Good Parenting

Does it ever feel to you like your child is barely progressing despite your constant instruction? I thought about this recently when I reflected back to the time when I started teaching my son Tico to play the violin.

I started teaching Tico the violin at the age of four with some very basic techniques. I didn’t even have him play the violin for several months until he could hold the bow and violin correctly.
I really didn’t want to rush through the process of teaching the violin to Tico because I had learned from personal experience that you need to build a firm foundation before moving on.

I started out with my own private violin lessons at the age of twelve with a teacher that didn’t emphasize a lot of technique. As a result, when I got more advanced I developed some bad habits and I didn’t acquire the appropriate technique for that level of playing. I can tell you that going from moving through pieces quickly to working on one piece for awhile was quite a dramatic change for me. I didn’t want to spend twenty minutes working on one technical aspect over and over again! I felt like my violin lesson time was being wasted. It took me what seemed like a long time (several months) to undo one bad habit and acquire the right technique.

Looking back and analyzing that situation now, I realized that it was very important to spend whatever amount of time was necessary to teach a skill and acquire fluency in that skill from the very beginning. I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake with my own children.

As my son Tico continued playing the Twinkle Variations for a year (progressing very slowly), I wondered if this slowness in learning new pieces was going to continue. It’s one thing to know the theory behind the approach, but it’s quite another to put it into practice with complete confidence.
I was quite amazed when all of a sudden, Tico started to take off by learning new pieces quickly and without a whole lot of effort. I was relieved to have it proven to me that building a firm foundation really works!