Keep Building

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?