Piano teachers have traditionally been thought of as hard task masters who were generally mean. I realize that in the past, this reputation was well earned. There have been many tales of piano teachers absolutely demanding that scales had to be practised to complete perfection or there would be consequences. I have also heard stories of piano teachers that would use a ruler or a pencil to hit a piano student’s hand if they ever dared hit a wrong note. I never had that, but one of my piano teachers did yell at me a lot (although I found out later that she was not a well woman at the time and so this goes some of the way to explain, but not condone the yelling).
Fortunately piano teachers these days are a far cry from this image. First of all it would be completely illegal (at least in most places) to hit a student on the hand for playing a note wrong. Secondly and more importantly, piano teachers aim to be professionals, just like any other person getting paid to provide a service. Certainly in my own experience, piano teachers will attend various seminars and training to improve on some aspect of their teaching or to discover a new approach at teaching something. Like the vast majority of the workforce, piano teachers are interested in professional development.
So piano teachers are professionals and just like any other job, the majority will be very good at what they do and there will be the odd few who really don’t care if they do a good job or not.
The thing about piano teachers, like other teachers of other instruments, is that the majority are self employed, not some company’s employee, which means that income is not guaranteed like it is if you have an employer. This means that if you loose a student, you loose income. It is as simple as that. So piano teachers are motivated to do what they need to do to keep students (and their parents sometimes) happy with the lessons and happy with the music that is asked to be practiced and perfected.
Piano teachers are not a rarity and we know it. If a student is not happy then they can easily find another piano teacher. I live in a city of 1.3 million people and I know that there is another piano teacher that lives a 10 minute walk away from where I live and she has a wonderful reputation, so I am aware that my students have always got the option of going elsewhere. In the last few years, having piano lessons via skype or zoom have become quite popular, so even if you lived in a sparsely populated area, you could get lessons from a teacher that lived thousands of miles away.
I’m not the exception here, but when I am teaching I am aware of not only what a student is capable of, I am aware of factors that may temporarily impact how much they can practice, ranging from illness, to the death of a family member, to an injury, to traveling. There are all sorts of reasons that can impact how much practice happens.
Also when I was learning to play the piano as a kid, piano lessons were always a classical approach teaching classical music. These days, there is an option of which genre the student wants to learn. Gone are the days where a teacher said “Learn this!”, instead it’s often a choice and if there is something specific that a teacher wants a student to learn, the teacher will explain why they want them to learn a particular piece of music.
When it comes to teaching adults to play the piano, it feels more like a partnership where I am responsible for guiding, helping and encouraging, not just explicit teaching. I would say that I am not the exception but rather I have the most common approach to how I teach the piano.
I am so glad piano teachers, on the whole, are so much better than what the image is of what they used to be!