6 milli-blog - new years resolution - what's the point of a piano teacher

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parents:: milli-blog
daily note:: 2025-01-05

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This is somewhat of a followup to 4 milli-blog - new years resolutions - turning myself into a school.

What is the point of a teacher? This is a question that I am not at all qualified to answer (as will be the case for many of the questions I ask on this blog).
It's just a question that I've come up a lot against, and I guess is becoming relevant more broadly with all the doomsaying (?) and fanfare around AI for education.

I'll start with learning piano as a case study (which just so happens to be the subject of another new years resolution). The way I understand it, becoming good at piano involves developing several distinct but interrelated skills

• Physical patterns: the ability to effortlessly (as in without conscious effort) perform many common movement patterns
• "Musicality": taking the toolkit you've built and actually turning it into a meaningful presentation with flow and dynamics and feeling.

In principle, this should be doable just by myself. By just playing a lot of pieces, focusing on and practicing weaknesses/difficult sections. However, there are several areas of difficulty when following this approach:

• How do I decide what to work on? That is, finding things to play which are at the right level of difficulty and are especially pushing me to improve on weaknesses
• How should I be practicing?
  • How quickly vs slowly
  • Hands separate or together
  • How many measures at a time

These are things that knowing someone with experience can easily help with. However, these in themselves don't necessarily justify requiring a teacher: a knowledgable friend would do, as this is somewhat of a one time thing.

But there are still more subtle weaknesses to the solitary approach:

• Motivation: in learning a complex skill, progress can often be slow. When it's slow, and it's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, quitting becomes very attractive.
• Discipline: it's natural to want to move as quickly as possible to get to maybe a piece that I really want to play. Seeing easier pieces/exercises as just things to get through, I might fall into the trap of letting myself get away with moving on from a piece after just playing it decently.
• Indistinguishability: even if I'm able to get the right level of discipline, it might be hard for me, as a newbie, to distinguish really great playing from good.

Maybe these are the main roles that a teacher serves. That is, as a motivator, a drill sergeant, and a distinguisher.

But okay, the new year's resolution

• consistently practice 7 hours a week
• find a piano teacher when I get back to Cambridge