Learning by Example

This afternoon I laid down for a good long nap - we're talking 3 hours. Bliss! I needed it. I have found that even though I'm not getting less hours of sleep at night, the hours of focused concentration during the day make me more tired as the week progresses. By Sunday, I need my nap more than ever.

Anyhow, my dear sweet daughters spent that three hours doing who knows what. I woke up and decided to take advantage of a lazy afternoon and do some piano practicing before supper. So I sat down at the piano and five minutes hadn't gone by before my dear sweet daughter came in and wanted to practice her guitar. Now, unlike my piano, her guitar is very portable, but of course, she likes to sit on the special chair in my piano room to do her practicing. She asks "How long are you going to be?" I tell her, "About 30 minutes." I'm thinking, Come on now, I need to practice! Take your guitar upstairs! But I know she won't. She likes the special chair. So she quietly sets up her music stand and gets her guitar and sits on the chair, prepared to wait the 30 minutes till I'm through. So I just quit and let her practice. She was being so patiently and well behaved.

She wants to give a recital. She has made a list of the pieces she knows, and is attempting to narrow down her list to find just the right grouping for a nice recital. I'm paying good money for her lessons, so I think it's great that she wants to practice. I'm proud that she's setting goals and that she wants to practice, but it's kind of funny that she only thinks to do it when I'M sitting down at the piano.

It's a great lesson in setting an example for your children. They want to be like us, whether we want them to or not. My son is off to college this year to study music education, as much as I encouraged him to study his math and become an engineer. Sinichi Suzuki really had something when he recommended that the mother learn the instrument along with the student. If I want my kids to practice, the surefire way to get them to NEED to practice is for me to sit down at my instrument and wish for some uninterrupted time.