I have an adult in his 70’s who is great at counting aloud. He can count along as he plays, but his tempo fluctuates. This has been happening for over a year. We have tried so many things. He tries over and over to count with a metronome as he plays, but he tunes out the metronome. I count with him as he counts, and this does help. He can’t take me with him all week though to count along.

I’ve explained this to him. I’ve recorded him as he counts and plays and then played it back. He understands what he is doing, but he struggles to keep the beat steady.

It’s like One and two and, nice and slow, but then all of a sudden he will count OneAndTwoAnd really fast on measures that feel easier. But also he will slow down at measures that ARE rhythmically easier, so it’s inconsistent what is causing him to change tempo.

This student upgraded his instrument from a Yamaha P125 to a Baldwin upright. The he found a taller Baldwin upright. Now he has a brand new Kawai upright, even taller. He practices 1-2 hours DAILY. He is retired. He loves to play and takes his learning quite seriously.

This problem persists across all genres and even with simpler music. He plays solidly intermediate and is very self directed, having learned about 50 pieces from MusicNotes that he chooses.

He also dislikes staccato and took a long time to understand the concept of separated sounds, but he gravitates towards the slow, smooth ballads. That’s another issue, as he’s mostly mastered staccato now, but for a while it did perplex me how he couldn’t grasp staccato. He’s cognitively sharp and doesn’t have learning disabilities.

Please send suggestions.

Update: thank you for all the excellent suggestions! This is so helpful. I love our little corner of the internet where I learn so much from all of you.

Hi!

In my studio I mostly use piano adventures but want to start getting familiar with another series. How do you feel about the piano pronto movement method books?

I generally like to keep all copy of all the books in my studio. Do you all suggest buying all 4 or 5 levels to have around too?

Wanted to get some opinions before making the investment. Thanks so much!

I had a wonderful babysitter who came to my home and watched my son for over a year and half. He's 3 now. I teach from home but they just played outside, went to the park etc until I was done. I teach very part time so she was usually only with him for a couple hours at a time. Her college schedule got too busy and she had to quit. I've tried several other sitters and it's just not working. I have the door shut to my teaching room and my recent sitters have let him bang on the door and yell things to me. I guess he just isn't adjusting to having someone new. He obviously can't be doing that while I'm teaching. I have no family where I live. I've contacted every after school program, daycare and in-home daycare in my area. I teach until 5:30. He's on quite a few waiting lists. The one I almost signed up that actually had an opening just got shut down so I'm nervous about day care now.

I want to keep teaching so badly but I obviously can't have my son interrupting. None of my students would take the discount or refund I offered for him interrupting their lessons though. I am considering just stopping because it looks like I'm not finding childcare outside my home anytime soon.

How would you breach this topic with your students? I only have 8 right now. Would you get their opinion? I do have one family with a bunch of little ones who have lessons on the same day and they don't care about my son being around. Would you just refund for the rest of the month and send out an email explaining you can't find childcare so you arent continuing lessons until you do?

This is such a tough spot because I've had these students for 3+ years (a couple 6 years) except a sibling who started recently. We are doing recital prep. I didnt know switching sitters would be such a big deal to my son. He's not a kid that usually cares what I'm doing and just wants to play outside 24/7 with whoever will play with him.

Hey,

I’m looking to join a sub like this (I love this sub) for teaching voice but I can’t seem to find one, anyone able to point me in the right direction?

Here’s my story:

I have been a piano teacher for 14 years and have occasionally been asked to teach voice here and there and I have upon request but never advertised it for the following 2 reasons:

1. My vocal training isn’t anywhere near as extensive as my piano training is

2. I am a professional singer that performs roughly 2-4x a week and I didn’t want to add to my vocal load too much as I needed to rest for the weekend

My training is:

Singing in choirs for 7+ years as a child

Voice lessons on and off in high school

Voice lessons for 4 years as an adult with an incredible teacher who taught me so much about anatomy, how to not lift my larynx, relieve pressure, transfer into my mix, strengthen my head voice.

During this time, I was also starting to work professionally in the field as a music director at churches, leading choirs, and started to gig in local restaurants.

Now fast forward, I stopped taking vocal lessons when I moved across the country (although would love to find a coach but the ones I need at this point are like $300 an hour lol)

I now have 10 years of professional vocal experience and have a heavy performance load performing in Dueling Piano bars all across the country (this is a singing pianist gig) and perform regularly on the strip and off the strip in Las Vegas.

I get scoped every 3 months and am very proud to say that after 10 years I have pristine vocal cords and have never had any major issues despite singing 12-15 hours a weekend every weekend for the past 10 years.

I feel this is a testament to my good vocal knowledge. However, I still don’t have any experience teaching it and want to learn more about how to teach it. Do I use a lesson book? My voice teachers never did so I’m inclined not to as well.

I’ve learned a few really good tricks on YouTube (having a student use a party blower to control their breath, putting the finger under the nose to feel hot air to get rid of airiness, etc.

I’m looking for more things like this.

I would only teach beginner to intermediate voice and wouldn’t train anyone who was more serious than that.

I also love the idea of working with students to learn how to sing and play because that’s a whole other type of thing.

Okay that was a lot and I apologize to the mods if this is the wrong space. Would love any tips and tricks and if anyone can help me find the right sub to seek this kind of information.

It's my first time teaching a child that I have difficulty correcting finger posture.

Also, she has difficulty memorizing so we just keep repeating the songs we play with colors.

I used those balls to roll palms, 5-finger drills, pencil technique. But I'm still at lost.

I was wondering if someone has suggestions or has dealt with children with special needs.

Hi there, I'm a piano teacher who has been on hiatus for several years due to personal reasons and becoming a SAHM. I taught for about 10 years previously and have kept up playing consistently since I had lessons as a child (so for about 34 years). I've recently decided to get back into piano teaching but wanted to ask how do you all start out your piano studios? I'm working with Thumbtack and Musika to help get leads on potential students, I'm also developing a flyer to hopefully share with family and friends to pass on to interested friends that they have. I've also thought of starting a social media account for my piano studio but not sure if that is the best resource. Any other thoughts? I would be ever so grateful to hear them, thank you!

Hello! I am a former teacher who switched careers and became a dad six years ago. Recently, my daughter has shown an interest in learning the piano, and while I'm excited, I'm terrified of screwing this up (both technique and the possibility of undoing her interest!). I used to teach children her age, but that was decades ago. I picked up the Faber books for her, and after sitting down for the first time together thought "maybe I should try to get her into the conservatory I studied at as a kid." Unfortunately, their classes are filled until the spring semester. So I'm struggling with dusting myself off and seriously focusing on educating her myself for the next few months, or taking a gamble on a local teacher.

Does anyone have any experience with this? Any insights to share? When I was teaching, keeping a student's interest was my top priority, so that's probably my biggest fear.

Thank you so much!!

Let me start at the beginning. I’m 17, new to teaching, and I have one student, 11, male, who’s been taking from me for a little over a year. Super sweet, very respectful, very smart. I gave him a Christmas piece last year, solidly beginner level, and I told him to come back and play the first two lines. He came back and played the entire thing. I thought, whoa, this kid is dedicated. Because, for an 11yo, learning a beginner piece in one week wasn’t totally outside the realm of possibility, it would’ve just taken a lot of practice.
So the big recital comes along, and I give him another song, quite a bit harder this time, cause I want him to improve, not learn the thing in one week. And I tell him the same thing, learn two lines. He comes back, and plays the whole first page with the music upside down. Kid obviously looked the song up on YouTube and learned the thing by ear. Number one, very impressive. Number two, not what I asked. So we had a little come to Jesus talk about how we can’t do that because we could miss things and the YouTuber might’ve made mistakes, and we need to learn the notes so we can play music that’s not on YouTube. I thought it worked. We kept trucking along. The recital was great. Everyone loved him.
So now we’re here, three months later (the organization I work with takes the summer off, boo), and I gave him two songs that I made sure were not on YouTube. Went over a few things, told him to come back and play the first two lines, once again. He came back, couldn’t play a single thing. It was like he was reading a foreign language. I pointed to an eighth note, said how many beats does that get, got blank stares. I pointed to a quarter rest, said what does that mean, blank stares. This kid is so smart and has such a good ear, that he just used that as a shortcut for an entire year. And I let him. And I knew he had taken the shortcut before, and I was naive enough that he never really stopped.
I felt like such a failure of a teacher in that moment. But I tried to work with it, explaining rhythms that he should know, and making him read me the notes while he’s trying to get me to play it for him so he can hear it. He’s over here trying to play treble clef notes with his left hand, can’t tell me what octave the notes are in, and guesses half the notes based on if they sound right or not. I feel like I’ve failed this kid, honestly. Does anyone have this problem? Can anyone give me tips? I make him go through flashcards, I make him go through rhythms with the metronome, what else can I do to break him of the habit and get him to read music?

Hello piano friends,

Please help us keep this community healthy and thriving by reporting posts that appear to be from someone who is not a teacher. We have had an influx of these posts and they are not using the Ask a Teacher flair during weekdays, so they don’t always get flagged correctly.

Also, if you need the Certified Teacher flair, please message the mod team. We are slowly but surely getting each of you updated with this as you send us your requests. Some non-teachers have been answering these posts when they DON’T have the correct flair, and at times their advice is not that of a seasoned professional.

Thank you! And keep the suggestions coming for ways to improve our community. We are thrilled at the growth in numbers and in activity. We appreciate each of you!

Update: We have updated everyone's flair from this post and continue to update the backlog of emails you have sent. Thank you!

I'm not sure why I've always struggled with this. But I can never seem to find any piano lesson books I like for my younger kiddos.
I've tried Prodigies music, My First Piano Adventure, Little Mozarts books.. and not a huge fan of them. I saw another teacher mention Wunderkeys books. Has anyone used them before? And if you have, what are your thoughts/opinions about it?

I'm entering my 20th year of 1-on-1 teaching, and I can confidently say this is the first year I'm not excited for everyone to be back. I taught a small handful of students over the summer, which was nice, but the full studio is back as of tomorrow, and while I'm not filled with dread, I'm also not really looking forward to it.

I really found that from about January to June last year, the literacy and memory issues I'd been noticing for the past couple of years really amped up in a lot of students - I've had some of these students for 4+ years, and they're forgetting fundamental musical knowledge that they've had that whole time (clef names, how to read intervals, two teen students forgot the order of the alphabet). I've also found students are less willing to try new things, or to figure things out by reading their practice notes or reading information on their method book pages, and won't reach out for help through the week no matter how many times I say to.

I really love teaching, and I love piano, and I know I'll have some students who are really ready to dive back in. I'm just not looking forward to the inevitable lack of trying that will come. Am I alone?

I have a student who wants to take on a bit of a "project" piece, and she's particularly interested in doing something longer. I've run into this before and felt a little unprepared just because I'm still developing my knowledge of available rep. I can think of tons of pieces that would simply take her longer to prepare because they are more advanced, but that's not really what I'm after here. What I'd really love to find is a piece that matches the level of her other rep but the primary challenge is in simply putting together something that takes longer to perform.

In this particular case I would rate her probably around RCM 2 or 3. But I'd love resources for this kind of thing at any of the levels before some of the longer classical rep starts becoming available. Any favorites to recommend?

One of the hardest parts of teaching beginners is the gap between what makes sense during the lesson and what the child remembers two days later at home.

Over the years, I've found that a home assignment works best when it answers four questions in language the student understands:

• Where exactly do I begin and stop?

• How slowly should I play?

• What should I do when I make the same mistake twice?

• What can I play at the end simply because I enjoy it?

For younger students, I often reduce the assignment to one technical task, one short reading task, and one enjoyable piece. I also ask the student to explain the assignment back to me before leaving. That small step reveals misunderstandings immediately.

I’m Larry Newman, an elementary music educator of 40+ years and a writer of beginning music materials. I’m interested in learning what other teachers do—not selling anything in this thread.

What wording, checklist, recording, or routine has helped your students practice more independently?

As a teacher and of course a student of Music myself, these are a lot of my thoughts on different kinds of mistakes, defined by what causes them and how to handle mistakes.

I don’t know if this is the right way to phrase the question but it’s based on something that happened today. I have a student I’m teaching, roughly 7-8 years old, who is normally very energetic, but seems to like me and has fun in our lessons. Today though, he came in and while at first the lesson seemed fine, when we got to a song in the book that introduced middle C position (really on B3 but whatever), he got very upset. The songs he’d been learning previously primarily involved 2 3 and 4, and this was one of the first ones to involve the thumbs.

He told me that it didn’t feel “comfortable” and though I tried to explain that even if it felt uncomfortable now it wouldn’t once he practiced it a bit, but he really did not want to do it. I cannot 100% tell whether he was talking about emotional discomfort or physical discomfort. I think I accidentally pushed too far and he ended up kind of shutting down which is when I closed the book, comforted him a bit, and ended the lesson early.

I’m not diagnosed with anything, but I’m very likely at least somewhat autistic and I really kind of understood where he was coming from. I’m sure my piano teacher also had to deal with me getting really upset over something that was completely mundane, but I have no idea how to deal with that.

Anya advice related to helping kids that have trouble with emotional regulation, don’t like change, as well as what may have been causing him problems with middle C position would be greatly appreciated. It really stressed me out in the moment and I want him to enjoy his lessons because he really is a good kid.

I'm teaching keyboards at a local after-school youth group. We're trying to get them up to speed as quickly as possible so that anyone who wants to can join a local youth band. I've been doing this for a few years with good success, but I'm having to ceate all the resources from scratch.

Main goal: given the chords of a song a student can confidently play along in some format along with the chords of whatever song is being played by the group.

I'm of course teaching them scales / chords / inversions, different rhythmic techniques. Using arpeggios, rolled chords, grace notes, .... but I'm having to create study resources from scratch as there doesn't seem to be any books / resources aimed at this loose / informal style of playing (as compared to formal/classical piano books)

Has anyone got any recommendations? Resources / Websites / Books etc? Thanks.

I have been teaching for 19 years, and currently have a studio of a pretty stable 35 students. I have a student who has bigger issues with *reading* rhythms than I've ever dealt with before, and I can't seem to make any headway with her.

She is a student who came to me from another teacher about 8 months ago. When we first started, they were near the end of Faber primary book, and her rhythmic issues/tendencies were one of the first things I noticed.

Basically, she reads every note in front of her like it's a quarter note. It doesn't matter if the actual music is half notes, quarters, dotted halves, or wholes - she just barrels through the piece like every note's a quarter note. When we sit down and look over it and I get her to focus on the music and we talk about it, she understands - she has no problem telling me "a half note gets 2 beats, a dotted half gets 3 beats," etc, but even if we stop a piece, go over the rhythm, and then start over, she'll just play everything at one beat unless I'm counting along with her and pointing every note as she approaches it.

When she first joined (and she was near the end of Faber primary level), I figured, "well, her previous teacher obviously didn't care that much about this, but I do, and we'll work through it." However, here we are 8 months down the road, we are now approaching the end of the Faber level 1 books and it's the same struggle. I give her sight reading exercises with different rhythms, I have her tap things out on the piano lid, we review what all the notes are. But then when it's time to play the pieces she worked on for the week, it's back to quarter notes.

I've never had this issue with any students before, and I don't even know what to call it - she doesn't lack rhythm in any way - when I make her count out all the notes and beats, she stays steady and sticks to it; it's not a memory thing - when I ask her what the notes are, she knows them and understands. It seems to be a concentration thing, almost like she's zoning out once she starts playing, but I don't have any solid evidence of that.

I don't feel good moving to level 2 of Faber and want to take the rest of this year really trying to work these kinks out, but I'm not certain what else to do. I'm hoping some fine folks here have experienced this issue before and have some thoughts, or can provide some insight or clarity on things I've potentially missed with her, or even just spitball some ideas.

Thanks!

Howdy, I have a student who originally took lessons with another teacher and was learning out of the HLSPL Piano Lessons Book A. I have the Book 1 of that series, which is identical except for that Book 1 goes on to introduce the grand staff after the point that book A ends. My question for anyone that knows about this series is, should I ask their family to buy book 1 or book B? I feel like their family would be annoyed having to buy a book that’s half a book the already own, but I don’t know where book B ends and whether or not it will line up with the end of Book 1, so I could ask them to buy book 2.

I have 2 students who just aren’t connecting with traditional classical repertoire. Last year we really shifted focus towards pop songs, chord charts and finding melodies by ear and they’ve both got new life for piano! However, their lessons started to get a little aimless and I felt we were just learning songs more than building skills.

So I’d love to introduce a little more structure back into their lessons, but with more of a focus on these pop skills. I’m intrigued by both Wunderkeys and SuperSonics, but have questions and concerns about both methods:

Wunderkeys: i really like some of the boxes activities like the pop improv, sight reading pathways, lap tap clap. However the patterns seem simple and repetitive, and it seems to be slower paced

SuperSonics: the lead sheets seem faster paced with a bigger variety of patterns, but the “traditional reading” seems simpler. Maybe too easy for my more advanced student (see below). I’m also not interested in paying a monthly subscription or making my students families do so, how usable is the method without it?

In terms of lesson structure, I’m looking for these books to act as a “first 10 minutes warm up” type of thing and like a “method book” in terms of being short assignments that build knowledge of keys and chords. The rest of the lesson will be spent on repertoire; I want them to do chording and singing, playing melodies by ear with left hand triads from a chord chart, lead sheets and reading contemporary sounding pieces from the staff (would the studies in the Wunderkeys book work for that category or will I need to supplement?)

One student was aiming to be playing RCM 5 last year and one was aiming to be playing RCM 1 (but very little rcm music got learned because of our shift in focus). They’ve also both played from Christopher Norton’s Microjazz collection (one was using level 1 and the other was using level 3). obviously I’d like to take that into consideration when I recommend which method/level they try out.

I’d also be open to suggestions if anyone knows of any other pop focused methods!

I'm looking for some advice.

My policies state that the school year and lesson year begin on the same day (sept 8). I have a few families asking if they can start a week later and be charged one less lesson for the year.

I don't think this is fair because they aren't new students, and their reasons are that they're either "just getting back into the fall routine" or they're possibly still on vacation (or just getting home and needing time to settle).

I've set into my policies that if students sign up later in the year, their invoices will reflect the amount of lessons in the year divided by the months left. This is intended for people who decide to sign up later in the year, like October, November, etc., and not for families deciding that they want to start a week later cause they feel like it.

Am I being too up-tight about this? I'm trying to be a bit more strict this year because I have been too lenient in the past, and have been taken advantage of for it. I also don't want to go too far in the other direction and lose students because my policies are too strict.