Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I fear my entire life these days could be summarized in three words: Lather, Rinse. Repeat.

Of course, this could be said of any musician, or certainly any person of practice. Like Buddhist monks creating their mandalas out of sand, every day we show up to our instruments, or our meditation cushions, or our yoga mats. We work through scales, rehearse thorny passages, read through new repertoire. We sit and watch our breath, trying to quiet our monkey minds. We make our way from downward facing dog to plank to savasana. And then the next day, we do it again. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

This month has felt like a particular repetition of behaviors and events and routines around here. There was a weekend with Quintessence choral concerts. Another in Santa Fe with the SF Symphony. I played a house chamber concert with friends. The annual Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta filled the skies and crowds jammed the highways and restaurants around town. I picked up the same cold/allergy combination that I had last October—and the October before that—with its all-too-familiar symptoms. Seasons, in general, have their own rhythms and rituals: the trip to the farm stand to pick up pumpkins and pansies and roasted green chile. The first night with the comforter on the bed. The first morning I put on a pair of socks or need an extra layer while I drink my coffee and read. The first pot of turmeric chickpea soup, the first apple cranberry crisp, the first dinner of roasted vegetables over lentils: fall comfort food. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Which is all another way of thinking about practice boxes, really.

Practice Boxes are the method of practice accountability in my studio. In students’ practice notebooks, we take down detailed lists of assignments and practice steps, make notes about fixing wrong notes or rhythms, scribble reminders about listening for exaggerated dynamics in the slow movement or clean pedaling in the coda. But above all, we draw practice boxes.

In a typical week, I require five practice days, or five practice boxes. If we know we are going to miss the next lesson for some reason, students expect ten practice boxes (This inevitably makes the Little Ones whine and groan, “Ten boxes! Miss Amy, it’s too many!” No matter how many times I try to explain calendar mathematics, they are convinced I am cheating them somehow.). And sometimes during longer holidays or vacations, we negotiate the number of boxes. But generally, week in week out, five. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

This is the easy part. It’s the filling in of the practice boxes where things get messy, because what students are required to write in the practice boxes is a moving target. At the very least, kids are supposed to put in the practice day or date: October 18 or Saturday. March 3 or Thursday. Except with the smallest, youngest children I do not smile at an X or a checkmark or other random markings in practice boxes. I want evidence of specific days of the week. There is an obvious reason for this, or so it seems to me. If I know a student didn’t practice the two days after their lesson (the most important days to practice, in my opinion), even if they managed their five practice days, it gives me some insight why they might be struggling with something we had worked on in their lesson. Specific practice days recorded in the chart tells me this.

And there’s another reason, writing down specific days tells both of us—student and teacher—what went wrong if the practice week didn’t add up to the required five days. “Oh,” I missed Friday and Saturday,” a kid will say. “I can’t remember why. Oh wait! I was sick. That’s why I didn’t get my five boxes.” Mystery solved. Vague checkmarks in practice boxes give us none of this information.

Then there are the extra rotating things I want in practice boxes: sight-reading pages (No, kid, trust me. You really can’t remember accurately where you are in the sightreading book unless you write down your finished pages.), scale or chord progression keys, or other fun items. Sometimes I ask students to write down total practice times every day, but that depends on the kid and the situation. For years, I had one student who chose to write down starting and ending practice times in every box: 4:47-5:32 or whatever. As he got older, these times got later. I would sometimes see things like 9:57-10:39. Is this at night? I’d ask Max. Yep, he’d say, and shrug. Good grief, kid, I’d think. Go to bed.

Some students (clearly my favorites) are always good about practice box accountability: Thursday. Saturday. Sunday…Bean counters, I call them. If I’d ask them to record what they ate for breakfast in their practice charts, they’d probably do so. Happily. Other kids I fight with, refusing to give into their laziness about filling in practice boxes. “I practiced,” they tell me, “I just didn’t write it down.” Here’s the thing, buddy, I reliably respond, Thanks to your empty practice chart, I know nothing about your practice week. You are handicapping me here and I don’t like it.

Every kid I teach knows I hate empty practice boxes, even if they’ve practiced. This doesn’t mean I never see empty practice boxes. Sad, but true.

But despite the struggles, and the endless, relentless conversation about practice boxes—heated as it might sometimes be—it is worth it. It is worth it because it is endless and relentless. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Practice boxes and all their strengths and weakness give us a place every single week to talk about practicing: What happened? What didn’t? This is only a good thing.

Research has shown that even basic forms of accountability (like those good old practice boxes) increase our willingness to stick with habits, diets, exercise programs. Something about the act of writing or recording our actions makes us more motivated to do the action in the first place. Which bring me to the beauty of streaks.

Streaks—as the name implies—are unbroken patterns of behavior. The science behind why we are motivated to maintain a streak is pretty obvious and not really that controversial. And streaks—heaven help us—are EVERYWHERE. Video games lure kids back with the prompt: “Don’t break your streak!” Educational apps like Duolingo use streaks to keep folks learning French or Mandarin. Sport teams try not to break winning streaks. Even Jerry Seinfeld uses streaks. Streaks are EVERYWHERE.

I must confess that here in the piano studio we have been sucked into the streak magic. After years of nudging, encouraging, and sometimes yelling at certain kids to always practice the day after their piano lesson (how did I know they didn’t? The damn practice boxes), I finally resorted to the manipulation of a streak competition.

If said students would maintain a day-after-their-piano-lesson-practice-day streak, we’d keep track of the total weeks of their individual streaks. At the end of the year, the kid with the longest day-after-their-lesson-practice-day streak wins. Perhaps a cheap pedagogical trick on my part, but here’s the rub: it totally works.  

My “streak” kids are so into this. The first question they ask when they come into their lessons is: did anyone break the streak yet? No one wants to be the one to break the streak (crowd manipulation at work here). And as the weeks pile up, students are motivated by their own growing number of weeks. Even better still, of course, is what I see: these kids are better prepared than ever (the magic of always practicing the day after their lesson!) and much less likely to ever miss one of their five practice boxes. Bottom line: starting a practice week on the very first day after their lesson makes it easier to get all the boxes filled. I should have succumbed to the life-changing magic of streaks years ago.

Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if everyone had practice boxes, a sort of daily accountability coach or spiritual teacher prodding us into our best selves. Because here’s the thing: I think if we search ourselves, we all know what should go in our practice boxes. I need to account for laps swam, or minutes on the yoga mat or meditation cushion. I need a gentle push to make sure I’m putting in daily writing time, or remembering to check in with those I love but don’t regularly see. I need a system for tracking house and garden chores, sure, but also for making sure I fill my diet with fruits, vegetables and plants, and not too much gluten or chocolate. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

And so it goes: the leaves fall, the harvest moon rises, the days shrink, the darkness creeps into our hours. We build our mandalas in the sand and fill in our practice boxes. And every day, we begin again.