Mood:
brightTopic: Traditional Teaching
Don't you just love it, when you're teaching, and you get one of those "Light Bulb" moments from a student.
I have this wonderful young lady that I've been teaching for a couple of years now. She recently completed her grade 1 RCM exam with First Class Honours, and is now working on grade 3.
She struggles with fingering, always has, and, quite frankly, it has been hampering her ability. I've been nagging for SO long. In lessons, she'll get it, but come back the next week with the fingering all wrong again.
I've been reading "The Practice Revolution" by Philip Johnston, and one thing really stuck out the other day. He talks about "Cutting wood with a spoon" - that is, using the wrong tools for th job.
Tonight, it hit me: she has been using the wrong tools for the job during her practicing. And, then what happens is that her practice sessions aren't successful (because she can't play the passage properly, and it shows!), so she feels frustrated... which isn't the type of feeling that fosters a love of practicing!
So, at this evening's lesson, we talked about ways of fixing fingering. That is, I gave her the tools she needs to fix the fingering at home (and wrote them down in her homework book!!)
Here's the tools I gave her:
- Identify the tricky spots and work out logical fingering (we're currently working on fingering rules)
- Play the offending passage HS, saying the fingering out loud.
- Play the passage without looking at your hands/fingers
- Play the passage in as many different octaves as possible!
- Play the pagges HT very slow with correct fingering
I also told her about the pitfalls of incorrect practicing, and how it actually creates more work if you learn a passage incorrectly.
We worked through this process in one of her pieces, and she played it successfully. Then, we moved on to another piece. She was struggling with it a bit. While she was able to play the passage HT without stopping, it was a bit shakey at the end.
I was about to show her how to fix it, and she grabbed my pencil out of my hand and said, "I know what I'm doing wrong!! If I put finger one HERE (and she wrote it in), then I'll have enough fingers to get down over HERE!"
I have a feeling she will have a great week practicing!
