Do you ever get so frustrated with obstacles in your practice sessions that even when you get it right, you still aren't happy? I have seen this very phenomenon in artists and musicians and in students and adults and even in my own husband and now... in my own four year old son...
This "perfectionism" is something that I think goes beyond just our surface level idea of perfectionism, but I can't quite figure it all out just yet.
While we have been homeschooling, I have been really working to observe my son more, especially his motivators and frustrators and his zone-focus areas aaaaaand his emotional and physical responses. While most things go well (and I will share more about why I think those things are going well, I am extremely interested in what has been keeping things from going well...
For example, yesterday, my son was having some independent playtime in his bedroom, listening to his Yoto audio player. I had the monitor with me so I could watch without disturbing him. At first, all was well. He was just sing-song playing with his stuffed animals, pretending someone was saving some day! Then, he found a recorder, like the musical instrument recorder. The recorder was in two pieces and usually, it is so easy for him to put these two pieces together, but for whatever reason, on this particular day, he couldn't get them together the way he wanted. I watched as my four year old began to slam the pieces together and twist with greater force each time. His face began to contort and his cheeks turned red as he became more and more frustrated with this process. I could see his anger building, but he kept trying (enter super proud mama for this persistence factor!). Then, he finally got it just right! I thought he would delight in his success after all that hard work! But, instead of playing the instrument now that it was put together correctly, he looked at the recorder for just a second in his hand with disdain and threw it across the room.
(This was especially interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is that he never acts like this in front of me. Is this how he feels when frustrated but has enough self-control in front of me that he doesn't do this? Or was this just a unique situation?)
What had just happened?!?! Why was he still so upset even after he achieved his goal? If it were me, I would have proclaimed "I did it!" (at least, I think I would have!). But I have a hypothesis... I think his frustration at his own perceived inability to "get it right" the first time, this easy task that he usually can do so well so quickly, was so great that it outweighed the success of completing the task. It's something I haven't fully flushed out yet, but in my mind, there are themes of grit and perseverance and self-imposed standards circling around... There is also some deep connection here to the very actions I have witnessed with high performing artists and musicians. My question, however, is what can I do as mom and facilitator of the home environment to set my son up to continue to persist and push, but to rejoice in his successes? Because if, every time he comes up against a barrier, he focuses so much on the trials that the goodness holds no weight, then how long will he continue to persist before just giving up on growth?
And I'm sure someone else has written on this very thing, sooooo I will probably be scouring the infinite podcast library when I get a free moment to see if I can find some expert to listen to on this topic. But for now... I just wanted to document this...
In other news, yesterday, we had such a great homeschool day! And I think part of it was that I was able to think outside the box of curriculum and environment. We were working on spelling three letter words with "i" or "o" in the middle. Like, "dog," and "lid," and "top," etc. I decided to take this work outside and to turn it into a scavenger hunt! Here's what I did to set this one up:
Cut post-it notes up with the letters "i" and "o" and place them all over the front yard.
I placed them prominently on leaves and flowers and our front door and on flower pots.
Then, my son had to go find the correct letter for each word on the page.
He had to place the post it note just right in the middle of the word.
This was SO fun and engaging and being outside was exactly what we needed! My favorite part of this activity was that every single time he got a word right, he would take a little victory lap where he would run from one end of the yard to the other and back. It was a great way to make learning more enjoyable, physical, and energizing!
The other thing I have been working on figuring out is how to kind of recenter his focus when he is struggling to complete a task. I have experimented quite a bit with this, and here are a few things that seem to recenter him:
Painting Projects
Drawing while standing (paper taped to the wall)
Getting outside !!!!
Final observations from the past few days:
I can't seem to write down these observations quickly enough! And I continue to forget what I was thinking if I don't write them down quickly enough. So... I will work on dictating more on my phone when things are happening.
Homeschooling is helping me think so differently about the way I teach, the learning environment, and connections between early childhood education and music education at all levels.
I still don't understand why more people don't study early childhood. It is the most fascinating developmental period and I am finding the entire process to be incredibly mentally stimulating.
The Environment... In Montessori education, the environment is one of the most important aspects of the planning and execution of lessons. We just switched our environment around so that our living room is more on the side of Montessori. Meaning: There are way fewer items out and available to us all. Each shelf space only contains one item. And all of the items we have selected for our son are activities he can work on independently and are manipulative. I had hoped that this would be a healthy environment for him to work in and that it would encourage creative freedom and independence, which it has! What I didn't expect... is that it would also free up my own mental space, haha! I am finding that this more minimalistic environment has really helped me get through some of my own mental clutter.
If you got this far, THANK YOU!!! And even if you didn't, thanks for even clicking on this link! I will be posting more as we get deeper and deeper into this grand experiment.
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