"I didn't practise"

Here's a little anecdote about a student who walked in my office this week, and before saying anything else, she said, "I didn't practise." True story. Real dialogue (to the best of my recollection).

I responded in the kind of nagging tone kids use to imitate their parents, "Practice, practice, practice, did you practise? How much did you practise? Why didn't you practise?...I don't want to talk about it!"

The student, recalling previous conversations about practice, said, "Because you want me to just play the piano."

I said, "Well, yes. Every day, most days at least, you go to the piano and play the thing. Play something. Learn something. Improve something." I emphasised, "The idea is that, instead of talking about practice, practice, practice [in a nagging tone], we talk about learning and improving. Next time, don't say, 'I didn't practise'; say 'I didn't learn anything' or 'I didn't improve anything', well, obviously, I don't want you to say that at all because I want you to have learned and improved, but the point is, you need to be thinking about these things, not practice itself and how much you should do and all that."

The student acknowledged my point.

I continued, "You know something? And this will probably come as a big surprise..."

"What?" she asked.

Dropping a big truth bomb, I answered: "I don't care. I just don't care whether you practise or not."

You should have seen her face! Absolutely horrified. I think I may have even hurt her feelings.

I explained, "Whether you practise or not doesn't affect me in any way. You still come, I still teach you, you still learn. You practise for you, not for me. I want you to succeed, I care about that, and to succeed, yeah, you'll need to put some time in at home, and I want you to want to succeed and do what it takes to succeed. It's up to you. But I want you to think about, talk to me about, and focus on learning and improving, not practice itself."

The point I made to the student here is about my firm belief that we need to stop emphasising the logistics and metrics of practice. By that I mean, we need to stop arbitrarily assigning time or repetition targets that have absolutely no relationship to content and learning goals and talking about how much and how many times students practised. Instead, we need to focus on learning and improving and what these look like and how to achieve them. These are the things that ultimately determined the logistics and metrics of practice.

If you tell a student to practise for 20 minutes every day, they'll stop when the time goes off. Why? Because you defined successful practice in minutes; they think they were successful because they practised for 20 whole minutes, not because of what they actually learned or improved—assuming they did. But, if they can engage in high quality practice for 20 minutes, they can probably do it for longer, because there's nothing magical about 20 minutes or whatever number you arbitrarily choose. At 20 minutes and one second, will everything suddenly fall apart? At 19 minutes, will they have achieved nothing? I don't think so.

Of course, there's only so much cognitive load anyone can handle, but that changes every day and is affected by a myriad of factors (time of day, energy level, motivation on any given day, distractions on any given day, etc) so how can we could possibly determine a time target accordingly? No one can say after 20 minutes, or whatever number you arbitrarily determined, without fail, cognitive overload kicks in.

I also have a theory that you can assign a capable student 20 minutes of daily practice and at 21 minutes, everything could, in fact, fall apart because motivation plummets because the student is no longer required to practise. In a parallel universe, you assign the student 25 minutes of daily practice, and at minute 21, they're still going strong. Why? I think it's related to the theory of Mental Framing but I'm not going to pretend I know anything about that. But my theory is, that, whatever target you determine, the student will think—whether consciously or subconsciously—anything more than that is too hard, too much, not necessary, and lose motivation.

Finally, this is about keeping the focus on the student, not me, the teacher. This whole thing of instrumental lessons is not about me, it's about the student. I don't want them to practise to satisfy me—who do I think I am? I want them to practise for themselves.