May 17th 2020 finds The Curious Piano Teachers celebrating their fifth birthday. In part 1, we followed Sally and Sharon as they developed their idea; in part 2, we look back over the past five years of Curiousness. ONE STEP AT A TIME By early spring 2015, we were ready to start building an […]
Piano teachers – Thank YOU! All across the world so many of you are doing a brilliant job in these extraordinary times. So during Teacher Appreciation Week* – from us to you – a huge thank you on behalf of all the piano students you are teaching and piano parents you are working with. PIANO […]
Teachers are often a bit scared of using sol-fa in piano lessons. Yet sol-fa is such a useful tool for piano teachers and once learnt is a real time-saver. Sol-fa is the use of singing names for vocal pitch: doh, rah, mi, fah, soh, lah, ti. doh’. As pitch cannot be seen, sol-fa helps our […]
You know those piano lessons that feel really, really good? Where both you and your student feel completely fired up and energised by the end of the lesson? Think back to these lessons and consider about what mades them so successful. For me I have pinpointed these lessons to be the ones when I stop […]
Have you accepted any new transfer students into your teaching studio this new academic year? It can be a tricky time as everyone in the partnership works out how the others tick. Putting a few logical processes in place can really help though. Here are five smart strategies that we’ve found really helps to smooth […]
Back in my 20s I found it hard to believe that someone would pay me to do something I had a real passion for. The fact that I was teaching the piano and earning money from it was frankly astonishing. Seeing and being around people who love their job is life affirming. We often feel […]
Are you a teacher who is ready to move on? ‘”Anyone can teach the piano in the UK.” When I tell people this they are amazed: “What? Anyone?” Then I have to go through the explanation that piano teaching is unregulated, teachers don’t need to have any qualifications and people are often asked to teach […]
Have you noticed that everything at The Curious Piano Teachers has been very quiet over the last few weeks? HAVING A BREATHER To be honest both Sharon and I were in need of a complete break from what is often the non-stop, hurly-burly world of The Curious Piano Teachers. So this summer we have taken […]
‘Why do you play the piano’? I asked this question last week when I gave a talk at Miller’s Music in Cambridge (UK) to a group of piano teachers. Overwhelmingly the answer was: “because of a love of music and the piano”. I went on and asked the same question about our pupils and came […]
I love getting away from the computer! There’s nothing to beat getting out into the ‘real’ world and spending quality time with like-minded people. Sharon and I have done just that this week as we have been to a conference. It was held at the University of York and the theme – Connections and Communication […]