Home-lesson recaps – Page 5

A surprising birthday present

The past few days have been rough, and it’s been wearing me down enough that I’m actually starting to think halfway seriously about switching M to the violin, which she’s said she would prefer to play. But that’s another post!

I expected more of the same today, for two reasons: (1) M is still a little sick (running a fever), and (2) today is M’s birthday. I expected some whining about how she shouldn’t have to practice on her birthday. I did make a special effort yesterday to tell M that we would practice today, but I didn’t think that would totally preempt protest.

Yet it did. When I said at 4:30 it was time to practice, she came right in, even a little cheerfully. She brought with her the two new “Chinese Barbies” (Mei Ling – Lotus Dancer and Black Turtle) she got for her birthday, which she proposed to earn during the lesson depending on how well she did.

We started out easy, by reading a new piece of music: one part of an arrangement of the Twinkle theme that her studio teacher plans to have her students play at the year-end recital in May. Here’s the part:

We approached it in steps:

Clapped the rhythm using fruit names.
Said the note names without worrying about rhythm. (Weirdly, M had a problem with E on the first line of the staff. I had her practice “E-E-E-E,” pointing at all four of them, several times.)
Said the note names with the right rhythm.
Played the A section together.
She played the Twinkle theme while I played this part, to give her an idea of what they sound like together.

Next we worked on the Bach Tanz — specifically, on the same 2-measure portion we worked on yesterday, which requires use of the A (ring) finger on the right hand for the first time in the repertoire. She did 10 good repetitions, twice the 5 we did yesterday. I sat in front of her checking her hand position carefully. A couple of times, when she brought her attention fully to the right hand, she really did a great job. We still need to eradicate a bad habit, though (twisting her hand to start the second measure, which puts her in position to play using the wrong side of her middle finger).

She also still isn’t careful enough with the left hand — she often starts playing when it’s out of position (one string over, for instance). I was able to get her to laugh about it, though, which seems good.

Next we played Meadow Minuet twice through, once with her on melody and me on bass, and once reversed. When she played the melody, she made a lot of errors in the B section that she corrected as she played. When she finished, I asked: “Which section did you make the most mistakes in?” She answered, without hesitating, “The B section,” which is progress.

To finish with something fun, I played a chord progression in the key of G while M improvised on the G scale. She does a nice job of this, and while it doesn’t improve her technique, if it gets her excited and thinking musically, it’s worth it.

I then told her a little about the chord progression (a simple I-IV-V blues progression) and played more with some percussion (slapping the guitar top), and she danced around like a crazy person.

What a nice birthday present from M to me!

Back to the normal routine

With the Olympics an SAM graduation behind us, it was back to the grind: group lesson, swim lesson, lunch out, and private lesson (plus, today, some errands).

Group class was small, and the teacher kept it very simple, working largely on rhythm and listening. Here’s what they did:

He had three rubber balls, small, medium, and large. He dropped them and asked the kids to play a G when it hit the ground (forte for large, mf for medium, and piano for small). He built in some crescendos/decrescendos.
- He made one great point. He told the kids to notice if they are early or late and said noticing this is just as good as being on time.
G scale with knocking. This was rusty.
Huckleberry Apple (I’m A Little Monkey) on the G scale, first all together, then all around the room with one kid per note, then around the room with eyes closed, which really forced them to listen.
Again with the bouncing ball, this time letting it bounce two or three times.
Improvising on a G major scale against a chord progression.
- He made the mistake of asking kids if they wanted to do it. The shy ones said no. M was not shy, though, and she improvised with a lot of confidence.
Playing Perpetual Motion and counting out loud, 1-2-3-4.
- Twice he asked a song’s time signature, and both times M eagerly shouted, “cut time!” She was not right either time. I’m not sure why she’s so excited about cut time; she’s done this before.
He did a variety of exercises with this:
- He played, kids counted.
- He counted, kids played.
- He played, stopped on an arbitrary beat (actually, it was always 1) and asked the kids to give the beat number.
He ran a tone contest with the kids and talked about nails.
- M did several cool things when she played. First, when she played Twinkle, she played with great dynamics and some vibrato. Then, when she played Perpetual Motion (a few bars), she deliberately ended on a fretted G, not an open G, so she could do some vibrato. (She actually missed the note, but it was a cool idea.)

M also said something nice at lunch. When I brought our lunch back from the counter, I told her that I had been telling the staff about our day (in response to their comment that it was daddy-daughter day) and how much we did, and they called me a “slave driver.” I told M that I responded that she was very accomplished and liked doing her activities. She agreed, saying, “I do. I like it.”

At her private lesson, M rocked the section of the Canon, though her rhythm wasn’t totally secure. M also did a great job reading another song in the key of D. And M played a section of With Steady Hands and, though she missed notes, was in fact very steady (her teacher balanced an eraser on her hand and it stayed in place). Our assignments are:

Bring With Steady Hands back into the rotation. Do a balance game with it, placing something flat on her hand and seeing how long it can stay in place.
Work on the 2nd section of the Canon.
Work on the Canon while tapping her foot, counting beats, or both.
Work on bass notes in Meadow Minuet separately from the melody. Try saying them as we listen, and consider using the music. (I’m not crazy about that idea.)
Also, we have a new Twinkle accompaniment to learn for the end-of-semester concert.
And we need to work on the Bach Tanz for Colorado!

House concert

M and I began by practicing the Canon, including a 4-bar section that we started only yesterday, to show off for S (her mom). Unfortunately, S had a tough day and wasn’t really planning to be an audience. And it didn’t help that I asked S to try to use Dweckian praise only, namely, to praise M’s effort. S doesn’t really know how hard M has been working on this song, and it didn’t sound great because it’s so new, so S was a little nonplussed.

M didn’t seem to mind, though.

After the house concert, M and I worked on adding bass notes to Meadow Minuet. The first section is getting better, though she’s still having a hard time remembering to play the open E and B rather than fretting them. For review, we tried syncopated Perpetual Motion. It was rusty, but M seemed to have fun.

Overally, a pretty good practice.

A mini-tantrum over posture

Not a great lesson. I wanted to get her going on some more of the Canon, and since she likes to read music, I decided to start by clapping the rhythms of the whole song. (This was a followup to the discovery yesterday that each measure in the four-measure sections she knows have almost the same rhythm.) That went pretty well.

But it went downhill when I tried to get M to generalize about each section. That is, I was trying to get her to answer this question: “What is the rhythm of 3 out of the 4 measures in the section we just clapped?” She clapped the section perfectly, and she knows what a measure is, so I thought this would be easy. But it wasn’t. When I asked her to clap the single-measure rhythm, rather than doing that, she tried to clap the whole section. When I stopped her and asked my question again, she started fidgeting and complaining that she was tired and that her legs hurt.

And here’s where we went off the rails. To protest the questioning, she started fidgeting like crazy and sitting down, away from the music. I insisted that she remain standing and try to answer my question.

Was this crazy? Maybe. I don’t know. I do know that I find the type of resistance she showed, which is basically a kind of passive aggression, seriously aggravating. And I know that I believe that the mind follows the body, so if the body becomes squirmy, the mind will too. And I know that I believe in the value of insisting, as a matter of principle, that a child comply with reasonable demands.

I also know that I don’t believe in nagging, so when M remained noncompliant after one or two requests, I stopped asking and started reading my book. She then started crying and telling me how awful I was. I replied as calmly as possible that I had told her what I wanted her to do; it was something she could do; and I expected her to do it. I reiterated that if she wanted shorter and better lessons, they were in her grasp: she just needs to choose to cooperate better.

She cried and berated me for about five or ten minutes, then went into another room to cry by herself for another five or ten minutes. She again tried to take control by telling me, “I’m ready. I’m waiting for you to come get me.” And I again responded that I was waiting for her and would not be coming to get her.

She came back, and we managed to practice fairly effectively and without conflict for another 40 minutes or so. We worked on:

Pachelbel’s Canon. We got started on a new 4-bar section.
Meadow Minuet. We tried to add bass notes to the first section. This went surprisingly poorly. Part of our problem is that her left-hand fingering is now a little screwed up because she’s fingering things the way the Canon is fingered, not the way Meadow Minuet is fingered. So M has to do some unlearning, which is always frustrating. But we worked on small chunks (just the first two measures), and M was pretty tolerant of her frustration (she kept making the same mistake over and over).

I’m glad I have an independent kid, but I do wish she would express her independence in a different way.

From the page to the brain

We kept working on Pachelbel’s Canon and Meadow Minuet (with a Twinkle to close).

On the Canon, I tried to help M move from just reading the music to hearing it in her head. We worked mostly on the third 4-bar section, which is mostly 8th notes. After we played it through a few times, we did a few things:

She tried playing it without the guitar. This was unsuccessful — whenever she wasn’t sure of a note, she just randomly tried anything rather than thinking about what the note might be.
I played it, pausing after each note, singing the following note with M, and asking M: Is the next note higher, lower, or the same? She was right every time, showing that she knows the tune. So I essentially modeled for her how to use that knowledge instead of guessing random notes.
I had her sing it, with the sheet music, while I just played the first note of each measure, to help keep the pitches in the ballpark. This went well, except that she missed the rhythm.
We clapped the rhythm without singing it, which helped her see that the first three measures are rhythmically identical, and the fourth measure’s rhythm differs only on the last beat.

On Meadow Minuet, we worked again on the F#/B transition, specifically, on trying to hold each note for the full 3 beats rather than picking up too soon. Then M wanted to try a different section, so we worked on the first 4 bars. She has that melody down pretty well, though she made a lot of careless mistakes because of failing to attend to her hand position.

Overall, a good lesson — probably about an hour long, with only minor conflict. As her activity, she put pop-bead necklaces on herself and Felicity.

Pachelbel’s canon, Meadow Minuet

Good lesson today, half before dinner and half after. M earned pop beads during the first half of the lesson and assembled the earned beads in between items. After dinner, M wanted to play War (the card game). So we did.

We worked on two things: (1) Pachelbel’s canon (two 4-bar sections), and (2) Meadow Minuet.

The Pachelbel’s canon stuff went well. We listened to some Youtube videos of it first, then practiced the parts her teacher assigned. After we practiced the measures together, we had a little fun playing the first two bars together, her on one part and me on the other.

After dinner, we tried to add bass notes in the D section. M’s mental picture of this piece isn’t solid enough. We practiced the first half or so of the section, but it was rocky. I ended the lesson before things went really south, though, and overall, we got a fair amount done in a pretty cooperative spirit.

An experiment in self-assessment

M is excited for the Suzuki Association graduation tomorrow. She’s going to be playing all the Twinkles, so that was what we practiced. She dawdled a little with a doll before practice, but she had a pretty good attitude going into it.

But on our first Twinkle, she clanged the first note because she didn’t check her hand position. I stopped, lectured, and started again. She clanged a note during the song just because of careless left-hand work. We started over.

We got through two variations, and then on the third, she just stopped playing after the first A section. She said she thought the song was over.

What to do? Here’s what I did: Sat there mute, hands on my head, thinking. Meanwhile, M continued playing — she even played her own introduction for the next variation.

I decided to try an experiment. The problem is her concentration — she’s not paying attention to what she’s doing, perhaps because she doesn’t own it enough. So I decided to give her ownership. I explained that she needed to figure out what to do to improve her playing, and I was going to let her do that on her own. She could get me when she thought she was ready to play through them with me.

I left the room, and I watched from behind from another room as she played the variations, usually with a 4-bar intro she played herself. She seemed really focused on what she was doing: her head was pointed at her left hand (I obviously couldn’t see her eyes), she remembered to play tosto in every second B section, and I think she got the form of every song right. She played everything but the theme, then said she was ready for me.

We played them through together, and she did pretty well. Not great — she spent a lot of time staring around the room, and it was obvious she wasn’t paying great attention to what she was doing. Her right hand, in particular, is stuck in bad habits.

But she definitely made an effort when I left her alone, and she’s probably pretty ready for tomorrow. In any event, I decided we had done enough and we finished early on a positive note.

Hard stuff is easy, easy stuff, hard

I wanted to promote M’s enjoyment, so we started out with another duet from Read This First. Her sight-reading is excellent and we sounded good together.

The Twinkles and the Fuhrmann Tanz were less successful.

It’s so hard to get her to pay attention to these older songs. She rolls through them on automatic pilot, and that works for 70 or 80 percent of the song, but then she botches the remainder. I have not succeeded in getting her to consistently care whether she is doing a good job or not.

But she didn’t bite me, so that’s a plus.

Double lessons, no problems

M and I both got up earlier than usual so we would have time for a lesson after breakfast. We had about 30 minutes available, but I didn’t have my watch and the clock in the practice room was fast, so we only ended up doing about 20 minutes. Still, it was fairly productive: we ran through the Twinkles to prepare for the upcoming graduation, then we worked a little on Meadow Minuet.

She did one cool thing on her own in the morning: She started picking out Lightly Row in a different key.

After dinner, our regular lesson also went fairly well. We only did two things: Meadow Minuet and the Twinkles. Her right-hand position leaves something to be desired (wrist too low, hand falls over).

On Meadow Minuet, M kept making some note mistakes, so we played the problem 2-measure section over until she got it right 10 times in a row. It took a while.

She’s ready to begin putting the bass notes and the melody line together.

Epic tantrum

For the first time in a long time, M had such an epic tantrum that we didn’t really manage to practice.

After dinner, as it was time to get started on our lesson, M was garden-variety uncooperative — not picking up her guitar when told to, dawdling by saying she wanted to go get animals as an audience, but doing this all pretty calmly. I sat and read with the stopwatch going and let her know that I was waiting for her to be ready.

It fell apart when she came in with her audience (a stuffed kangaroo and Fluffles the lamb) while wearing sparkly antennae. I told her she couldn’t wear the antennae, and I took them off and put them on the kangaroo.

M melted down, and it just got worse. After about a half an hour of her crying and saying that I was awful for taking the antennae, I told her that if she couldn’t calm down, we were going to have to do two lessons the next day.

The meltdown escalated. I stayed outwardly pretty calm, but I was quietly getting pretty mad. Still, I repeatedly offered to try to help her calm down and asked if a hug would help. My offers were refused, and at some point (30 or 45 minutes in), M tried to hit me.

I don’t react well to being hit by a child. I have never hit M, but when she tries to hit me, I do react physically, by picking her up and carrying her into another room. Which of course occasions more attempts to hit me and, today, a bonus: she tried to bite me!

M’s mom came home while we were about an hour into this. I told M she needed to calm down before she could see her mommy, and I offered to help her calm down, but she couldn’t. So then I carried M up to her room, where she raged on for another 15 minutes or so. I told her she had to stay calm for at least 5 minutes before she could go downstairs. When she had been calm for a while, I asked her if it would help if I read her something, and finally she agreed to accept my help. I asked if she wanted to sit with me while I read or stay in her bed by herself, and she chose to sit with me, which was nice. I read her a page, then we went downstairs.

A little while later, as she was putting away a tumbling mat (which she had thrown at me earlier) on the bookshelf next to where I keep the music-instruction books, she said, “I have an idea of — if it’s okay — I have an idea of how to make up to you,” and she started pulling sight-reading book off the shelf. It was such a sweet gesture, and we did a few minutes of rhythm sightreading together before it was time for her to get ready for bed. I also explained again, once she was calm, that we were going to do two lessons the next day, one before breakfast and one after dinner, and that if the morning lesson didn’t go well I was going to cancel her afternoon playdate so we could do our makeup lesson in the afternoon. She accepted this.

She hasn’t been this out of control in a long time. I wish I could head it off better and handle it better when it happens. It’s tough for me to both watch my out-of-control kid suffer (because it’s obviously no fun for her) and deal with the anger I can’t help feel when I’m called the worst father in the world, etc. But she’ll grow out of it; she has to!