What's next for my daughter?

April 14, 2008 at 11:25 AM

And now for something completely different . . .

I've blogged about my daughter's violin experiences before, on and off. She first begged to play the violin when she was 6. She took lessons from a Suzuki teacher and liked the pieces (except for Twinkle, which she was bored by) but didn't really get along with her teacher. She's a bit "sensitive," cries easily, gets frustrated easily. Doesn't do well with "tough love." I backed off for the next year, and tried to teach her myself in a low-key way. We did a book of "Adventures in Violinland." Then, the following year, this year, at age 8, she started violin in school.

She has group lessons in school every Tuesday with Essential Elements 2000 and also did the Saturday music school supplementary program. Or, sort of did it. She had another "sensitive" meltdown early in the school year and took November and December off Saturday music school. Then one day in January she asked to go back, if I would go with her.

So I did. I was the only mother sitting in the group lesson with my kid. I asked the teacher, a local conservatory student, if it was okay, and she said it was. I helped out with tuning a couple of times and started to get to know the other kids too. I took them on bathroom breaks and helped get them back to the classroom in a timely fashion. My daughter started, slowly, to bond with the teacher, who was young and pretty and kind and enthusiastic.

But then it was over. They had the spring concert last week. They played "Twinkle Variations" (never get away from it, do you?), "Bristol Park," and "New World Symphony Theme." One night beforehand I played her the real New World Symphony just so she would be able to hear the real beauty of that piece. She complained a lot about having to wear a dress at the concert. Her tights were too tight. "I am a tomboy, mom! I don't wear skirts and tights! I look ridiculous! Sheesh!"

The Tuesday pull-out class is still going on. I invited my daughter and her viola-playing friend over to play some more EE2000. They're playing "Ode to Joy" and "Bile 'em Cabbage Down." We've now moved beyond the free trial of "Smart Music" that came with the book. I'd have to pay $25 to subscribe to the more advanced stuff, something I've been avoiding, not really because of the money but because it's complicated and I don't remember where I put the password or the instructions.

My daughter has outgrown "Lucy" and "Rocky," her half-size violin and bow. The daughter of me and my Paul Bunyan-sized husband, she is headed for basketball player-size herself by the time she is 12. I point this out to her and she's sad about it. She doesn't want to give up Lucy. "I only want a new violin if we buy one! I want to own it!" She's right, the whole rental scene at the school is a bit of a zoo. And, frankly, Lucy is a VSO.

Another thing I noticed: my daughter, in spite of all her complaining and her questionable practice habits, is a lot better player than her friend. She has been playing longer and had the Suzuki experience, where she actually learned quite a lot from the teacher she said she didn't like. But however she got there, her hand position--both right and left--is somewhat reasonable. She has to be reminded not to do a pancake (or "pizza") now and then, but her friend's playing has opened my eyes to a whole new level of bad habits.

This girl should probably not be playing a viola. She's tiny and has a tiny instrument, but she still can't reach the fourth finger consistently. She's scared of the fourth finger, in fact. Wanted to play Ode to Joy and just skip those notes (it starts on an F# and gets to fourth finger A pretty quickly). She pulls all her fingers back except the ones she's using to play. She holds the bow awkwardly, sort of a half-fist. She can't count rests, and still can't really read music. My daughter was getting impatient and her friend was getting frustrated. So these joint lessons are probably at an end.

But my daughter wants to keep playing violin next year. I'm trying to decide what to do: go to Johnson and get her a new violin? Keep trying to work with the friend, whose family is at a loss to help her practice?

I'm also wondering if it might be time to start the search again for a private teacher for my daughter. If she finds one she bonds with, I think it could be a nice, productive relationship rather than an ordeal that I feel like I'm inflicting on an innocent teacher. And she's finally gotten to the point where she seems like she can listen to direction and get some non-cringeworthy sounds out of the instrument. So music, rather than whether the teacher is "nice" and doesn't make her cry, might finally be able to be the point of the lesson.

From Tom Holzman
Posted on April 14, 2008 at 1:26 PM

I would advise going with what your daughter wants. Whatever does not create a power struggle in this situation is best, IMHO. She can always take up viola again later with little problem. I would also advise trying to get a private teacher again. There must be zillions of good ones in the Boston area. Try Longy or get referrals from other folks. Good luck!

From Anne Horvath
Posted on April 14, 2008 at 1:57 PM

Your daughter won't be "an ordeal inflicted on an innocent teacher" if you are very, very candid with prospective teachers. Also, Holzman is right: Ask your daughter, and find out what she is interested in pursuing.

I got a huge kick out of her protesting the tights and dress. Me too! I loathed having to wear dressy clothes for church and recitals at her age. However, arguing wasn't exactly an option in my family (insert smiley face here). Long term results are in...no permanent scars, and I am usually the only female under 75 at church not bare-legged.

From Karen Allendoerfer
Posted on April 14, 2008 at 3:47 PM

Tom, my daughter has never played viola, it's her friend who plays it. Looking at their body types, with my tall daughter and her tiny friend, one might think they would be naturally more suited to each other's instruments--but, they chose what they chose. I didn't discover the pleasures of the viola until I was in my 30's . . .

With my daughter it's just been an ongoing struggle to get her to act on her stated desire to learn to play the violin. She's been so easily hurt and easily distracted, and anti-analysis, but I think I'm seeing some signs of a little more maturity.

From al ku
Posted on April 14, 2008 at 4:00 PM

karen, interesting development. having 2 daughters, we have double jeopardy:) i think my older one is more similar to your daughter. very sensitive, kinda stubborn, therefore takes much longer to warm up to ideas of change/suggestion. when she was younger, only mommy could sit next to her to practice piano. if i ever made one suggestion, may be a question on a wrong note, her eyes would turn pink and tears would swell up. to some extent, she is much better these days but there is still that shadow of personality conflict or issues. and piano is that fuse:)

when she was younger, her teacher gave quite a bit of work, with competitions etc, so she was overwhelmed. now, the lesson is only 30 mins per week, she practices whenever she can, and seems to accept or even enjoy it more. looking back, i think the teacher's style makes a big difference. right now, my older kid does not feel any pressure. perhaps this way she will develop her own initiative more comfortably.

with your daughter, i wonder before you go onto the next stage of getting a private teacher, whether it will make sense to discuss the issues more candidly and in depth. both side voice concerns. for instance, ask her how can you help her to avoid emotional outbursts? what can she do on her own when that happens, etc? it is not really a contract, but it may serve to be a longer term reminder of one's responsibilities, that we learn to treat sunny and rainy days alike.

i think for my kids, and for most kids for that matter, music is simply a means to allow them to get to know themselves and there is no end. for some kids, like my younger one, it is more natural in the beginning. for others, like my older one, our "normal" expectation may be counterproductive. given ample time, kids may find their own niche.

From Karen Allendoerfer
Posted on April 14, 2008 at 7:14 PM

Thanks, Al. We've been trying to work on the emotional outbursts in other contexts. She also does karate, and seems to handle herself better there. She has cried in karate class, but her sensei has a good sense of humor and somehow that seems to get her through. His yelling doesn't have the teeth that her violin teacher's did, for some reason. And she hasn't cried in karate for a long time.

But she still cries in school sometimes and when she has a fight with her friends and just when she gets overwhelmed by sensory stimuli, which she does pretty easily.

And some adults just can't cope with crying kids: they get all wound up and go into some kind of fix-it mode where they try to get her to stop crying immediately by peppering her with questions and demands, which invariably makes the melt-down worse.

I can sympathize, it's not a fun situation to be in. For anybody.

From Bilbo Prattle
Posted on April 14, 2008 at 8:08 PM

I guess every parent has a different experience and it is difficult to generalize.

My child has always been extremely musical. There has never been a question as to whether he'd continue; only issues of "is this the right teacher" or "are we spending too much" or "are we encouraging his inner drive" and that sort of thing. And so doing the instrument search and plunking a good bit of money down wasn't a "risk" at all: I knew it would all be very well-spent.

You know better than any of us internet fakers what is really going on. If you've read my posts in the past you'll already know my opinions on instrument shopping. The more important questions are how to foster and support a fragile interest.

From Pauline Lerner
Posted on April 15, 2008 at 12:00 AM

I am the ex-instructor of a 6 year old who lad lots of talent, loved to practice, loved to play for others, and got so excited about her lessons that she would jump up and down at my door. We had a very good relationship. Then one day I asked her to do something differently, and she had a stormful of tears. Her father was with her, and he stayed calm and managed to talk her out of it. Most of the time her father went out during the lesson because we found that this was the way to make her communicate orally with me. After the first crying experience, whenever I saw her on the verge of tears during a lesson, I backed off. That was a big mistake. Before this she had played very well, but when I was afraid of making her cry, her technique went to h*ll. Her playing deteriorated to the point where she had been 6 months ago. I read everything I could and talked to everyone I could, including v.com members. I got lots of good ideas, but when I tried them, each one failed. Her father said that in her orchestra in school, the emphasis was on playing fast, and she associated playing more slowly to practice a piece meant failure. I had extensive conversations with her parents. As usual, when a kid has problems with violin lessons, he or she has the same problems at school. Her father told me that when she was study and she made a mistake, she'd cry waterfalls Her parents would then send her to her room for 15 minutes to calm down, and she really regained her composure and continued studying. Unfortunately, I could not do this at a violin lesson. The situation continued to get worse, and her parents found another teacher for her. I thought this might work. Sometimes simply making a change in environment makes a change in behavior. Besides, I had played all my cards by then. I haven't communicated with her parents, so I don't know whether the change of teacher worked. In retrospect, I think I erred by backing off when she was on the verge of tears. I let her little problems grow to big problems. I was very fond of her and her parents. We had very good relationships in many ways other than vioiin lessons. I miss them.

Now I have a 9 year old boy student who whines and moans and refuses to play when I make a correction or tell him to slow down. I finally started joking with him when he began to whine and moan. I'd say, "Come on, you don't expect me to fall your moaning," and laugh. After a while, he's laugh, too, and we'd go on with the lesson. Sometimes I'd start playing a piece he was working on, and he'd join in. He can not turn down the allure of violin playing. He loves it so much. I've had long talks (actually emails) with his father, who told me that his son was having exactly the same problems at school, and he was talking to the boy's teachers. Somehow, I got an insight: fear of failure. I asked him about my student about his behavior, and he said that if he made one mistake, he just knew that he couldn't play the rest of the piece or any other piece correctly. The boy is very intelligent, even precocious for his age. He knows what his problems are. Lately, we've been discussing the real reason that he behaves as he does. My lessons with him are divided about equally between psychoanalysis and playing violin. I am so happy that I've broken the ice with him and we're making progress. One factor facilitates the whole procedure: He really, really loves playing his violin.

I hope that my two "case studies" will help you to understand your own daughter's behavior better.

From Benjamin K
Posted on April 15, 2008 at 9:07 AM

I am not convinced that the reason for such crying outbursts are entirely (if at all) due to the child being "more sensitive". Instead, this may well be the result of the reaction a child gets when it has these outbursts. Pauline's experience would seem to suggest that there is at least some element of that.

When I was a little kid I used to cry not for being criticised but when I didn't get what I wanted or when something didn't go the way I wanted it. Most parents seem to be able to identify this situation as a form of blackmail and deliberately ignore the crying then. This is what my parent did to me and it fixed the problem very soon. I only remember one such incident myself and the little I remember was the "What? They just walk away? What am I going to do now?" experience and that it caused me to stop crying.

Now, I wonder if the same approach might also work if a child starts to cry for what would at first sight seem to be a different and less selfish reason. At a closer look, one might consider crying because of criticism a more subtle form of crying when things don't go the way the child wants.

Maybe if everybody just walks away on her when she cries she'll stop the habit simply because she no longer get the convenient result that she will get her way.

On the other hand, it may also help to phrase requests differently. For example, instead of "ok, but in this bar you were too fast, can you play this a little slower please?" you might say "I play this like so: (demonstration of slow play), can you try to play it this way, too?", likewise when she makes an error, you could perhaps talk about how you learned the piece yourself and say "when I learned this I always had this problem in this bar" and explain how you worked to fix the problem eventually and that it was hard work, then ask if she can explain which passages she felt were challenging herself, if she then misses some, you could ask "what about this bar, this note?". In other words, you may want to try to encourage her to discover the mistakes herself, make it look like it was her own idea to find and fix the problems. Of course this will be more difficult to do in practise than it sounds in theory but it may be worthwhile trying.

From Karen Allendoerfer
Posted on April 15, 2008 at 10:38 AM

Benjamin, I think it's kind of a mix in my daughter's case. I think you're right on about helping her discover mistakes herself. To me that is one of the essences of effective practicing. One I didn't really have a handle on until I was an adult--maybe still don't.

One thing that usually works with her, and with her friends in the Saturday music school, is if I play something wrong and ask them to find the mistake. I did it once in the Saturday music school when they had a substitute teacher who hadn't worked with little kids much before who was telling them to "be more careful with the intonation." They had no idea what to do with that suggestion. Then I played "Are you sleeping" with an exaggeratedly low 2 (that was the most common error, made by most of them) and asked the class what was wrong with it. They all could tell and were excited to be able to point it out when I did it. My daughter too.

But in general, I find that it's difficult for most adults *not* to immediately leap to the conclusion that she's being a manipulative little drama queen trying to get a rise out of them by crying "on purpose."

I had a somewhat similar temperament as a child, and in fact I still cry pretty easily, and so I'm trying to use that experience to bring some compassion to the situation rather than just make the standard unhelpful assumptions that were so often made about me.

Pauline, I agree with Benjamin that your case studies do illustrate some interesting and helpful points. The reaction of the adult makes a big difference in how the whole situation goes. Your use of humor, and my daughter's karate sensei's, both seem to point to a possible way forward.

What doesn't work is taking the kid's reaction too seriously, in the sense of letting yourself get correspondingly wound up by it and demanding that it stop immediately before you can move on. Usually if you just hand her a kleenex and otherwise ignore it, it extinguishes itself in 5 minutes or less. What turns it into a full-fledged fit is peppering her with a bunch of questions and/or demands to get her to stop crying. Kind of like this (compressed for brevity, but the emotional crescendo is essentially the same):

"What do you want to do? Do you want to play Lightly Row again or Go Tell Aunt Rhody?" (tears) "Okay, do you want to go to the bathroom and get a hold of yourself?" (more tears) "Well, we obviously can't do anything when you're crying!" (wailing begins) "Do you just want to put the violin away??!!" (no!! followed by more wailing and some shrieking) "If you're going to cry like this in your lessons, maybe you can't take lessons anymore! You should just quit!" (now the fit is fully launched and won't be over for at least another 15 minutes). More than one pair of eyes turns to me despairingly and/or accusingly. As the mommy I'm apparently now expected to pull a rabbit out of my magic hat and make the fit instantly disappear. I, in turn, feel a strong urge to flee the premises.

Anne, I like your suggestion that I be "candid" with future potential teachers, and I wasn't planning to be anything else. But I'm not always very good at mixing candor and tact. I'm concerned that candor might scare the teacher off.

From Benjamin K
Posted on April 15, 2008 at 1:14 PM

Karen, I didn't mean to suggest she was doing it "on purpose". Instead I think this happens on a subconscious level.

From Wiebke Nazareth
Posted on April 15, 2008 at 1:33 PM

Hi Karen, please excuse my poor English, but I felt I wanted to share my own experience with you. We have 3 kids, now 18, 15 and almost 14. We gave our youngest daughter a violin for her 4th birthday and she started in a Suzuki group at school. She thought that was a horrible experience, although the teacher begged us to "force" her to practise and go on, because in her eyes our daughter showed some exceptional talent. We don't believe in this kind of education and let her do what she wanted. So she happily put the violin away. When she was 8 she asked for it again. This time, we searched for a privat student teacher because she had made some remarks about the "scratching" in the group lesson hurting her ears ;-) and this time she took off like a rocket. In the meantime she has studied with Europe's most outstanding violin teachers and we are preparing our move to New York because she so much wants to continue her studies there. Since all this is her own wish and she puts a lot of effort in it, we ofcourse support her, wherever we can, although this move to another continent is a real "tour de force".
Similar story with my eldest, who had his first cello lesson at 4, only to proclaim at age 6 that he "doesn't want to sit with a piece of wood between his legs any more". Fine, we accepted it. He was 12 when he finally decided that he couldn't live without his cello and now is considering to become a professional musician. My middle-son is an aspiring pianist, he is the one who refuses to "dress up" for concerts. So what? If he feels good on stage with one red and one blue shoe - that's fine with me! I love the story about your daughter and the tight tights!! Yes, she has character - way to go! I think you do best just listening to your child. She will know what's best for her! Have you considered other instruments for her? Maybe the violin is not her thing, maybe she is a wood-wind person or a brass person? Maybe she too is disturbed by the group lesson. Some people are teamworkers, some are not, who knows.
All the best, Wiebke

From Anne Horvath
Posted on April 16, 2008 at 4:26 PM

Karen, I have had many parents really lay it on the line for me. Candor is so necessary!!! Things like ADD, dyslexia, a beloved relative passing, a pet passing, etc., even Drama Queen tendencies, really need to be explained.

As a teacher, I wouldn't mind a Dramatic Crier at all. (Actually, I have several right now). But I would want to be warned (insert smiley face here).

From Man Wong
Posted on April 16, 2008 at 6:54 PM

Karen,

Your daughter sounds not too far off from my own soon-to-be-11-yo. She too is rather "sensitive", especially in the past, though she has steadily matured over the last few years and are a bit less prone to crying (or reacting in other unhealthy ways) nowadays -- but still, it does not take a lot for tears and such to well up for her.

RE: the violin and lessons, perhaps you might wish to search out for a thoroughly Suzuki private teacher for her, ie. one who has thoroughly adopted the underlying Suzuki philosophy (as strongly encouraged in the seminal book "Nurtured by Love" and also his subsequent, more philosophical book whose title escapes me now), not just one who uses the "method" books and a rather formulaic approach to the method.

Given our recent dialog on topics like faith and ethics and such, I suspect the true Suzuki approach might well suit your own view on the matter while also being the kind of approach your daughter might find best for her. Just remember that not everyone who claims to use the Suzuki method is really a true Suzuki teacher -- though I guess I should probably qualify that w/ "IMHO" of course. :-)

In any case, hope it all works out well for you and your daughter...

Much blessings...

_Man_

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