When I operated a piano school many beginning younger students would try to read the notes by assuming that the little numbers above the notes in their piano books were the notes they were supposed to play. We finally convinced them that those were finger numbers, not note numbers — #1 does not mean Middle C and #2 does not mean D, and so on — but were the numbers of their fingers: thumb is #1, index finger is #2, and so forth.

And some piano students (not mine) are told that the fingering written on the printed sheet music is absolute — those are the fingers you MUST use. But it turns out that while they are good suggestions, they are not the best fingering for each individual person or each individual sitution.

For clarification on the common sense of fingering, please go to “The Logic of Piano Fingering”