Cello update

Jamie continues to work at cello. We're starting to realize, and we suspected this, that it's going to be a struggle, especially with practice. Jamie can be really dogged when he wants to (see posts on baseball), but there are some challenges with this. I think it has to do with his tendency to not want to do things until he is a master of them. We have seen this with him since learning to walk, which he refused to do until he could run, and learning to read. He would not work to sound out letters the way Connor does, but instead waited until in essence he had memorized a huge number of words, or gotten to the point when he could sound them out intuitively, so that when he did start reading he jumped quickly to an advanced level.

The problem, of course, is that this won't work for cello. At least not initially. I do wonder if once he gets through this face of getting the basic mechanics down, he might also move forward quickly. One of the other obstacles is that he doesn't like working on the mechanics by themselves. He wants to play songs. I'm hoping that this will serve us down the road as well. He seems to think in terms of the entire unit rather than each other sections. Things have advanced in the past couple weeks as his posture has advanced enough that his teacher is letting him use the bow, and he can pluck out two songs pretty much in their entirety.

So stay tuned, as it were, for more progress reports.