Comments

Excellent, thanks for posting. I really enjoyed his views on what I call integrative learning, or one thing learned leading to another--within reason. I've practiced this in my life in a lot of arenas, and not only can one skill be applied differently, but in a completely different context with innovative-think.

And his remarks about teaching inflection 'out' of a student's thinking. I've experienced that directly with violin because I took it so seriously. But, when I started interpreting Segovia's version of BVW 997 #3 from guitar to violin, I'm thankful I didn't let myself become completely overwhelmed by my seriousness. It's gonna rock--at least in my mind ;).

Good teachers should both push students to do difficult repertoire and help them to polish the easy ones because this two-pronged approach imposes different demands on students and students will learn different skills technically and emotionally as a result. I should add though it is probably easier for a teacher to push students to play hard pieces than polishing the ealier ones. I believe the latter demands more detailed work as well as technical and musical abilities from the teacher, as the latter would likely to involve more of fixing some stubborn bad habbits while the former mostly aims at finishing the piece.