Practice Rut? Expand Your Thinking!

It is easy to get into a practice rut. Your practice sessions with your child become routine, and your interest wanes.  You lose your enthusiasm for the number of repetitions that your child’s teacher thinks are important (Ten times a day? Really?). Even professional musicians suffer from this problem and have to work to discover the fun that can be found in practice. I have a solution: expand your thinking.

I know. It sounds like that tired cliche, “think outside the box.” But really, that is what is required. Here are three examples where expanding your thinking produces something entertaining and interesting.

Squares of Eight

I borrowed this idea from an article I read at http://practicespot.com. If you have not visited this site, there are many free articles and theory tools that you will find useful and interesting.

The purpose of the “Squares of Eight” game is to teach the student the best way to master something and what quality effort is involved. The game also provides the student with an interesting and fun way to do repetitions. I want to demonstrate to the student how important correct repetitions are. You have heard the old adage that “practice makes perfect,” but in reality “practice makes permanent,” and that is the true lesson that I want a student to learn and take away from this game.

Before we begin the game, the student and I identify a particular passage or finger exercise that we want to improve with practice. In the squares of eight, I take a piece of paper and fold it in half. Then I fold it in half again, so that the paper has been quartered. Then I fold it one additional time; the paper is now evenly divided into eight squares. I number each square sequentially from one to eight. I put a small game piece (a poker chip or a small piece of candy will also work) on square number one.

The student plays the passage or exercise. If the student plays correctly, the student then advances the game piece to the next square. The student plays the passage or exercise again. Now the game becomes interesting. If the student does well, the game piece is moved ahead. But, if the student does not play the passage correctly, the game piece gets moved back a square. We continue the game until the student finally reaches square 8.

As a teacher I find it amusing to watch how different students work through this game. Some students keep “banging their head against a wall” by doing the same thing over and over without ever addressing the issue. I have to offer more guidance in these cases. Usually though a student soon figures out that a slower and more careful repetition will net a positive result and advance the game piece further ahead. In other words, the student learns that slow and steady nets quicker practice results.

Then we play with this game and “expand our thinking” to keep the game interesting. One student drew a race track that wound among the squares and used a little match car as a game piece. Another student turned the game into a pirate story that had various obstacles to successfully navigate to reach the treasure in the last square. Another student nicknamed the squares to represent the difficulties that each square represented. For example, square number four was the “habit breaker” and square number six was the “habit maker."

The Scary Story

Here is another example of expanding your thinking. In this example, the student was learning how to navigate some of the tricky places in “Humoresque” in Suzuki Violin book 3. I stuck some colored highlighting tape on each tricky place to make it easier for her to isolate the passages that needed extra attention and repetition. The student would also see the areas to come, and the colored tape would “foreshadow” the areas before she played them, reminding her to take her time and be careful. The different colors also helped the student to get a picture in her head of the piece’s logical structure, which would help her with her memory.

We used yellow, purple, blue, pink, and green tape and one teensy bit of red. To make the practice sessions even more interesting to think about, we gave each colored area a name. The yellow tape referred to the patch of “Yellow Yucky Yuccas.” The purple place became the “Purple Pools of Poison.” The blue tape spot became the “Blue Bogs of Bubbles,” and the green tape became the “Green Gorge of Ghosts.” We also have the "Pink Patches of Prickles." The little red tape spot became the “Red Rose of Ramputa,” which was isolated in the middle of the purple spot to remind the student of a particular grace note place.

When the student plays the song, she concentrates on making her way through all the treacherous spots with exotic names. We giggle about the names and use goofy voices like TV announcers in a wild animal documentary. We added a “swaying bridge” over the “Green Gorge of Ghosts” to imitate the swaying motion that the bow uses to make the string crossings.

Do the Opposite

Sometimes a practice rut can be overcome by expanding your thinking with a different or opposite expectation. For example, I have trouble on a particular Bach Allegro movement. I have always had difficulty with this particular movement because it stretches my tiny hand in an uncomfortable way. There is nothing I can do except practice it enough times so that it eventually improves. I noticed that my frustration was increasing, so I decided to do the opposite with my expectation. Instead of making music of it, I turned it into an etude.

Gasp!

Yup. I turned that fine piece of music into a thing of drudgery. Instead of frustrating myself about making the piece sound beautiful, I altered my expectations. Some might say I lowered my expectations.

An interesting thing happened as a result. I started to improve. I still have some trouble playing it but not as much trouble as I did before. I am still not ready to make music out of the exercise just yet. I want to keep working on this etude project a while longer before I decide to add the additional complexity of a musical expectation. My goal is to continue with this “exercise” throughout January.

You can invent your own opposite expectation whenever you encounter a practice issue or frustration by first identifying what your expectation is. Then figure out a way to change that expectation.

I provided three examples above of ways that you can expand your thinking. These are just three ways that popped up this week during my teaching sessions. Take a look at what you are practicing this next week and consider whether you can use any of these ideas to shake things up a little.

Boring!

The subject of boredom comes up every so often, and we should probably look at it a little bit. There are several different scenarios I have encountered:

• one of the parents is bored or is worrying that the child is bored (or will become bored)

• the child is bored

• the teacher is bored

In my pre-twinkle group classes and with my beginning students, we play a great number of "easy" songs, including open string songs. My students love them! We have catchy piano accompaniments to go with the songs, and the students more frequently request these songs than any others. I even have two songs that are exactly the same but that use different words for each song. The students actually believe that these are two different songs!

The most frequent scenario that I have encountered is the one where the parent is bored or worried about boredom. I believe I read in one of Dr. Suzuki's books that he believed that children actually learn about boredom from someone else, most likely a parent. This statement, if I have indeed correctly attributed it to Dr. Suzuki, makes sense to me. Dr. Suzuki was very big on examining the child's learning environment to make sure that it was the optimal situation and that we were putting in the child's environment only those things that would encourage the child to learn and be motivated to learn.

If it is true that children learn boredom from the adults in the child's life, then we should be very careful to examine our behaviors to be sure that we are not teaching the child about boredom. If we are enthusiastic about our child's learning and give encouragement for our child's efforts and praise for the child's achievements, then I find it difficult to imagine how the issue of boredom even rears its ugly head. There are so many different ways to play something and so many different possible skills to develop within every song.

I recall someone once asking me how many times I had to listen to students play the Twinkle Variations in a week (a lot), and how I could stand listening to the same song over and over. The answer is that listening to a lot of Twinkles every week is not a problem. That is because every child plays the Twinkles differently. Every Twinkle sounds different. Each child is unique in terms of whatever particular skills and expression the child is working on. I never get bored listening to the Twinkles. I think that a teacher who claims to be bored probably just needs a break. Maybe a short vacation or even just a lunch meeting with one or two other teachers to get energized again about teaching.

As for a child being bored, I have only heard that one time and it was recently said by a potential new student. I was a little bit startled to hear it, because the child I was just meeting for the first time was so adamant about announcing how bored she was. And I wasn't even talking to her at the time! Her mother and I were in conversation. As the child continued to announce how everything she saw or heard about playing the violin was "boring," I realized a few things:

• the child needed to get attention, even if it was negative attention (this was an introductory meeting between the child's mother and me)

• the child needed to control the conversation ("this is boring!" is certainly a conversation interruption)

• the child did not really seem to understand what the word meant (the student is 5) (I thought she was using the word in a way that indicated that she meant something other than that she was bored)

• the child had probably heard the word from someone else (actually, she had heard it from an older cousin she had visited recently)

In the case of this recent student encounter, I believe the issue of boredom is more likely one of behavior issues. The mother and I are looking forward to beginning lessons soon after our parent education classes are finished, and we anticipate that there may be the need for a "million dollar lesson" in the child's future.

Generally, though, I believe that boredom is not a good word in anyone's vocabulary. Boredom to me is a sign of someone who cannot or will not take the time to figure out how to be interested. With the imagination that children have about their world around them, it surprises me to hear a parent lament that their child is bored or that what the child is learning is boring. I tend to feel sorry for the parent because I know that if left unaddressed, the parent's attitude about boredom will indeed become a problem later when the child adopts this same attitude.

Let us stay focused on the task at hand: teaching our child new skills so that the child can develop the habit of developing ability. I refuse to believe that this is boring for the parent, child, or teacher. Let us dig deep and keep ourselves enthusiastic over the process of learning and refining.