Nancy Piano

07/27/2022

A great teacher is a great coach too.

They are leaders, coaches, motivators, influences and teachers. And for the small few who have known them on the sideline or on the hardwood or in the arena, athletes have gained from their knowledge and inspiration...

07/27/2022

I saw a 7 yo girl making fun of a 5 yo because she had a blue hair bow instead of the more popular yellow bow at that time. That 5 yo cried right away. Moms- let’s teach our children not to bully other kids because they wear a different color item. And moms, teach our kids how to fight back when bullied.

12/03/2021

Musician at work 🎶

06/20/2020

Haha that's my equal sign ( not-equal sign) there. Most people connect math to music. Well, the average people can do math pretty well. If a teacher asks 100 questions, most students can get at least 70 correct. Why is learning math easier than something like music? That's because math has only a couple of blind spots in learning while learning music has a few dozens.

So unless those blind spots are resolved, students will need to practice endlessly with repetitions to just get a little bit better.

Can you imagine driving on the highway of learning with 30+ blind spots? How fast can you go? Pretty dangerous too.

My students probably will not enter competitions with so little practice and repetitions, but they will more likely to have music in their life as an active participant than any other ways. They will always have a friend in Music.

Music is beautiful. It's helped me a lot during this unexpected pandemic.

That's my calling: to help the 99% of the children have music.

Morally I can live with my students' "lacking competition opportunities" or not having a college music degree.

I like to see them amaze themselves when exploring piano. That's all I can do when they are still young.

一般人都把學習數學和音樂連在一起。其實呢學數學還挺簡單的.就算遇到一些難題 也可以不太為難的解決。那為什麼學音樂卻有那麼多困難？

最大的不同是音樂學習中有太多的盲點. 大概幾十個.數學就一兩個盲點.所以中等的學生學數學至少可以考70分以上.這樣子不錯啦。老師問100個問題 中等學生正確而快速的回答70個。

用同樣的時間學習樂器或鋼琴、這個學生就失敗啦。如果學音樂的盲點不一一解決 那麼你的鋼琴老師是對的：就要不斷地反覆練習。

慢慢地進步是必然的 、這種邏輯也挺受學界的歡迎。我捨不得學生的痛苦 所以過去20年 就就一個一個的把他們的學習問題解決掉了。

或許我的學生沒辦法參加高等比賽、可是他們這輩子永遠都會快樂的彈琴。他們永遠都有音樂做他們的好朋友。我也只能給這個。

04/11/2020

Things I have learned from children as a teacher~

1- they want to learn piano even though it’s a difficult task. They give up because their experience made them feel this endeavor is hopeless with so much practicing and so little progress.

2- expert in the frontline of education underestimated kids’ ability. Their knowledge from research became the understanding of parents and our school system. Children’s learning is capped at these “expert’s” conclusion. My students taught me this is an artificial cap on children’s ability to learn.

3- Young kids have skills that are still too raw to be used and this is what the experts call “potential.” Every school uses the word potential in their advertisement. But I found a way to mature the raw abilities into existence. A long time ago, I realized a ripe tomato has more versatility in cuisine than a green one. So just as there is way to mature a fruit by adding heat, I can do the same with children’s unusable potential too.

Ex. they can’t read anything at age 3, or can’t focus, can’t coordinate, can’t follow verbal instructions…but if they can, these are skills for learning. So, I have developed ways to train them in these mastering these fundamentals first before we make piano-learning our goal.

4 - In 2003, I saw a video clip that a baby was crawling towards the edge of a table. I realized young children are fearless. They are that way too in learning. So, I capitalized that nature to help them learn something s complicated as piano music. But be careful, if they experience unreasonable failure (piano’s tendency) then their defensive mechanism builds up quickly.

5 I always believe kids are imaginative. Every teacher knows that, but in 2006 a mom reported to me that her daughter after our first lesson was air playing Mary had a little Lamb during bedtime. This is why I say my students don’t have to practice piano in order to progress in piano. They practice in their mind.

06/22/2019

A lot of learning... since we were children ourselves, is to learn for now, for the topic, for an exam, or for an admission. That’s fine.

Some learning is to enhance our other mental or physical mechanisms for later use. This is useful and that’s great.

But I find the best learning is to learn in a way that a student’s body and mind and spirit and energy absorb the teaching.

This way even if the subject is forgotten, lets say the subject is Russian language, the student would remember the respect presented by the teacher for someone else' culture and even its annoying nuisances.

When a child learns a second language in this internalized way, he is much less likely to make fun of others' native language and tell them to "go back to your country" which happened in my school in California dozen times.

I try very hard to provide an all-absorbing environment for piano where we can eliminate 80-90% of repetitions and don't have to learn by rote.

So this way even if a student drops out of piano at some point, he can come back to it, and he will remember the swiftness, celebration, and energy we created in the classroom alongside the never-ending challenges and triumphs.

They will feel ok to touch the piano again. (I find that most adults don’t return to piano because they had a less meaningful emotional experience in their learning of the instrument in childhood ) ( but I'll let the parents share with me their own stories.)

In my first few years, my teaching was to do everything possible so the students wouldn’t suffer from the typical slow progress and boring repetitions of piano.

But I started to feel this was so shortsighted. Then I pushed the boundary of the meaning of music, and decided to teach in a way that even when the students become 85 years old, they will still want to and will know how to play the piano.

This changed the way I taught kids because I started to research new learning methods and incorporated college text books in their learning.

And so in general, my students are more knowledged than their peers in the makeup of music. They understand how composers write their pieces a bit more. The older students can see clues in music and then connect the dots themselves which I typically don’t teach. So kudos to them if they got it.

It’s probably not very ‘romantic’ to imagine your adorable children with perfect skin and full of energy and wonders being wrinkled and hunchbacked , but the reality is most of them will turn 80 or 85.

A teacher shouldn't teach only to satisfy an artificially installed system, which piano education also has. I feel teaching to a child's inborn nature is wiser and more beneficial to him and the benefits are much longer lasting.

So I approach teaching in a way they learn something- for life - and that they love it enough to pass it down to their own children.

This is why your children’s happiness and inspiration and curiosity and fear of zero judgment from me is important in our lesson. I protect these qualities at the sacrifice of progress as I profess in the beginning of our meeting.