let's see how I feel about this !

Tessie is learning Minuet 2.  Has the fingering for the first part down pretty well, and we are working on "the hard parts" of the rest.  She is doing G major scale with slurs.  Working on finding Dsharp.  Most of all: trying to WATCH HER FINGERS.  This is getting ridiculous.  Alicia is trying everything... "Pay attention to the second finger this time".   I mean, isolating which finger you are watching is getting pretty extreme in terms of making it a focus during practice time, especially when she has so many review pieces under her belt getting into late book one.  She is just playing so sloppily lately, and trying to play too fast. So the big problematic corollary of all this, is that I am not enjoying our practice time together at all.  She wants to do well. She tries.  But she just doesn't give a flip about getting her fingers down precisely on the tapes.  I am beyond annoyed at this point.

Wow.   

But she was a very cute Velma for Halloween this year.

Comments

[Miranda]

Oh gosh, I've been through phases like this! It can be so frustrating for everyone. I have a young student in the midst of such a phase right now. He's 6 and supposedly polishing Perpetual Motion. Everything is at top speed and all of the focus he seemed to be building has gone to Planet X or something.

But what I've discovered with my own kids is that sometimes what is going on is that they're learning on another front -- not the one the parent and teacher are focused on. What they're doing is integrating previous learning by sort of "stress-testing it." They might be getting the knack of thinking in bigger musical chunks, or of "zoning and zenning" on what playing the violin feels like when it's relaxed, or of not directing every last left-hand muscle movement in a intellectual way but "letting the fingers go" (which is how the violin is played most of the time once basics are mastered).

So it's still annoying and frustrating, and you still need to work on the danged second finger, but perhaps it's some consolation that there is probably some other valuable-but-intangible type of learning going on in the midst of all this scatteredness.