I am curious; for those of you who have piano instructors, and for those of you who are piano instructors, how do your lessons operate. My instructor typically begins by asking me to play scales, arpeggios, chords, broken chords, etc. and then has me run through the pieces I am learning. She assigns about two pieces for me to learn at time, and they are usually very challenging and frequently each piece takes months to learn. (Is this a normal amount of time to learn a piece?)
At various relevant points in the lesson she will stop me and correct my arm motion, finger attack, etc, which she writes down in my notebook so I remember to practice them for the next week, but that is basically as specific as she gets when assigning me things to work on. She essentially leaves it up to me to decide what to practice and how much to practice of any specific thing. She doesn’t say practice this line or these bars for next week. The most specific she will get is by saying, for instance, “do the 3rd page for next week.” Does this mean the entire 3rd page, just the first line, or the first and second line? I have no idea. From lesson to lesson I never really know what her expectations are. What then ends up happening is I have a choice when practicing; either I can put all my efforts into one section and get it nice and polished or I can spend a bit of time on a number of different sections, thereby working on more of the score but not getting as each section as polished as if I had just worked on one section alone (I hope that made sense). Regardless though, whatever method I use she is always quick to point out areas of improvement (not in a mean way). I never feel as though I get any recognition for any of the hard work I put in because it always seems like I have practiced wrong, or something. It is sort of akin to that old clichéd saying of “how do you know where to aim if you have no target.”
When I first started taking piano lessons she would have me learn through an adult method book. Each week she would tell me what pages to work on for the next lesson. Then I would go home and work on them and if there was any problems she would correct me and I would either continue polishing what I was working on or else we would move forward. It was simple, I knew what was expected of me, but more importantly I knew that she knew I had practised. We both seemed quite satisfied at the time.
I have asked her to go back to this method, but she refuses and insists she has her reasons for refusing. Although, to be honest, I don’t understand her reasons. The best representation I can give is that she needs to “see what I can do.”
Sorry for rambling, but I can’t even remember the last time I left my piano lesson happy. Can anyone help me understand what is going on?