a little while.

I have been teaching an awesome retired bloke piano for about six months. Previously, he was self-taught, working from some method that taught piano in a similar way to how guitar is taught - with chord shapes etc. After quite a bit of progress with regard to reading music, technique, understanding of the musical concepts and difficulty of pieces, we have hit a major plateau and I'm running out of ideas. I have little experience with adult beginners and I fear that my toolbox is full of age-inappropriate things.

Anything to help us out of this rut would be appreciated.

Thanks is advance.

Amos

Well, I'm not a teacher, but a beginner like your student (but i'm still 20 years old). Recently I consider of attending lessons. I obviously don't want to play some children songs. So that is a way to avoid. I want to learn how to sight read, correct techniques, and some songs that is easy for my level but not children songs (easy classical). That's just my ideas, and things I would want to learn if I do have a teacher.

What sort of plateau? Maybe no-one's answered because it's not clear what the specific problem is.

He gets to a point where he can almost play a whole piece hands together, but it always gets derailed somewhere. One particular piece we've been working on for months and he's happy to keep playing it, but it hasn't really improved at all in the last couple of lessons. The corrections aren't ever totally corrected, if you know what I mean. His scales haven't improved in the last few months either.

He is practising.

Take it apart. Break it down. Isolate things. Separate cause from effect.
Then, do a lesson where he shows you how he practices and you coach him to practice effectively.

We've done all of that except have him show me how he practises. He has the Practiceopedia and we do refer to it. I'm so stumped.

What do you mean by "gets derailed" and "corrections are never corrected"?

Remember practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent.
Perhaps he is just practicing infinitely different ways of getting it wrong making not getting derailed in the lesson require a miracle?
I would have him pretend he is practicing at home in the next lesson, try to catch him doing things right and nipping off bad habits at the nub. Might be better to choose a new piece for this though so you can isolate things from the start.

I'm near retirement and I've been taking lessons for 14 months. Previously I was learning myself for 9 months. So it seems the situation is very similar.

My opinion is that at this age the progress is very slow (for late starters of course). Initially, the progress seemed to be fast, because he was absorbing things intelectually (concepts, reading, memorizing even). But when it comes to polishing a piece, eliminating flubs, and all that, i.e. neural development, the time must be measured not in days, not in weeks, but in months.

I've been polishing one particular piece essentially for a year (Beethoven's 49.2), of course in parallel with other assignments. My teacher says it's normal under the circumstances.

Have you explained to him the importance of mental play? Also, proper practice routine, as another poster said above. Tell him hello from me.

JAS, I am impressed that you are learning Beethoven 49/2 as a late starter. I'm curious if you're working on a particular movement?

I'm at the final phase of polishing the first movement. My teacher advises me to postpone the second movement (we've only read it through) because it would not add anything substantially new to my abilities, both technique-wise and in terms of musical development.

At my present stage, building musical understanding and technique is more important than building repertoire.

My teacher does not believe in mechanical exercises such as Czerny and ridicules Hanon ("virtuoso in 60 exercises"). Instead, we carefully select pieces which in his opinion are beneficial to my development. Now I study two Chopin's pieces (out of the simplest ones, Waltz in A minor and Polonaise in Bb, both posth.), and some other pieces by Burgmüller, Kuhlau, and Schumann.

I don't think it's a stellar progress, particularly compared with the achievements of his other students (teenagers) or many guys on these forums. But at my age, and being only in the second year of learning, I'm happy just being able to play adequately some music by the greatest composers, even if only nearer to the easy end of the scale.

Hi,
I've run into the same problem with many students of hand co-ordination. You can only work on the same piece of music for a certain period of time without needing to move on to something else to keep the student progressing.
What I do I rewrite the left hand part of many pieces for students so that the songs are doable and still sound good. You need to know what you are doing with that first though or your student is going to hate the way the altered version sounds. Come up with the versions when your student isn't around and write them down or use a notation program to make a clean looking version.
Then you can move on to other pieces and come back to that one with the possibility that they'll be able to do the original version as well.
If you student is playing just for fun they will be happy you took the extra time.

Just an update:

I've seen this student for a lesson now and I got him to do a "practice session" for part of his lesson. Low and behold, he is ignoring all of the practice techniques we have discussed and is doing the "play through from the beginning until we get to a mistake then go back to the beginning and try again" technique most of the time and occasionally half-fixing one problem area, but then not testing it to see if it is ready to put into the piece, nor putting it into context, but going back to the start again. *headdesk*

No wonder!

I took notes through his session so that he had a record of exactly what he did and how he never really finished a task, meaning he hadn't accomplished anything in the entire ten minutes. We've now discussed why this is a problem and I've set him four specific chapters in the Practiceopedia to read. His homework for the next lesson is to develop some systems into his practice and have particular goals in mind instead of always looking at the big picture.

Thanks for your advice.

We'll see how this works now.

Success.

More improvement in this last week than there has been in months.

That is usually the problem.