Another Practice Sandwich
I call them “Practice Sandwiches.”
A “Practice Sandwich” is a sort of practice hack or strategy that intersperses a specific task throughout one’s practice session, breaking up a big chunk of work into smaller bites. This could be an entire piece of music that is interwoven in between other tasks, or it could be a short gnarly passage that needs extra attention. The idea is each spurt of practice is short and intense, but that we return to the job over and over again during a single practice session. “The specific task is the bread and in between we have other stuff: bacon, lettuce, tomato or peanut butter and jelly or turkey and cheese.” The kids always look at me like I’m crazy. “You know, this isn’t how a sandwich works, Miss Amy,” some smart-mouthed kid will always say. “This is too much bread.”
Ah, well. There are other names for this practice trick. Some pedagogues call it Intermittent or Interleaved Practice. Then there’s a whole industry around structuring one’s workday around a similar concept called “Pomodoro Technique” named after the tomato-looking timer used to organize one’s tasks into timed sessions. Call it what you want, the idea is the same: small chunks of focused work intentionally interspersed with other activities.
Practice Sandwiches are nothing new in my teaching life. Particularly when a kid is stuck on a piece or a particular passage, the strategy of lots of short bursts with the problem scattered throughout every practice session often pushes the student over the wall. Cognitively, the reason why Practice Sandwiches are effective is because every time we go away from and then return to a task, our brains either must relocate an existing mental pathway or it builds a new one. This works magic to secure the skill or knowledge, reinforcing both cognitive and muscle memory. In addition, the break between tasks helps keep our perspective and energy fresh. Kind of like a vacation to Hawaii will recharge a flagging spirit. Ask any Educational Psychologist. While we might call this learning tool by different names, Practice Sandwiches work.
A typical piano Practice Sandwich around here might look something like this:
After Spring Break this year, I found myself assigning lots of these Practice Sandwiches in hopes we could get recital pieces ready to go. In fact, at the last performance class of the year, Practice Sandwiches were all the chatter. “Well, did Amy make you do a Practice Sandwich too?” I overheard one kid saying to another. This was so much on their minds that the feedback after students’ performances basically came down to two things: “You need better dynamics.” And “You should try a Practice Sandwich.” Pretty good advice, I’d say.
Advice that I have needed to take to heart these last few months. It is almost second nature by now to live, breathe and work Practice Sandwiches in my ordinary life: Swim—Read—Emails—Practice—Breakfast—Practice—Laundry—Practice—Writing—Practice—Teach—Rehearsal—Walk—Dinner—Read—Yada, Yada, Yada. But lately the concept of Practice Sandwiches has taken on a whole new meaning, 2023 being the year of the Practice Sandwich, I have decided. I live, breathe, work and teach practice sandwiches all day every day, the makings of my entire life stuffed between layers of bread. The problem is that recently my daily Practice Sandwiches are a tasteless mess, the bread is moldy, the peanut butter doesn’t spread, the jelly is clumpy. Or the tomatoes are tasteless; there is too much lettuce. Or not enough, depending on the day.
Or maybe I should just blame my substandard sandwiches on bad plumbing. Some time ago, we discovered that our nearly 90-year-old galvanized pipes were rusted, compromising the quality of our water supply. While this might offer a solution for a diet deficient in iron (“Miss Amy, you must be very strong!” one young student told me), the visual of brown water coming out of the faucet is hard to forget. Enter the Pipe Redecoration Project, as I decided to reframe it. Every single pipe on our property had to be replaced. Translation: days and days of plumbers, noise, dirt, noise, folks in the crawl space and basement and digging in the yard, noise, two distressed cats locked in our bedroom, noise, no water, noise, holes in the wall and ceiling, and noise. Did I mention the noise?
And, as you might imagine, this is a super cheap redecoration project.
The fact is that general life survival and happiness (not to mention sanity) means learning to be resourceful when all the bread in the house has gone stale. Turns out, one cannot practice the piano when there are men under the floorboard in the crawl space (too loud!). There is no reason to think about housework when the residual dirt from two four-foot holes in the yard is constantly being dragged into the house. One cannot easily cook in a kitchen without water. Or do laundry. Nor can one read quietly when a hole is being drilled through the hallway wall. Listening to music is out of the question. Even listening to my own spinning thoughts becomes dicey.
Perhaps this is where the practice in Practice Sandwich comes in. Because last week my world became not so much a tightly constructed sandwich as an exercise in grabbing windows of time while babysitting plumbers. Take Tuesday: There was the chunk of practice time before the crew arrived in the morning, the reading hour when the guys were at lunch, the precious yoga minutes when I could hear them in the crawlspace and knew they wouldn’t walk in on my downward facing dog. I grabbed lunch when they were working on the bathroom and taught lessons when they were digging holes outside. I caught up with correspondence. I pulled weeds in the backyard. I stockpiled desk jobs—papers to file, music to order—things I could do anytime. And I practiced breathing deeply.
Having said that, the cats and I also spent a great deal of time climbing our brightly colored walls.
Sometimes when faced with a difficult situation, I ask myself “OK, what am I supposed to practice here?” The last few months have brought some obvious answers: patience, flexibility, resourcefulness, creativity for sure, but there have been some more subtle lessons to learn as well: stamina, perseverance, discipline, good old-fashioned grit and optimism. I won some internal battles here and there and lost just as many along the way. But, of course, that’s a Practice Sandwich too. We intersperse our better selves with our shadow versions with regular frequency. We come in and out of our practices with grace and elegance, or often we simply make do with less-than-ideal ingredients and hope for the best.
“That’s not how a sandwich works,” I can hear the kids saying to me now. Maybe not, but as the semester winds to a close, as we put away recital pieces and set summer lesson schedules, as the twelve plumbers get into four trucks and drive down the street for the final time, as the water runs clear and clean from all our faucets, as the cats creep timidly out of the bedroom closet, as I sweep floors and replant flower beds and wipe plaster dust off the bookshelves, it’s the best I’ve got.
Work, holiday, work. Dirty floors, clean water, dirty floors. Noise, silence, noise. For at least the ten thousand time, I remind myself once again, it’s all practice.