Practicing Outside of our Lessons

I remember one time when my parents would get frustrated or a little impatient with us as kids and then they would say, "One day when you're a mom, you'll understand!". It made absolutely no sense to me at the time. It still kind of doesn't since I am a new mother of a 10-month-old.

When I had private violin lessons in school, I always had the practicing routine of starting with any given warm-up scale, work on assigned technique exercises, run my piece from top to bottom, work on "hot" spots, and then wrap it up with another run through. Sometimes I would practice 30 minutes in a day and sometimes it would be 3 hours total (don't worry I took breaks.)

There would be days where I just didn't practice. I was too busy with homework, extracurricular activities, my family, you name it! But I was nervous to go to my next lesson because I just knew it wasn't going to be a productive one. (Hint: Your teachers can tell when you don't practice. I swear it's a superpower!!) Most of those lessons following a week where I didn't practice as much ended up with a lesson where we went backwards in stead of forwards. So I would go in my lesson, ready to be lectured, chewed out or something but they never did anything of that nature. They were always so loving and patient. Naturally, there was a bit of disappointment in my lack of time I put in for practicing my violin for the week.

I noticed in the weeks that I did practice, my lessons went really well! My teacher always had this proud look on their face and it made me feel good. I was happier and the next week of practicing, I got to move onto more interesting and challenging things in my music and technique. It was just a positive accomplishment overall. During my own practice time, I got to go over that hard passage as slow as I wanted to. I had time to memorize it better and play it over and over again until I couldn't play it wrong.

Now before you jump to conclusions, I'm not writing this to shame anyone or anything like that. I'm just sharing my experience from being a student myself and now a teacher. I want you to take from MY experiences and talk about how truly important it is to practice outside of our lesson together. As a teacher, I want to see you progress and succeed! If we go over the same stuff at every lesson because the lack of practicing, it will get boring and we will all get frustrated.

One thing I hope we can all take away from this is that the best learning happens on your own time. When you invest time in something and work hard, you're going to get better! Lessons aren't meant to help you practice, they are meant to help the student with spots they just couldn't get on their own practice time. It's to add those extra details. We are your coach! We teach you new things to apply to your practice time. Then when we see you the following week, we want to see how you improved and how you applied our instruction to your practice!

Until next time!

Mrs. Williams :)

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