🦋 Transference
Sylvia has been taking violin lessons for a couple of months now. She seems to be really enjoying the playing part of lessons and practices, but it is hampering her, that she hates making mistakes and not being able to do things. (No diagnosis here -- I think this will give her trouble and need to be overcome at some point, and I think she picks this mode of being up in part from me -- just saying how it is.) Most of what she does in lessons and practices is of course stuff she is not able to do yet, so it gets frustrating for her. My current approach is not to push at all, just let her approach it from a place she feels comfortable, and this seems to be working out pretty well for the time being. Today she came up with a new strategy which I think may be very useful to her, which is to transfer her frustration with not being able to do things onto her bow. We are learning to play "I Have a Little Dreydl", for the seasonal tie-in, and she has got the sequence of notes correct but was not getting the meter. So: I tried explaining to her that the notes were played in pairs, and played it through exaggerating the pairs; and she said, "I know that -- but my bow makes mistakes." A little light went on for me and we talked back and forth for a few minutes about helping the bow to get better by practicing. And I realized, we should really be doing "I Have a Little Dreydl" in the same way we play "Twinkle, Twinkle, Litle Star", repeating a set rhythm for each note, that will be a lot easier for Sylvia's bow to remember. So we tried it with the "Elephants-and-mon,keys" rhythm and she was able to do it straight through, very smoothly. A note on the Suzuki method: I learned Suzuki violin from when I was approximately 5 years old until 13 or so (IIRC) and hated much of it. It took me until I was 18 or so to start getting back into music and until this year to pick up the violin again; in between then and now I think there are a lot of lost opportunities. I have thought all along that whatever I did, I would not subject a child of mine to Suzuki music instruction. But I had a bit of a change of heart last year or so. Whatever the faults of Suzuki, it does seem to have left me and my siblings, all of whom were in the program, with an abiding ear for music. So my new idea is to start Sylvia in Suzuki, but (a) keep a very close eye on whether she is enjoying it and having a good time, and make it clear it is her option whether to stay with it or not; and (b) encourage her to learn to read music early on. (Her teacher seems to be pretty good about not viewing Suzuki as a doctrine, just as a teaching tool, which is encouraging -- my memory of my own childhood experience suggests that this attitude is not universal.)
posted evening of Saturday, December 31st, 2005
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