Toughen Up, Kids

By Scott Coulter So I've been codirecting a jazz camp this week for the school where I teach piano. It's a weeklong camp, with about 15 students. Most of them are beginners, while a few are on the cusp of being in the intermediate stage in their musical development. Already, we've had a few quit because they felt they weren't up to the challenge. And this has got me to thinking about the idea of facing challenges in a broader context. I see a lot of parallels, actually, between the process of learning how to play jazz and living with diabetes. Both involve great patience, both involve high tolerance for "not knowing," and both present a great many challenges that must be met, processed, and overcome if one hopes to move forward. So let me start with the challenges of learning how to play jazz. Improvisation is the heart and soul of jazz, and learning how to do it is not easy. Improvisation means creating music in the moment, and to do it well requires a staggering level of musical understanding and applied music theory along with years and years of ear-training and development. One of the things that makes jazz improvisation such a challenging thing to learn is that you have to spend huge amounts of time "failing." You can memorize the theory all you want, but to turn that dry, academic knowledge into readily available information that can be instantly recalled and freely manipulated you have to simply dive in and "do it." And the first 1,000 times you do it, you'll hit mor...
Source: Diabetes Self-Management - Category: Diabetes Authors: Source Type: blogs