One of the hallmarks of an ongoing musical education is that you keep building. What you learned last year helps this year’s music come more easily, and more quickly – enabling you to learn more and do even more next year. It’s a virtuous cycle.
And one of the ongoing hallmarks of the pandemic years is the we have interrupted that virtuous cycle. Without that continuity of growth, there is a sense of stagnation, and worse, a sometimes palpable sense that students believe they can’t grow further.
This virtuous cycle was going before I began teaching, and before my teachers began, so it’s a little challenging to think about how to restart a virtuous cycle. And yet, that’s what we must do. It requires a mixture of praise, cajoling, and brute force, combined with faith that a concerted push over multiple years will restart the cycle eventually.
What are you doing to restart the drive, the hunger, and the virtuous cycle in your students?