After watching a webinar by Sara Ernst (Practicing Piano through the Early Stages) with our local music teachers association a couple of months ago, I was inspired anew to teach my students effective practice strategies during their piano lessons. This is not my favorite part of teaching and often brings to mind this quote by G.K. Chesterton:
“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”
Truth be told, I really don’t want to hear my student run through a two-measure segment of a piece a thousand times while I cheer him on in the process. But I know from many years of experience (and more than a little failure to incorporate such tedium into my teaching!) that it makes a significant difference in a student’s ability to learn and play well when I do so anyway.
True to Mr. Chesterton’s sentiment, my 5-year old student had a blast repeating two measures from his new song, Creepy Basement, over and over again at the prospect of getting all four of the little game markers moved from their starting spot to the top of the piano. You can see his huge smile when he achieved the goal and got to move the last of them up! This simple, but highly effective, strategy entails placing a certain number of objects in one place and then challenging the student to get all of them moved to another designated location. If they play the practice segment correctly (fingering, notes, rhythm, dynamics, technique, etc. – whatever elements you want to include), they get to move one object to the new location. If they miss one element, they have to move all of the objects in the new location back to the starting place. This pushes them beyond the more natural make-a-mistake-correct-it-on-the-spot-and-move-on every time approach to encourage repetitive accurate practice, which begets mastery.
Success spurring him on, as soon as he moved the last object to the top of the piano, he was eager to try it again with another segment! My reward for enduring the monotony was that when I praised him for persevering in his practicing and asked him if he knew what that meant, he responded, “It means you don’t give up!” What a delightful reminder of the incredible opportunity we have as piano teachers to not only teach our students to understand and play music, but also to help instill in them the character that will help them succeed in any endeavor for the rest of their lives.
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