To: 老梅子

Last week you mentioned that your daughter is less interested in playing piano. It surprised me a little, since I thought your kid was doing great. Kids do change and lose interests, but also there could be some deficiency in her skills. Playing piano requires a combination of many different skills, more than just playing on the piano keyboard with great fluency. Too often, a teacher only emphasizes on a few of the many, while neglect the rest, particularly when the teacher is under the pressure of helping the student pass a test or win a prize in a competition. That will definitely cause some imbalance in the musical growth of the student. And it will catch up on the progress of the student sooner or later. I am not saying that your daughter is in that case, since I know little about how she was raised up in piano playing. What I’d like to caution you is: do not blindly switch to another teacher. It may cause more trouble. Instead, do some study first. Find out her deficiencies (if there are any), then locate a teacher who is capable of helping her on the weaknesses. If the teacher can help her on those areas, she will be back on her feet again, though, that process could be difficult and sometimes painful.

If you do not mind to answer some questions, I might be able to give you more detailed help. They are:

1. When she is learning or working on a piece, does she look at the book or look at her hands most of the time?
2. Is she asked to memorize a piece ASAP?
3. What were her starting materials? I mean what books the teacher let her use at the beginning stage of her studying.

These are for now. I may have more later. If you like to elaborate the answers a little, it may give me more clues to the whole picture. Thanks much.