Each week some 50 pupils pass through the various rooms I work in and each of them is expected to spend a little time playing their instruments between lessons to make some sort of progress. Fed up with hearing various excuses for not practising (homework, brother's birthday party, swimming, ballet, cat was sick) I developed a method of questioning. What I wanted to hear was what practices they had done, not what they hadn't. What practise have you done this week? Any pupils about to give an account of all the events that prevented them from practising were given a glare and had the point re-emphasised. "What HAVE you done this week? In a positive way, for example I have done 5 minutes, or I have done 0 minutes!" Eventually they got the message and the time saved at the beginning of the lesson not having to listen to their life stories was huge. This questioning wasn't always necessary as most teachers will be able to tell how much practice their pupil has done, almost to the minute, based on the first 30 seconds of playing. Those who regularly do 0 to 5 minutes clearly need to reassess their week. I try to help by working out how they could adapt their evenings to fit their practice in. How much telly do they watch, how much time on the computer? Eventually we compromise and the pupil is expected to watch a little less telly and play their instrument instead. To demonstrate that it is always possible to find some time I ask if they always find time to eat their evening meal. Yes? Well only when you are so busy that you can't fit your evening meal in, then and only then are you too busy to play your clarinet!
One thing I have had to consider very carefully is the amount of time I have to spend practising the harp and writing about it. Any spare minutes during the day are used economically fitting in little jobs that may have been left until later. An absent pupil slot is used to do some admin. So far I have managed to find some space every day for playing the harp and writing about it. The things that I am not doing as much are surfing the Internet, reading, experimenting in the kitchen (some call it cooking) and playing the piano. Rather than write up my notes from the days teaching at home, I do it at school before I leave. It is always possible to fit more in and the busiest children in schools tend to be the ones that do the most practise. We all have the same amount of time, it's how we choose to spend it that counts. Three practise sessions managed today, two on the harp and one on the sax for Saturday's concert! The first harp session was for Barbara M, a clarinettist who has recently joined Palace Band. After a warm up I played some exercises and pieces that have two-note chords. It still sounds uneven so my next approach is to just let it be a bit rubbish and see whether it evens out over the next week or so (based on a little rule of life – leave it 'til later and it will sort itself out!) The game of finding a piece to fit the sponsor’s name (see yesterday) was appealing and not having a Beach Boys for Easy Harp album to play from settled for a piece called Barbara Allen in First Harp Book and then worked on it for Barbara M and all the other Barbaras! My second session was for Melvyn so my game suddenly became much harder, especially so given my limited repertoire! Melvyn is a clarinettist with the band and has recently taken up the bass clarinet. As the band is so flexible players can move between sections and several players have successfully moved from clarinet to bass with Melvyn being the latest. The 20 minutes for him was a little lighter and mostly featured pieces from the two books. I finished with a run through of the three exam pieces from memory to see how they were. Tiny slips in fingers rather than memory but these will need some performance experience before going in front of an examiner. All my jobs done for the day I still have an hour to go before bedtime. Now when you have finished reading this get off your computer and go and do something interesting!
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