It dawned on me, a little while ago, that my daughter was really starting to pick up on the Cello. The tortured cat sound was gone, mostly, and she was playing with a timing, skill and grace that made me enjoy the performances. “When did that happen?”, I thought.
I should provide some back story – my daughter, Zosia, is five. She has been playing for almost two years, and man, has it been a struggle. Trying to get any child to sit still and concentrate on something is tough enough, let alone when that “something” is hard to do! Late last year, we faced a very real deadline for my daughter to get good enough to make graduation by the end of term, so we resolved to do something radical.
We practiced.
Every day.
Sometimes, twice a day.
The improvements were so significant it got me to thinking, “There could be something to this whole ‘practice’ thing”.
Shortly afterwards, I had the pleasure of reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, ‘Outliers’, and it turns out the whole “practice” thing isn’t as radical as I first thought. According to studies performed on the subject, and summarized in the “Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance”, 10,000 hours of dedicated, focused, practice is what it takes to become an expert at something.
Dancing, Chess, Music – turns out the Beatles put in thousands of hours performing in Hamburg, Germany, before they made it big in England, and then America.
Public Speaking, Project Management, Coding - Bill Gates did the same as a young computer programmer in high school, spending countless hours in the Computer Labs.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, my daughter has a recital in two weeks, and we – the teacher and the student – need to practice.
Captain Joe
Follow me on Twitter @JPuglisiLLC
Children learn from their environment. The Suzuki Method teaches parents to practice with their children, so they can add the warmth of family participation and acceptance to their child's learning experience. Concerts also add to self-esteem.
ReplyDeleteWhen music students get older, practice needs different brains. You have to choose a tempo where your muscles and mind coordinate to get a passage correct. Then repeat ad infinitum, until you are ready to go to a faster tempo. What scientists have learned is that the brain learns mistakes with equal value to the correct notes. So trying to show off and play something fast, with a mistake, hurts the practice process more than the aspiring musician knows.
Learning how to practice, or learning how to learn, seeps into all aspects of life. Yes, you need 10,000 hours to become an expert. You need a symbiosis between person and skill that is preternatural.
For me, it was online communities. No one had to tell me to practice.