Music and Math progress

I have been pondering  why some of my children make so much more progress than others. Here are a few observations and hopefully some insights

I have ds who is making very good progress in Maths. His error rate over a whole Saxon lesson is 2-4 , he is 8. He is able to complete a whole lesson in 30 – 40minutes. When he does his corrections he knows what has done wrong and if I ask him he can usually tell me specifically what and where the mistake is. Even for careless mistakes rather than misread or misunderstood questions he will point out where in the process the mistake has been made. He is bothered by the mistakes (in a good way), he takes it as a challenge. He does not blame the maths book or anything else.

Another son is making sloooow progress, his error rate is higher. He continually makes the same seemingly careless mistakes. Previously maths had come easily to him, he seemed to me to be as gifted in this area as the son above. When I ask him about each of the questions he has corrected he is vague about his mistake. He knows it went wrong somewhere, it was careless, he says, but he does not usually know exactly where the mistake happened. It doesn’t really bother him. Of course he is unhappy with his progress and this adds to the feeling that maths is something to be endured not enjoyed. He often blames the math book- what a stupid question, they didn’t teach that…

Another ds is making slow progress but it is steady. He often gets things muddled. He does not blame the maths book, though.  He is willing to look for errors when asked.  I’m not concerned about him. It will come with maturity. 

 I see the same thing in music practice. One child will play the same piece over and over with several mistakes/ stumbles. If the piece falls apart completely he will start again  from the beginning.  Sometimes the difficult part is passed over, like someone who has tripped and is able to move their feet fast enough to prevent landing on their face. He he gets through the piece that will do for practice for that day. The piece is again played the next day and the mistakes are repeated. It is played enough times until the piece is able to be played without falling apart. The progress is slow. No joy comes.

Another student plays a piece of music. He notes carefully where the hard bits are. He stops and plays just this small section several times until he is satisfied. He may spend less time practicing but much of the time spent is spent on the difficult bit. He then plays through the piece, he smiles although the piece is not perfect he can hear the improvement.

 The ds above who is easily muddled in maths is not so in music, and I suppose that is why his maths concerns me less. He hears the errors in the music and seeks to fix them. When he does copybook he gets many errors, it is difficult for him to see the difference between the book and what he has written. But he is improving. The look of a word is beginning to stick. It has taken longer. But those habits of self-correction are there. A child that is teaching himself must also correct himself. He must evaluate his own work. He must develop the self control to attack the difficulties.

We follow many of the ideas put forward by Art Robinson of the Robinson curriculum. I have read his website a number of times and  listened to him online. But this week I noticed that he asked each of his children to bring their Saxon lesson to him and tell him about their mistakes. Perhaps they all like the first son mentioned above saw their mistakes or perhaps he informally instilled this habit. I am  going to encourage / require all the children to tell me specifically where the error was. They will be required not just to do their corrections but to LOOK back and see how they did it the first time and be able to tell exactly where the mistake was. They must think through what they did the first time. If there is no working to show them they will be required to work out if possible how they came to this answer. We will try this for a while and see if this helps.

I have been doing something similar with the child not making much progress in music. I can honestly say it has been a painful progress. When  he plays the piece. he now has to identify the errors, the difficult bits. He must practice this small section 10 to 20 or more times until he can play it without an error 5 times in a row. Like a maths problem a student can stumble through it and get it correct some of the time. But a piece of music is mastered when it can be played easily with very few errors. So too with maths. I shall be noting the errors and requiring not only that problem be corrected but a couple like it as well. I had been, if there were many errors, requiring a reworking of the lesson the following day. But this might be like playing the piece of music from the beginning: a pointless exercise.

The music student  who was making little progress after several weeks of being forced to attend to the errors  is making so much more progress He hates piano a little less, he even admitted that he was making more progress. So we will keep going.

I remember hitting quadratic equations in 4th form. We had several lessons in class on this subject , but they did not come easily. Up until this point maths had been easy for me. I enjoyed maths, or at least I enjoyed the success I achieved in maths. So I took the textbook home and worked nearly every quadratic equation in the book. Then quadratic equations were easy for me. So I continued to enjoy maths. Not so with some of my other subjects. I just decided I was no good at them, stopped working on them and hated them.