Wednesday, October 30, 2013

October 2013 Newsletter!

Here's a link to our pdf newsletter. All our students should have received one in the mail; just let us know if you didn't and we'll update your address.

Thanks, and happy practicing!
-Miriam

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Practice articles: Early October 2013 edition

The internet and print media are abuzz lately with great thoughts on how to learn. Parents, please note that these thoughts do NOT only apply to a tiger mother shoving her children into a career as a soloist. Rather, they condense some of the best current thinking on how we learn and contain tips for us all. We are nothing if not students, from beginning to end!

Here are just a few articles I've liked:

James Clear's article, "Lessons on Success and Deliberate Practice from Mozart, Picasso, and Kobe Bryant"

Noa Kageyama's blog, books, and counsel serve as a secret weapon for many professional musicians and I love this article about practice, "How Many Hours a Day Should You Practice". The ideas here could apply to anything that requires time to learn. My kids are only 5 and 7 years old, but we are already talking about some of the things he mentions here both in our school day and our instrument practice time.

Sarah Welsh has a good quick read for parents helping children practice. It's a bit annoying to scroll through to read, but there are some clever tricks offered. In our house we do stickers rather than candy, and the stickers add up to choices from a prize bucket of dollar store trinkets (works for the arcades!), but to each his own. See also our parent handbook page about creative practice helpers. "The Secret to Getting Kids to Practice- Without Tears"

... and just for fun, current Nobel Prize winner Thomas Sudhof says this about what lessons with an excellent teacher did for him:
(Who was your most influential teacher, and why?)
My bassoon teacher, Herbert Tauscher, who taught me that the only way to do something right is to practice and listen and practice and listen, hours, and hours, and hours.