Nearly there now…
Hello! It’s been a few months since I last wrote on here. For myself and my family they have been full to the brim with trips and transitions and some rather intense toddlering, and I’ve felt my mind full and body tired as a result. The title of this blog refers to the season of spring, which I think we are all eagerly awaiting!
Even when I’m not particularly busy, I am a person who reads several books at once, and works on several projects at once, and thinks around a million vaguely related thoughts every minute, so just going about my day can be quite a tiring business. I’m trying to get better at that enviable skill of FOCUSSING ON ONE THING AT A TIME- and, crucially- when I need to, not when my brain suddenly decides to learn all about an obscure extinct language at 11pm when I would prefer to go to sleep… Anyway, all this is leading me to the point of this blog which is about perseverance and motivation in relation to learning.
I recently had a flute lesson for the first time in 21 years (I think being able to say this officially makes me a middle-aged person) and boy was it a reality check! I stopped playing when I was 15 after a change of teacher put me off the whole business. My first teacher had been wonderful; warm, playful, accepting of my distractibility and extremely hypermobile fingers and the strange positions they would take while playing, and able to make the hard graft of frequent practice feel less of a chore and more of a hobby. The new teacher was the opposite of this, so I started skipping lessons (not a sensible choice, and one I still feel bad about!) and eventually gave up. Anyway, for at least twelve years now I’ve been talking about taking it up again, and this month I finally got round to it. I knew it would be hard, and that I’d need to start from the beginning again, but in truth I had completely forgotten just how many elements there are to playing effectively. Even without the fact I now have to wear wrist and thumb splints to even hold the thing, I also have to re-learn how to stand in the right way, how to breathe in the right way, how to manipulate the muscles of mouth with great precision, and how to read music notation all over again. It’s A LOT. And at this point I’m not sure how much I want to do it! It was so much easier in my head, where I had imagined feeling the joy in music and a sense of accomplishment right from the off.
I’m glad I did it though, partly because I think experiencing and having to accept the way things are rather than the way you’d like them to be is necessary for growth, and because it helps me relate more acutely to how kids who struggle with certain skills must feel a lot of the time. Writing is a similarly complex business, involving physical strength and stamina, short and long term memory, imagination, cognitive agility, confidence, and all manner of other elements we may not notice. And while I knew this already, having recently been through the emotional experience of trying to do something really hard has made me even more aware of how writing might feel for those who struggle with it.
The difference between the two scenarios is, I believe, motivation and autonomy. I have the choice to persevere with my flute lessons or not, depending how motivated I feel by the possibility of musical mastery (or at least, being able to pipe a few basic pieces!) Children in school are expected to learn how to write regardless of how motivated they feel, and their reluctance is sometimes framed as a form of wilful non-compliance, or perhaps a weakness of character, or a ‘lack of grit’. I don’t think is helpful, as it only reinforces their already low self-esteem and makes them feel even more hopeless. A better approach, I believe, is to tune in to what makes them tick, find out where their strengths lie, and make the process as fun, appealing and playful as possible. Give them a sense of purpose, and let them find their own motivation. Most kids know that they need to learn to write, but they find the hardness of it too overwhelming, the pressure to ‘catch up’ and ‘keep up’ with an inappropriate curriculum too oppressive. It puts them off the whole business, and I can completely understand why!
When I work with children who struggle with writing, we don’t do much writing to begin with. We do other things, things they already enjoy and see the point in. I let them show me how good they are at the things they are expert in, how well they are able to learn when they feel motivated. Then we might gradually involve some writing into our sessions, through play (e.g. making up paper games) and shared projects. And it may sound like it takes longer than the traditional approach, but give me a few months and I am confident you’ll see progress and, even better, a greater willingness to persevere through the hardness.
I’m hopeful that some spring sunshine is just around the corner and that the daffodils will bloom despite their recent battering. Nature, of which we are a part, is both sensitive and resilient, so we’ll just have to wait and see.