Friday, March 18, 2016

Lessons That Teaching Has Taught Me—part 6


Lessons That Teaching Has Taught Me—part 6 

            Fix the weak links. Too often, a student will get a piece fairly well learned, except a few places that seem to trip them up repeatedly.  I call these the weak link passages or measures.  The song is a series of measures, linked together.  Most of them are beautiful, but the weak measures bring down the quality of the whole piece.  To fix these, students have to learn to practice well. They have to identify and fix the tough spots.  They have to stop repeating the easy parts over and over and over - and find solutions for fixing the parts they aren't so good at yet.  Most of us probably don't have to think very long to apply this to a few weak measures in our own otherwise disciplined lives, yes?

The author Sarah Wolf Frey is a 20 year veteran of applied music teaching.  In her words “There are some ‘lessons’ that have become more and more true to me about life in general...”  This series is used by permission of the author.

 

 

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