Posted on March 20, 2011 by Liz Duncan in Musicality Miscellaneous - Musicality/Phrasing
For encouraging students to practice, having a point system seems to help them understand their progress better. And they are rewarded for it.
For each lesson a student can earn up to 25 points. For each of two etudes prepared for a lesson, a student can earn up to 8 points. For the piece they are working on, up to 9 pts.
8 + 8 + 9 = 25
Students are generally supposed to get 20+ pts. per lesson and certainly an average of 80 pts over four lessons. Some do much better than this on a regular basis.
For five lines of an etude a student might get most of the notes but cannot play straight through it without stopping. After many weeks they understand that this might earn them only 6 points. The following week they might add the bowing correctly and be able to get through it completely, with perhaps some rough edges, but all in all it sounds good. That would be 7.5 pts., perhaps.
When a student first arrives for the lesson we play an etude together and I give them a preliminary score, say 6 out of 8. They can only improve on that score as they play it alone. We do this for each etude and then for the piece. Often a smaller section of the etude or piece is chosen for them to play for points.
One caveat is that often a student will play something poorly. Clearly they haven't practiced it much, and if they also did not write any fingerings in a point is subtracted from their score as well. This encourages reading over the music with a pencil, and editing as needed. In fact, a student is not "allowed" to play a stretched position note unless it is written in. Second and third fingers are encouraged to be written in. And often, the shifts are marked with highlighter or a pencilled slash mark.
This has all developed over many years of teaching. Starting small pays off and you won't be overwhelmed.
Students who earn 22 or more pts. in a lesson may pick an item from a basket of dollar store items.
Birthdays are celebrated with a "Symphony" bar tied up with ribbon.