Motivating Kids to Practice Suzuki

This article was written by Sarah Davies, a parent of one of my students (who is a fabulous little violinist!) You can read her blogpost here: http://sarahdavies.cc/2009/05/10/motivating-kids-to-practice-suzuki/.

Opening
My husband, Brian, and I have a child in Suzuki violin. We have a quirky way of practicing, and our violin teacher keeps telling us that we should tell other parents about it, because it really does work. So this blog post has nothing to do with technology (although it does have to do with lifehacking). It’s aimed at other Suzuki parents, so if you’re one of my normal blog readers and you have zero interest in music or motivating children, then move along. I’ll be back to my normally-scheduled tech blogging next week.

Suzuki is hard work
Learning an instrument is a life-long endeavor. It requires daily practice over a long period of time. If you’re like my husband and me, you’ve made the decision that it’s worth it. Our little one (I call her the geekling) is seven. She started Suzuki violin at the age of five, and she can’t remember a time when she didn’t practice every day. That’s hard work! However, our job as a parents isn’t to help her (or bribe or intimidate her to) struggle through the hard work. I’m going to tell you about the way we practice. It’s a lot of work for us. The difference is that we know we’re working hard. If all goes as planned, she thinks it’s playtime.

Trust your teacher
There’s a reason we hire teachers. Any violinist could tell a child the 1,001 things that they are doing wrong. Edmund Sprunger says in his great book, Helping Parents Practice, that his job as a violin teacher is to tell the child the one thing that will help them the most. A good violin teacher (ours is the fabulous Christine Dunaway) will tell you exactly what to practice at home. We, as parents, have a strong urge to correct our children. It’s hard to watch them practicing bad habits, but if the focus for the week is a good bow hand, let the other stuff slide. There are a lot of things to think about while playing an instrument, and trying to focus on them all at once will overwhelm you and your child. Your job as a parent is to practice what you’re told to practice. It’s a no-brainer.

Teach your child’s body
Suzuki is about repetition. It’s about muscles and neurons. Your child wants to be a great musician, and they want to perfectly execute everything you ask them to do. Telling your child “you’re just not trying, try harder” is incredibly demotivating. You and your child have the same goals, you just need to help her whip her body and her brain into shape. Try using body and brain terminology with your child. Saying “you’re having trouble with that fast spot in Allegro” is really different from saying “your fingers are having trouble with that fast spot in Allegro”. The latter is both more accurate and more productive. The problem isn’t that the geekling always forgets the c-sharp, the problem is that we need to work together on strengthening that neural pathway, because it sure is stubborn! Get it?

Motivation
Just like adults, children need a good reason to follow directions. I think we all know that “because I said so” isn’t a good reason. We quickly learn that our children think “because it will make you a great musician someday” isn’t a good reason. There is a very important difference between adults and children here. Adults want the real reason. Children want a reason. This is the really important really hard work you need to do: making stuff up. Here’s an excerpt from a recent practice I did with the geekling:

“oh no!”
“what’s wrong?”
“gremlins have just kidnapped the willow princess, and somebody has to go save her!”
“I’ll save her!”
“okay, they took her into a dark cave. you’re not afraid of the dark, right?”
“no way! what do I have to do?”
“there’s water in the cave, but fortunately there’s a rowboat. To row the boat, you need to play the first four measures of Perpetual Motion three times with a perfect bow hand, then we’ll get to see what’s at the end of the cave.”
“okay”
“get into a good play position, here we go!”

You get the idea. If she forgets about her bow hand, then we’ve lost an oar and we need to go back to the mouth of the cave and start over. We’ve done dinosaur hunts and rock concerts and even saved the world from global warming. Take whatever excites your child this week, and roll with it. If I’m having a lousy day, and not feeling particularly creative, we’ll use a book or a myth (The Ramayana works great) so I don’t have to make up the structure. The teacher tells us what to practice, the story provides the motivation, and all I have to do is put the two together.

It’s a totally flexible method too. If she’s doing great, or it’s taking longer than I expected, then a gryphon swoops in and flies us to the end of the cave. If I feel like a little more practice is necessary, then there’s a gnome at the end of the cave who needs us to row him to his brother’s place so we can all get scuba suits because the kidnappers went underwater. We also throw in a liberal dash of Choose Your Own Adventure, giving her two (or more) productive choices to turn the story in a certain direction. We always end the lesson on an incredible victory, and she’s happy to practice the next day.

Our child is particularly kinesthetic, so we also include activities like “you’ve been sprinkled with fairy dust. put down your violin and touch every doorknob in the house so the fairies can come in.” We’ll toss a coin to decide what to do, or have her collect 8 pencils by playing something eight times, but then actually let her get a pencil out of the drawer each time she plays it. If she’s extremely wiggly, we’ve even been known to have her run around the block in the middle of a lesson then come back and play.

Some people (like my husband) can do this sort of storytelling on the fly. I usually need some prep time to look over my lesson notes and form a story outline beforehand. Do what works for you.

In closing
I hope that helps. All my work is public domain, so feel free to share this with friends, copy it, publish it, whatever. I won’t sue you. I would appreciate if you keep my name attached and let me know if you liked it and where you’re passing it on. Good luck with practice!

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This piece was written by Seattle tech-writer Sarah Davies, and it is available on her blog, http://sarahdavies.cc at http://sarahdavies.cc/2009/05/10/motivating-kids-to-practice-suzuki/.