Day 3 - Are you practising or just playing it through?

An admirable 30 minutes achieved in two stints this evening putting today's total at 40 minutes! The money is rolling in and this evening's practises were in honour of Elin and Heather, both members of the Palace Band, a great adult woodwind ensemble that I conduct. I am now using finger 3 regularly but it often slips off the string so I need to work out how to get that more consistent. Rohan provided us with some short, simple exercises so I have worked through a few of those. As well as exercises using consecutive strings I've moved on to arpeggios (broken chords) which sound lovely and are one of the effects commonly heard coming from the harps in ensembles. The list B piece is called Azaleas in  Houston and is made up entirely of arpeggio figures, mostly in root position, with a few in first inversion and other formations. We did a little on this in the lesson and I played through this fairly slowly with a few mistakes then went back to the start. About half way through the second go, and after a couple more wrong notes, a little voice in my head asked if I was going to sort out the causes of the mistakes or was I just going to keep playing it through. Playing it through, I replied. I'll work on the finer detail tomorrow! Then I realised this is probably how many of my pupils actually think, although without the promise to hone in on problem areas tomorrow. Often in lessons I ask how a pupil has practised and they reply that they play it through then go back to the beginning and play it again. Of course I already know this because the piece they have just 'performed' sounds as barely-tolerable as it did the previous week. I explain that playing it through is not really practise and they should target any weak spots with practise techniques that we cover in lessons. So there's one strategy to reassess in my lessons and one aim for tomorrow for me… practise it properly!