Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Diane Hidy - 10 tips for teaching piano to adults

But why can't you just accept that not everyone is like you and there's a high demand for teachers who can accomodate different needs? My experience is just the opposite: I was driven away from the piano as a child by being forced to learn music that I did not care for at all and was exteremely bored with the method. It almost happened again when I restarted as an adult with my first teacher.

I only started really progressing and practicing in a more productive way with my present teacher. She lets me choose my own pieces and also drop them if I feel I have to. Which does not mean that I would make idiotic choices or drop things just because they require a lot of work. Every now and then I do start on something I don't really like to test myself, but it usually doesn't end well at all.

This teacher has extremely high requirements on both musical quality and technical skills. I am also not in this "to have fun", but to learn to use the piano as a device to bring to life music that I care for and learn more about it. I will need a lot of tools for that, but I want them to be served in the way that I know is the most suitable for me. My teacher doesn't seem to have a problem with working this way, and she certainly manages to give me a hard time enough with the music I have chosen without the extra burden of disgust towards the pieces.

Edit:
I guess my point really is that it's not that important which pieces you teach (as long as they are within reasonable approach to the student) but how and what you teach about them.

Aren't we saying the same thing? I disagreed with the idea that it's not important what a teacher can teach. A teacher being able to teach is important. That has nothing to do with choice of pieces. In fact, a teacher who can teach can do so with a variety of music, and probably wouldn't be that stuck on a method.

Maybe I didn't read your posts carefully enough, I thought you were very much against the blogger's idea that adults do not really need to be subjected to Lima beans (whatever they are, I personally love beans of all kinds)

And in this case the Lima beans clearly referred to the choice of repertoire. There was no implication that she would not want to teach the students skills in a balanced way.

The idea of everything starting with the music appeals to me, because that's where I get the motivation to work my butt off. I know it's not the same for everyone, some people enjoy learning the skills for themselves, but that would not work for me. I do enjoy solving the problems I encounter in the music very much, but I do not get any satisfaction from learning to do keyboard acrobatics outside musical context.

Diane Hidy has since come into the forum and explained what she meant and does, and has given us examples. I also wrote earlier that without knowing what a teacher does, one is guessing. The lima beans analogy had a different association to me, something I experienced, and something that I've seen.

The important thing for me is to be given skills, but that doesn't mean method books to me, nor does it mean dry exercises. It means that the teacher intends to give skills, and will do so in some manner. It's not a thing to be taken for granted. In fact, a teacher can slog through method books, or slog through Hanon, without actually giving skills, if it's just routine for the sake of routine. Isn't there another thread where that might be happening?

I understand that, I think where we might differ is that I am not expecting the teacher to decide everything for me, even if she is an expert. She tells me what I need or what I am doing wrong and suggests ways to practice/correct it. Sometimes her way works, sometimes not. We have gradually reached an understanding that if it doesn't I will look for other ways. The important thing is that the results are satisfactory to both of us, not so much how I get there, which is determined by my personality, my physique and my learning patterns.

But of course sometimes I need her to tell me very strictly that something is possible when I myself feel it just isn't, so it's not that she lacks authority

Outo, that sounds pretty ideal to me.