April 2, 2005 - Saturday
Jeremy's been taking cello lessons for about a month and a half now and for the most part things are going all right. He seems to enjoy his lessons a lot and likes his teacher, Kate, and I think she makes him feel good and proud. At his age, I think that's really the most important thing. We have yet to find, however, a routine for daily practicing. I suppose that's partly our fault for not being more assertive about just doing it. But it is something of a balancing act between his making any real progress learning to play and us not being too aggressive and taking the fun out of the cello for Jeremy. Unfortunately, he often says 'no' when we ask if he wants to play his cello (I suppose we ought to do a better job framing it). So far, I'd say we're lucky if he practices more than a couple of times between lessons and that means his progress is really rather slow. Of course, that's to be expected from a three-year-old with fingers hardly strong enough to press down on the strings, but I would think a certain about of progress would be necessary to keep his interest. He needs to learn to play more than just the "Ants" song (pizzicato on open strings) or he's going to get bored.

All that is general stuff from the last six weeks of cello. Over the last couple of days there has been something a little stranger happening, although I tend to think it has more to do with Jeremy than with Jeremy and his cello. Last night when his mother sat down with Jeremy to help him practice, she says he purposefully was doing things incorrectly; things like, slouching in his seat, playing with the bow vertically on the strings rather than horizontally, and putting his hands in the wrong place. She tried to correct him, but he insisted that he was doing it the right way. His mother, having never been to a lesson, had just enough self-doubt for him to hold his own. He tried the same thing with me tonight, although curiously he wasn't quite so obvious. Since I have been to all his lessons, I had none of it and eventually told him to put away his cello. It's a balancing act, but there wasn't any balancing needed with that stuff because if he's going down that road for good the lessons won't last long. Fortunately, I don't think it was about the cello.


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