I go through cycles in my 5-Finger Position assignments. Recently its been all about rhythms, but lately I have flirting with minor-key positions. My students are introduced to minor positions early on, when we first explore D position on all white notes. "Does this sound different than C position?" I ask. Inevitably they describe minor positions by calling them "scary" or "sad" which, while being of rather limited imagination, does reinforce why we so often associate suspenseful or tearjerker movies with music in a minor key. While beginning students are first learning the notes of positions, I let them play both the major and minor forms of D and A, and this usually firmly establishes their life-long fascination with all things minor. After several weeks of playing both versions of D and A, I begin writing in their assignments, "Only happy positions," accompanied by the requisite smiley face. This often provokes groans, especially from my younger male students, who would happily play minor positions all day if I let them. "OK." I bargain, "You can play the minor positions for extra credit," thereby assuring we all win: I get them firmly secure in their grasp of major positions AND usually get extra practice of the minor positions as a bonus. They get to happily explore minor positions, feeling like they have gotten away with something illicit. And by taking minor positions away from their regular assignments for awhile, I can usually guarantee their enthusiasm when we return to focusing on minor keys some time later.

I think it is important not to confuse the issue by switching suddenly from major to minor keys too early in the process. Most kids need a lot ---and I mean A LOT--of time playing all the black and white major keys before they have developed the technical security and confidence to swing easily back and forth between major and minor. Because of that introduction to D and A minor way back in the beginning , students greet these two like old friends, but often the next step gets dicey unless I am careful. "What did you do to make it minor?" I ask. "Finger three moves down to a white note," they respond. The problem is that while that answer is correct for D and A minor, it won't get them very far, and shifting to C position quickly illustrates that misunderstanding. Students have to discover that finger three moves down a half-step, or one note. This starts to work better, but F always throws them for a loop, because F requires that we really understand that finger 3 and ONLY finger 3 moves. (If I had a dollar for every impatient student who tried to make natural the B-flat of F position thinking they were playing the minor, I could stop teaching and could retire to Hawaii.) D-flat position also throws up some challenges to the concept of the half-step moving down, because students don't naturally see that one quickly. G-flat is another one that is visually puzzling at first---all those black notes confuse students. All this is to say that, while teaching minor positions is an important part of working with 5-Finger Positions, they aren't as obvious to kids as they might seem to be, which is why it is important to wait until major keys can be done forward, backward, upside, in the dark, and with one's eyes closed before we even try to go there.

Years of trial and error have made me particular not only about how I introduce minors, but also about how I sequence the patterns for practicing. (Good teaching is 99% sequencing, I am convinced.) The following patterns are ordered as I assign them. Notice how many patterns swing back and forth between major and minor positions before I assign patterns using only minor positions. This is to ensure that students really do know how they got from major to minor and haven't just learned minor keys as a whole new set of positions. I want to make sure they see the connection between the two, and not that minors are an unrelated new world. To this end, I also have students spell, spell, and spell again individual positions, starting first with the major ones and asking EVERY time: "And how do we change it to minor?" "OK then, spell the minor position." If I have been lazy about the spelling work up until this point, I make up for it now.

31. Do Re Mi (Major)

Do Re Mi (Minor)

Do Re Mi Fa Sol Fa Mi Re Do (Major)

32. Do Re Mi Re (Major)

Do Re Mi Re (Minor)

Do Re Mi Fa Sol Fa Mi Re Do (Major)

(Note: played as one long pattern with no breaks in the legato or rhythm.)

33. Do Re Mi Fa Sol (Major)

Do Re Mi Fa Sol (Minor)

Do Re Mi Fa Sol Fa Mi Re Do (Major)

At this point I go back to old solfege patterns and familiar rhythmic patterns and concentrate solely on playing minors. See Recipes for Technique for ideas. Of course, creativity with articulations and dynamics is always encouraged.

I am a huge fan of big blank sketchbooks. At any given time, I have a half-dozen blank notebooks in use: one contains teaching notes, another serves as my practice journal, another holds recipes, and I carry still another everywhere to capture miscellaneous thoughts and ideas. My husband, on the other hand, likes the small moleskin notebooks to record all of his random information, and he teases me about the size of my sketchbooks. "Why do they have to be so big?" he asks, eyeing my pile of black spiral-bound sketchbooks. "My ideas are too grand to be contained on your tiny little pages," I retort, as he slips his admirably compact volume into his jacket pocket.

Not only do I swear by these big sketchbooks in my personal life, but I require that my students own and use theme for their practice assignments. This is, admittedly, because I have a lot to say when writing down assignments for students. I am fanatical about assigning specific practice steps. For example, a beginner working on a new piece might have the following assignment: play RH 3x, LH 3x, BH line 3 5x, then whole song BH 3x.

Or something that looks like: tap BH 1x, play RH 1x, LH 1x, BH 3x, repeat from beginning each step 1x.

An advanced student might have an assignment such as: Practice each section of the piece a different way every day: using metronome, hands separately, different rhythms, in phrases, etc.

This comes straight from my own practice journal, full of ideas about what is working and what needs to be done next. Keeping a journal reminds me of what I've already done, and what I might have neglected. It is a place to catch those brilliant, if infrequent, moments of insight while practicing, when suddenly it is perfectly clear what might fix a particular problem; it is a map of my learning process for every piece of music. For years, I was convinced I remembered these moments of enlightenment and the intentions I might have for the next day's work, but after years of keeping a practice journal, I know I was only fooling myself. It is amazing what I forget when I get up from the piano bench. It is quite startling to realize how painfully blank the slate might be every practice session if I don't have a means to catch my progress.

So, I have become compulsive about writing down Every-Specific-Practice-Step for students, and this teaching habit borders on both the obsessive and the dogmatic. I know this, of course, and find it a bit ironic given how laid-back I generally am. Compulsive behavior isn't really a problem with me; establishing and maintaining habits are more of a challenge. But because of this, perhaps, I am more conscious of how important it is for students to have a plan when they sit down at the piano to practice. Students with a set plan are more likely to feel a sense of accomplishment when they work, and practice plans make the whole ordeal more objective. Have you practiced all your assignments carefully? Yes or No? Sometimes I scribble this in the margins of student's assignment notebooks just to see if they are reading their practice plans. Certainly in my own life and work, I welcome anything that will make this nebulous art form more black and white. If I have a practice plan and complete it, I can, in good conscience, feel like my work is finished for the day. I find the same to be true for my students.

But to counter this controlling tendency, I encourage students of all levels to think about their own practice plans. "How should we practice this?" I routinely ask students. "We don't have time today for 'Waltz'. What should the practice plan be next week?" This is good for all of us: it gives the student more authority and ownership and requires them to think about what constitutes a reasonable practice plan for a given piece. Equally important is the fact that it starts to write my role and absolute authority out of the equation. As a teacher, I want this for my students: I want them to become independent musicians, not dependent upon my holding their hands through the learning process. But even on a more personal level I want this: if I can give them ownership over their own music-making the work gets easier for me as a teacher. It takes an enormous amount of energy to push and prod students along; it is no small thing to step back and just provide the healthy atmosphere for music-making without all of the energy coming from me. If I can allow them to make more of the decisions and make more of their own learning discoveries, I am a far better teacher at the end of the day. I'm also far less exhausted.

I was reminded of this just this week. For three years, I have been pushing and prodding Jake along. This has been necessary, or so I tell myself, in order to get this now 4th grader to the point where assignments are being learned accurately and thoroughly. Suddenly, he is taking off at a breathtaking speed, sailing through his pieces, where once it took him weeks to master even the simplest skill. This is thrilling for me, as you can imagine, and as I watch this unfold in front of me, I am deliberately trying to hand him the reins whenever possible. "So how I am supposed to practice that?" Jake asked me as I was writing down a new assignment this week. "Hmmm....how about you use your own brain and figure it out?" I suggested, "You write the practice plan and follow it." "Oh, good." Jake responded. "I like to use my brain. It makes me feel less like a robot."

If we accept for a moment that our real job is teaching life skills, not just music skills, then using one's own brain ought to be on the top of the list. Daily, hourly, I have to remind myself of this and relinquish control: stop jumping in to correct every small or large mistake, but allow students to stumble through and discover their own process in my presence. This doesn't mean I stop making my assignments specific, but it does remind me that there is a line to between healthy, appropriate guidance, and putting students more in charge of their work. These are contradictory ideas, to be sure, but there's a balance to be found in the tension between these practices, if we can only learn to embrace that grey area.

Occasionally, when I am faced with another big empty page to fill for a student, I feel a lot like a robot filling in the blanks. But when I am doing my best work, and being attentive to all the complex nuances built into the art of teaching, its a far cry from anything mechanical.

I say this with some trepidation, because last year we had a frost on May 6. Or so the woman working in my neighborhood nursery told me. I went there last weekend to buy seeds, trying to satisfy my hungry inner gardener with a cheap fix. "Don't even think about pruning back roses now. If it gets cold again, you could kill them. And wait before planting these seeds; it's just too early." This isn't what I wanted to hear, my fingers itching to get outside and dirty. However, I can start cutting back all the summer flowering bushes, I understand, which is enough to keep me out of trouble and away from the rose bushes and seed packages for a few weeks.

...All children are artists, and it is an indictment of our culture that so many of them lose their creativity, their unfettered imaginations, as they grow older. But they start off without self-consciousness as they paint their purple flowers, their anatomically impossible people, their thunderous, sulphurous skies. They don't worry that they may not be as good as Di Chirico or Bracque; they know intuitively that it is folly to make comparisons, and they go ahead and say what they want to say. What looks like a hat to a grownup may, to the child artist, be an elephant inside a boa constrictor. (p. 57)