Tuesday, April 22, 2008

How's Jillian doing?

Remember last week, when she was voicing some discouragement over her progress? And we agreed that she just needed to practice more, since her assignments were getting harder? Perhaps you're wondering how that is going.

We (her loving and doting parents) sort of decided to laissez-faire the situation... she is the one who decided she needed to practice 30 minutes a day, so we decided to let the 6 year-old police herself on this. We'd just check in periodically to see how that was going. She is very bright and determined and all that, but you can guess how that went. There was very little piano practice (at least for her) over the week. Near the end of the week, my wife and I were beginning to question whether or not she was still interested in piano.

She is. She probably put in a couple hours' worth over the weekend, all of her own accord. And she's was ready for practice yesterday, and got a good report from her teacher. But this still bears watching... and we still will try to straddle the fine line between responsibly directing her practice habits (the risk being that if we are too regimented on this, we'd drive her away from it), and allowing her to learn and develop at her own pace. At this time, we're more prone toward the latter, mainly because we trust her teacher to let us know if we need to step it up. If the teacher is pleased with her progress, so are we.

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