I would recommend Cristofori. I had lessons from p1 to p6 and managed to get my grade 8 in p6, but of course this depends on the student for the most part. I was lucky I was being taught by a new teacher in the centre who had the competence. If I am not wrong Cristofori may tend to choose teachers for the new students unless the parents have a specific teacher they want. And cristofori holds ABRSM exams, which I believe is more recognised than the yamaha exams. My teacher before has also told me that yamaha has too many holidays, causing students to miss quite a few lessons throughout the year. And I believe it would be better to choose a Cristofori School thats under the company directly.

[quote=\"phankao\"][quote=\"waiyean\"]Does the teacher actually teach your DD how to play it well? How much time is spent during lessons going through that piece?


Or is your DD expected to bring it back home and play it well by herself? In that case you probably don't need a teacher then.

So your DD's teacher spends a lot of time on teaching how to play well?

Yes, almost the entire lesson is spent by teacher teaching how to play the pieces well. Teacher does demonstrate and teach bar by bar how she wants it to be played, down to the precise movement of the fingers and tone. However, there is only time to cover just 1-2 pages of music per lesson, never the entire piece.

I would have thought that most parents will expect teachers to actually teach their child how to play the piece, right? Not assign a piece to be practiced at home, to be played the following week and then move on.[/quote]

Same for dd too. At the end of the lesson parent is made to take video of teacher (hands only) playing the piece then go home to practice. But one piece per lesson. Is it normal?[/quote]

Hello parents,

I would like to share my experience learning the piano. So basically, there should be a responsibility that both the child and the teacher should have. What I have experienced is that my teacher would give me a piece, then she would try to teach as much as she can in the lesson, then after the lesson it depends on me to practice the part she teaches me, and to progress to the other parts she have not taught. As the student's grade increases, the teacher will have a decreasing role in teaching the students their notes, the learning of the piece becomes much more independent. The amount of time the teacher needs to teach depends on how musically inclined the student is as well, so it is better for parents to allow the teacher to continue with the detailed teaching, because the teacher's rationale is to decrease the amount of mistakes that can arise if the teacher just only gloss through the whole piece during lessons. Also, it can be beneficial for the teacher to just assign pieces for practice at home without teaching first, it trains the students' independence and allows the student to intepret the piece his way, and not just follow how the teacher wants it to be. This may be able to create more attachment to the piece than if the teacher just spoonfeeds the child.

Hope this helped