Yesterday the mother of one of my students told me that she suddenly noticed emotion and a feeling in her son's playing and how beautiful the piece was. But there is nothing sudden about it.

During my career as a music teacher, I've been lucky to observe many wonderful teachers and world-renowned musicians teaching. It always struck me how well-structured their process was. I can compare it with the building of a house. To build a house an architect first creates a vision, a project plan is created, a foundation is constructed, then bricklayers build the walls, painters paint them, and a decorator puts a final touch with furniture, curtains and paintings on the walls. In teaching music, especially in preparing a new piece with a student, a teacher also needs to create a vision, and develop a plan of how to achieve this vision by building a good foundation of technique, a structure of rhythm and phrasing and decoration of dynamics and agogics. And a teacher needs to accomplish all of this by taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of a student. Very often young teachers tend to skip a mundane work of construction and go directly to decorating. It is like hanging a picture on the wall that is going to fall in a second. It is not easy to be an architect, a project manager, a bricklayer, and a decorator at the same time. But I don't know any other way to be a good teacher.