Making practice easier and more fun with The Undertow
The tide comes in and goes out on a predictable schedule that allows those in maritime professions to organize their activity. They have to learn when to wait.
One of my most important tasks as a teacher is to prevent unnecessary frustration.
That implies that some frustration is necessary, which is true. But the feeling of losing ground (“I could do this perfectly yesterday, I swear!”) can be avoided.
It’s totally normal to have a warmup or review phase in any activity. I teach my students to do this in a systematic way that we call The Undertow. It provides a strong foundation for successful practice and progress. Here’s how it works:
A student learns part of a new piece of music in eight short steps at a piano lesson on a Tuesday afternoon. Each step is mastered before the next one is begun, which may require repetition. We carefully calibrate repetition according to our Comfort Scale and make use of backchaining. It’s normal for some steps to take longer than others. Imagine this new material as a wave coming into shore on the beach. Total time spent: ten minutes.
When my student goes home to practice on her own on Tuesday afternoon after the lesson (the most important time of the week to practice, by the way), instead of starting at step 8 or step 9 (in other words, picking up where she left off), she should start back over at step 1. Imagine the water pulling back from the tide line (the undertow).
Pretending she’s never seen the piece before, she will progress from step 1 to step 8. She will find that this time, it will take less than ten minutes -- maybe only five minutes! That means that there is now time and energy to move on to the next step with this particular activity, or move on to another activity in the same practice session. She gets all the way to step 13, perhaps learning another couple of measures of the song. Imagine the next wave coming in and going a little farther than the last one as the tide comes in.
At the next practice session on Wednesday, my student will again start with step 1. This time, it may take only three minutes to get to step 8 and another five minutes to get to step 13. That leaves a few more minutes of useful attention to tackle the next few steps. The undertow has drawn the water back and then forward once again.
At the next practice session on Thursday, the student may find that steps 1 and 2 have become so automatic that they can be combined into one. Now, it’s only taking one minute to get to step 8, and two more minutes to get to step 13. The waves keep rolling into shore.
Using The Undertow, a student will develop confidence and fluency in her playing and decrease the resistance to each new practice session and to practicing in general.
This strategy also students get back into the flow after some time off from practicing due to a vacation, illness, or just plain life. It is also a great way to ease into each new lesson or practice session and help them warm up their fingers on the instrument each week.
What’s more, The Undertow helps us build momentum and develop our attention span. We’re building success upon success, which gives us more energy to deal with challenges as they arise. The process of learning isn’t sapping our energy — it’s generating energy, for we can enjoy the fruits of our labor even as we are moving forward.
The alternative is one that you probably know all too well if you have spent time learning a difficult skill: Try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, get mad, go home. We channel our determination into pushing against something new and challenging, letting all the air out of the balloon at once until we have nothing left.
The Undertow may seem slow and superfluous. However, the longer it takes, the more it was needed. It’s unbelievable that the thing we mastered yesterday takes five minutes to re-learn today, but that’s how our brains work. Only through patient repetition over the course of days will the material become automatic. We can’t just will ourselves to that point.
Eventually, the whole piano piece will flow beautifully and seamlessly on the first try for my student. At that point, it is ready for performance. The only frustration my student will have experienced in the learning process is the slight delay in learning new material each day while she runs through the steps of yesterday’s material using The Undertow strategy. It’s a small price to pay for the confidence and momentum she’s earned. She’s eager to learn the next piece, and there’s no stopping her.