It’s the rest of the week—what would you like to rest from right now?
Did you ever take piano lessons? Violin, voice, speech, gymnastics, ballet, foreign language… anything that required practicing?
Did you like practicing?
Do you like practicing?
I once escaped practicing violin by quietly closing my bedroom door and climbing out the window to run next door and play games with the neighbor kids instead.
This only happened once—not because I got caught, but because we moved to a place where there weren’t any violin teachers and I had to switch to piano. Practicing the piano didn’t come any easier, but, seeing as the piano was in the living room, I had to at least dabble at it, meaning I lingered on the easy spots of a piece and stumbled quickly over the more challenging ones.
So, like any “good” parent wanting to correct their childhood errors in the present day reality of their children’s lives (heaven help us), I monitored every moment of our sons’ practice time with… passion.
What saved us all, was the loving and excellent mentorship of the teachers at the Suzuki Music Institute of Dallas—a “nurturing environment focused on the whole child”. A place “where fun and discipline meet”
To be honest, I had never considered those two words together, in one sentence.
Instead of a taking a militant approach to practice and perfection, demanding the kind of striving that breeds exhaustion and/or boredom, our teachers invited a love for music and reframed practice as a way of making it (whatever it is you are doing) easier.
In the words of one of the guest master class teachers, Edmund Sprunger:1
“When the goal of practice is to “fix things,” then a child’s performance tends to be limited to a hope that all the things you fixed stay fixed—not a set-up likely to give a child’s musical soul the freedom it needs to emerge. Practicing to “correct” things tends to have the effect of making children feel like they themselves are in need of correction for their very being, and they are more likely to be resistant during practice.
You don’t practice something only because the teacher said so. You practice it because some aspect of it is not easy and automatic yet.
One of the biggest struggles is dealing with the frustration that children usually have when they bump into the reality that things are seldom immediately easy, and that merely wishing to make them easier just doesn’t work. It takes practice. Children are not the only ones who face this frustration: parents and teachers do too! For the child, much of the toil comes in the form of repeating things. For the adults, the struggle is often with figuring out ways to help the child work through the disappointment that accompanies the discovery that the world isn’t magic…The adult who practices with the child needs daily practice, so that over time, he or she gradually learns how to accomplish these enormous tasks.”
Do you feel stuck in repetition mode?
Do you feel the disappointment of hard realities?
Don’t give up. It will get easier.
One of my friends likes to say, “I’m a practicing Christian,” meaning of course, that he is still practicing what it means to follow Jesus and be like him—kind and compassionate.
It takes practice.
Practice may not feel like rest, but it leads to rest—and knowing that can be, well, restful. Right?
It’s been a couple of thousand years since the Apostle Paul wrote a letter to people in Galatia with the following encouragement, but these words still live on with value for us right now:
“So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up”.
Galatians 6:9 NIV
Here’s to practicing rest—and may it be sweet,
Alicia
From his book, Helping Parents Practice: Ideas for Making It Easier, Volume 1—a fantastic book that, in my opinion, anyone helping children learn would benefit from reading.