You need to be charging way more than 10 a half hour. Charge 15 now (Provided that there are other teachers charging that or more in your area) Rate changes are a nightmare sometimes...nobody complains about a high fee right off the bat, but you should hear the complaining when you want to raise your monthly fee by $5....
I don't know about 15. Teachers don't charge as much in Canada.
I get all of my students through tuning. After I tune thier piano I demonstrate it, and then they want to take lessons. (usually they get the piano tuned because they want to start taking lessons, so it works out very well. )
Jen, another thing you can try is to give the students that you do have some visibility in your community. When you're going to have a recital, send a press release to your local paper (small community papers are more likely to print such articles than a large metropolitan paper). Try to include a picture of your students as a group, or even just one student playing your piano. In this press release, include an invitation to your recital, and include a quote from a student or mom about how much they enjoy piano lessons.You can also try to find places for your students to play publically---an open space in a shopping mall, at a park during a festival (using a digital piano of course--I've done this), some upscale stores have grand pianos in them. Choose 2 or 3 of your best students and talk with the store manager about letting them play (and of course have business cards and brochures nearby).Also, car advertising gives you a lot of visibility for little cost. Search online for a company that does nice, professional looking car window decals. Short and sweet, something like "Piano Lessons, www.yourwebsite.com" (I wouldn't want my phone number there for all to see).Get acquainted with school music teachers. Offer to volunteer as an accompanist, for classes or for competitions.Do some volunteer library classes to introduce young children to keyboards, and music basics ie rhythm, pitch, high/low, music alphabet, etc. If you walk into a library and offer to do a free children's class, they will likely jump on your offer. Then, as long as you're low-key about it, they will probably allow you to have business cards available. In fact, I just did 3 library classes this morning (for the purpose of introducing my new early childhood music classes) but I got as many or more questions of "Do you teach piano?" as I did inquiries for the program I was actually trying to promote! (so my piano waiting list has grown).Once you get several happy students, word of mouth will spread like wildfire!annie
Coming into this thread a bit late. At my son's preschool, there was a music teacher who'd come in for 30 minutes everyday to facilitate their music playtime. Pretty simple stuff -- they'd just sit in a circle and sing songs, or march around while she played the piano, clapping their hands to the rhythms and other preschool musical activities. She also made it known to the kids' parents that she gave piano lessons, and pretty soon a lot of them signed up. So she earns two ways -- as the music teacher for the morning preschool, and as a piano teacher the rest of the day. And since she deals with a horde of noisy bratty kids for the morning activities, she does a pretty good job at patiently handling and motivating 5-and-6-year olds at their piano lessons.
Question: is there a thread about the most common problems we have to face resulting from previous teachers who made big mistakes?Gaer
I also discovered this: It is not that difficult to get rid of bad habits, if the good habit is indeed a good habit.
“I can’t do that”. The most frequently heard sentence in the whole student vocabulary. My answer: “Of course you cannot, you moron! That is why you are a student, and that is why you came to the course in the first place.[…"]
"Unless a student loves to bits the piece they are assigned they will not put any work into it."
Hello, Bernard,I agree with you in general, but there are a few bad habits that are incredibly hard to fix. One is "dragging the fingers" in scale work, where two or more keys are held down because they are not released properly. However, I find this is usually a problem for adults (or older teens who are physically nearly grown). I think I could come up with a few other bad habits that are very hard to change. The difficulty is related to how long the habit has been "practiced". In short, people get very good at doing what they practice hard at for a long time. So if what they are practicing is wrong, they become very "good" at doing it wrong.
I think that your example is just a technical skill and it does not require un-learning of another skill, just a first learning of the skill of rolling your fingers cleanly.
Let me give you another example. I have heard many times people curse previous teachers for letting their students look at thier hands while sight reading. This is mistakenly called a "bad habit" because it severely affects a student's ability to read.
I started out with a half dozen students. I go to the student's home. I'm veeeeeeeeeery charming. Scmooze baby schmooze. I now have 40 students. My first few came from an ad in a small local paper - the kind that goes to every household for free. Always have brochures and business cards with you and network network. Everywhere I go if it comes up that I teach piano, someone asks for lessons. I couldn't possibly do this for $10 a half hour. But I live in the Boston area and everything is very high. I'm reluctant to say how much I get and have some bricks thrown at me. Suffice it to say I make a good living. I'm worth it. They get great instruction and happy kids who keep going and some of them I'm priming for scholarships later on.
Topic: Where do you get your students? 