Before our lesson, M said words to warm my heart: “I want to do a long lesson today.” But I squandered some of that goodwill by managing our time poorly and not being as enthusiastic as I should have been.
My main mistake was misestimating how long it would take to listen to and absorb the final 8 measures (the D section) of Meadow Minuet. It’s got a rhythmically tricky two measures (a dotted half tied to a half note, with a pickup note at the end of measure 2 — the only pickup note in the piece), and the accompaniment is a little busy, making the student’s part hard to hear. So we spent longer on listening to this than I thought. I kept trying to get M to hear the 5 beats of the dotted half + half note by having her count while we listened, but it was rough going. Eventually she got it when I sang and she counted.
(To make it easier to learn Meadow Minuet, I created a Noteflight score of just the student part. I think I’ll try having M play along with it very slowly.)
And playing this section was just as hard — this last section involves big position shifts that M has not done before. So tackling this may have been too ambitious.
Apart from that, we did:
- Are You Sleeping, Brother John?
- Go Tell Aunt Rhody
- Song of the Wind
- M sang note names and conducted me playing Twinkle.
We played the first three songs a few times, sometimes with the metronome.
Unfortunately, we did not do two things that were on my “daily” list:
- A scale; and
- With Steady Hands
Tomorrow, I need to spend less time on Meadow Minuet. And I need to remember to find things to praise and to end on a positive note. Given how tired M was, she was a real trooper today.