Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Learning How to Practice

Some years ago, I set out to teach my daughter how to ride a bike, something I'd never had to teach anybody before. She learned a bit about riding a bike, and I learned a bit about teaching.

Earlier this month, I was listening to her play violin. She played a piece she's been playing for quite some time. Her performance has not appreciably improved since she started.

My first reaction was that she's not practicing enough. Fact is, she isn't: she doesn't practice ever day, and when she does practice, she isn't at it for very long.

But the problem wasn't how much time she was (or wasn't) spending practicing. The problem was how she was practicing. She was slogging her way through the piece, over and over. Her arm would start to sag. Her bowing would be off the mark. She tried to memorize the fingering instructions so she could look at her fingers, as opposed to the sheet music, when she played. But when she hit a wrong note or she got distracted, she'd lose her place and have to stop. When that happened, more often than not, she'd start the piece from the top.

This isn't learning how to play the violin, this is bulldozing your way through a task.

My initial diagnosis - that she needs to spend more time practicing - was incorrect. More practice like that wasn't going to improve the quality of her play, it was only going to make her dislike the violin: showing no improvement, and being assigned the same piece week after week, she'd become increasingly frustrated and simply lose interest.

She didn't know how to practice. Perhaps she hadn't been taught, perhaps she hadn't figured it out for herself, perhaps this was my responsibility all along. Whatever the case, knowing how to practice isn't something I can take for granted.

We're spending time working with her on how she practices, developing habits that will develop muscle memory for fingerings and bowing. That should lead to greater dexterity and endurance - and greater satisfaction from playing the violin. Part of this involves sitting with her while she plays and coaching her on what to do. Part of it involves me pulling out my horn and re-learning a piece long forgotten to remember what it's like to feel the frustration at a piece I have to master, to play something repetitively, to drill on a handful of measures at a time, to re-learn how to read ahead to intuitively reach for an alternate fingering. And, ultimately, to remember that feeling of satisfaction knowing that my performance is demonstrably better - something I think she's experiencing as her performance has markedly improved in a relatively short period of time.

It's easy to recognize a poor performance. It's not always so easy to recognize the poor practice habits behind a poor performance.