Still Learning the 3 R's - Lesson #4,217,896 in Reframing

According to my mother, I was 3 when my sisters started piano lessons and I immediately started begging to learn as well. Ever the stubborn and persuasive one, this went on for a year til she finally relented and then had to convince the piano teacher that I could do it even though she felt I was too little and didn't actually know my whole alphabet yet. I didn't know this at the time, but my parents didn't really have tons of extra cash flow, so, having 3 kids in piano lessons was going to be a stretch. One that involved a loan from my uncle to help pay for lessons for a few years - he had high hopes of his kids eventually playing at Carnegie Hall and was happy to encourage this with us as well. When we've talked about it, my mom said her only hopes were for me to learn time management, discipline and how to commit to something. Not really sure that happened as the next decade and a half was unbelieveably painful and resulted in a lot of whining, complaining, stalling, getting yelled at and generally hating the piano. My initial enthusiasm didn't last once it got to the practice part of it all.

Apparently the term "use it or lose it" applies well to me - for someone who played piano for 14+ years, I remember shockingly little which has become painfully obvious now that the kids are learning to play. They too begged to learn the piano and it took awhile before we agreed to it. KC has, for the most part done, pretty okay with this. He's not in love with it, but generally knows that if he puts in the time, he can move on to something more fun once he's finished, and he likes learning some new songs he's heard from his friends or on Spotify. QS is not having any of that. 15 minutes of practice time regularly takes us 45+ minutes and is miserable for all parties. We haven't let them give up yet, largely because I apparently share my mom's same masochistic desire for the kids to learn committment and discipline and my husband believes it'll be a good foundation for any future musical instrument they may learn, but god, it has been painful.

I started reading Adam Grant's Hidden Potential recently, and he brought up that there's a big difference in deliberate practice versus deliberate play and that in the latter, it's not about adding gimmicks to tedious tasks but "actually redesigning the task itself to make it both motivating and developmental." Kinda makes sense - when I tell myself I have to do something (like say try to be disciplined about writing each week), I have a really hard time doing it, but when I can get myself to the "I want to..." stage, it's a lot easier.

When KC had his surgery last year, I needed to test his eyes to check if they were healing properly and if he was getting better at perceiving depth. We also had to go through the monotonous task of testing him on his times table every day. That led to the creation of "Nerd Ball" - it literally is me chucking a rubber ball at his head to see if he can catch it before it hits him in the face while quizzing him on what 7X8 was. It's actually still one of his favorite games that he asks to play regularly. QS was a little put off for awhile that I didn't come up with a game for her (though we did create an addition/subtraction version of Nerd Ball). She finally got her own version this year when she was struggling to recognize the difference between quarters, dime, nickels and pennies and having to learn to count them for school. Definite signs of how the world has evolved and their lack of use/exposure has made this basic skill much more difficult to learn. Enter "Nerd Bank" - I pull a handful of coins out and she counts them up, and if she gets it right, she gets to add those coins to her piggybank. Bear in mind, the coins originated from her piggybank to start so I've managed to outsmart her there in thinking she's earning something new, but she really, really likes this game and will choose it over iPad time easily.

Still haven't figured out how to apply this to the piano yet (or my continuing to stall on an article I've been dragging my feet on for months) but let's add this to another one of those lessons that I have to teach my kids that I don't really want to learn myself.