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About Yihong Zhou and Becoming a Piano Tutor.

The story of my becoming a piano teacher starts from my own experience of learning and playing piano. It continued with working with my son as he has developed into a fine pianist. Teaching piano to young students has become a passion.

When first learning I took piano lessons for a few years. I started with great enthusiam and did all the exercises my teacher required. Although my teacher said I was making lots of progress, I was not pleased with my own progress. Early on I had rapid progress. As time went on my progress slowed. I found I could only play music by sight reading and never played with confidence without the score. At the time I thought this was because I was simply a student and this was how it was supposed to be. My expectation was that only great artists can play big pieces without reading music. After years of practice I played music less and less and finally nearly stopped. It took me quite a long time to understand why my passion for playing music dwindled. It was only by thinking about piano differently that I returned to the piano.

When my son was almost 6 yrs old I was determined that my son not repeat the learning experience I had and lose his own enthusiasm for piano. I started to do research by reading many piano practice books. From my research I came to the conclusion that playing music by memory and listening to recordings are two critically missing factors for a student to play more musically and to become confident. I developed methods to aid new piano students to read and memorize a piece efficiently. In addition to developing methods specific to learning to play music I also integrated child friendly learning environments. As my son progressed working with advanced piano masters I have continued applying those ideas to help him to learn, memorize and play pieces. I also started to apply my methods to my own piano students. The results are amazing.

Even at 7 years old my son started to feel free to play the pieces anywhere he saw a piano. In his years of playing my son has developed great study habits and an amazing ability to memorize sophisticated music efficiently. While I worked with him and developed these piano tutoring methods I learned that I was good at it and really enjoy doing it. As sole teacher or tutoring supplement children taught with my methods learn much more than those taught with traditional methods alone.