Learning How to Practice

Some years ago, I set out to teach my daughter how to ride a bike, something I'd never had to teach anybody before. She learned a bit about riding a bike, and I learned a bit about teaching.

Earlier this month, I was listening to her play violin. She played a piece she's been playing for quite some time. Her performance has not appreciably improved since she started.

My first reaction was that she's not practicing enough. Fact is, she isn't: she doesn't practice ever day, and when she does practice, she isn't at it for very long.

But the problem wasn't how much time she was (or wasn't) spending practicing. The problem was how she was practicing. She was slogging her way through the piece, over and over. Her arm would start to sag. Her bowing would be off the mark. She tried to memorize the fingering instructions so she could look at her fingers, as opposed to the sheet music, when she played. But when she hit a wrong note or she got distracted, she'd lose her place and have to stop. When that happened, more often than not, she'd start the piece from the top.

This isn't learning how to play the violin, this is bulldozing your way through a task.

My initial diagnosis - that she needs to spend more time practicing - was incorrect. More practice like that wasn't going to improve the quality of her play, it was only going to make her dislike the violin: showing no improvement, and being assigned the same piece week after week, she'd become increasingly frustrated and simply lose interest.

She didn't know how to practice. Perhaps she hadn't been taught, perhaps she hadn't figured it out for herself, perhaps this was my responsibility all along. Whatever the case, knowing how to practice isn't something I can take for granted.

We're spending time working with her on how she practices, developing habits that will develop muscle memory for fingerings and bowing. That should lead to greater dexterity and endurance - and greater satisfaction from playing the violin. Part of this involves sitting with her while she plays and coaching her on what to do. Part of it involves me pulling out my horn and re-learning a piece long forgotten to remember what it's like to feel the frustration at a piece I have to master, to play something repetitively, to drill on a handful of measures at a time, to re-learn how to read ahead to intuitively reach for an alternate fingering. And, ultimately, to remember that feeling of satisfaction knowing that my performance is demonstrably better - something I think she's experiencing as her performance has markedly improved in a relatively short period of time.

It's easy to recognize a poor performance. It's not always so easy to recognize the poor practice habits behind a poor performance.

Happy New

A new year is a less significant milestone to a child. It's not a gift-giving holiday. Kids aren't prone to annual planning. They're also not likely to make many resolutions: change is thrust upon them more than they have the ability (much less the self-awareness) to initiate personal change of their own.

Even if they're inclined to spend the day watching college football, birthdays and the first day of school are more significant events because children's lives are governed primarily by an academic calendar.

This changes in adulthood, because our lives governed by tax and fiscal years that tend to align with the calendar. This incongruity is helpful to a parent, as it let's us consider what age & grade they'll be, and what skills & capabilities they'll have, when the year is out.

We'll Always Have Paris

Musée du Louvre. Musée Rodin. La Tour Effel. Arc de Triomphe. La Sainte-Chapelle. Notre-Dame. Les Catacombes.

It's a privilege to introduce a child to some of the most significant cultural, engineering, and historic places in the world. Being able to inject one's personal knowledge into the experience makes it even more satisfying. Functioning successfully in a completely different place and language gives it a sense of accomplishment. And what makes it all worthwhile is hearing her express what she learned and how much she enjoyed it.

Everything, that is, but the food. I wish she'd have appreciated the culinary aspects as much as I do - beyond the desserts.

Ah, well. Perhaps it is better that she appreciate the ancient masters than the contemporary chefs.

Frankensquid

Hallowe'en.

She's too old to want to go trick-or-treating as a princess.

Too young to want to dress as a goth.

Too cheerful to want to be the grim reaper.

Too independent to want to be a celebrity.

So she's something she came up with by herself.

She's Frankensquid.

She's the cross-section of unabashed joy, creativity, and independence.

She is her own creation.

May it forever be thus.

Ends and Beginnings

How we mark the stages of our children's lives subtly changes in the span of just a few years. Early on, it's the things she starts to do: her first day of school, her first soccer game, her first violin lesson. Before long, it becomes the things she stops doing: the day camp she's too old to attend, the grade school she moves on from.

Marking ends as opposed to beginnings is a profound change for a parent. It makes you concentrate on things past, regret missed opportunities, and even heighten your own sense of mortality.

But parenting is not about the parent. Even if I am significantly "past", she is all "future" right now. Setting her on her course is what parenting is about.

Memories, Lighter than Air

We went to a hot air balloon launch earlier this month. We counted 73 in the sky: some launching, some landing, some dropping a payload on a target, with only the occasional noise of a propane-fueled burner breaking the silence.

I can say that my daughter was with me, that we compared flight patterns of the racing balloons in rapid (and slightly scary) descent with flight patterns of our own 24’ solar airship, that we looked at the effect of windspeeds at different elevations and talked about the recovery pattern of our last model rocket launch that went up to 1,000 feet.

I can say all that, but deep down I know it wasn’t about my daughter.

The last time I went to this balloon launch, Gerry Ford was in the White House. It was nice to remember what it was like to be a kid again, if only for a few moments.

She's growing up fast. I hope she's racking up a lot of good memories of her childhood.

STS and SST

In the 1970s, two unique craft took to the skies. The SuperSonic Transport, called Concorde, and the Shuttle Transport System, called the Space Shuttle.

SST and STS.

Each is regarded as the pinnacle of engineering in its respective field. Both are now out of service. With their retirements, human spaceflight and air travel have technologically receded.

Each program had serious shortcomings. Complexity when simplicity will do is never desirable. Putting humans at risk in space to do a job that robots can do perfectly well is not good policy. A small, high maintenance aircraft that costs its passengers disproportionately more to fly than the time it saves is not going to be economically viable.

Photo credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls July 8, 2011

It doesn't matter. They were halos of a sort, vivid testimony to how far humanity has come. Imperfect halos, to be sure, as their occasional disasters and frequent maintenance issues made clear how much further we have to go. But halos none the less. Cro-Magnon wasn't going to get anything into space or faster than the speed of sound one time, let alone many times. We are each of us lucky to be alive during a time when we have the capability of doing such things.

With their retirement, we've lost a bit of the halo: America without a manned space flight program, humanity having mothballed its penultimate engineering accomplishments. We still do amazing things - the International Space Station and Boeing's Dreamliner are incredible feats of engineering in their own right. But they're not the STS and the SST.

As an adult, it's hard to come to grips with this moment of devolution in applied physics. It's harder still to explain it to a 9 year old, especially when some of the drivers for this particular devolution are human shortcomings of a different sort, such as profligate spending and inconsistent policies. But there it is.

We had the opportunity to watch Atlantis launch from the Kennedy Space Center to start the journey of STS-135. I hope my daughter is at the KSC to see the launch of the next generation of manned space exploration, whenever that is, to see humanity restore this particular halo.