My 12-year-old son's piano lesson is tomorrow morning and I am preparing for the battle. He has not practiced since his 30-minute lesson last week. If he has trouble with it I will not be much help. I'll try, but I only took piano lessons for a year and it was a long time ago. The song he is working on is at an intermediate level. He always tells me that if he practices it wrong then it will be a bigger problem for him than if he just waits until his next lesson.
It would have been so much easier for him if he had come home after the lesson and practiced while it was still fresh in his mind, but I couldn't get him to do it. He said he was too tired and I was too tired to make him. I thought he would practice the next day, but the next day I thought math was more important. He was willing to do more math than usual so I let it go again when he said he was too tired to practice piano. He also has another excuse now. The neurologist talked him into trying amytriptyline for his migraines and now instead of being unable to sleep, he is sleeping too much (12 - 13 hours) and is very hard to wake up in the morning. He moves slowly for a few hours after that. I wonder what his processing speed is like when he is taking this medication. He has maybe 4 or 5 good hours during the day when it wears off enough that he can do things like math and piano and writing so we have to prioritize, but I realize I should have made piano more of a priority. There were times I let him tell me about the interesting things he read and we ended up discussing these interesting things instead of doing piano.
The piano teacher usually knows when he didn't practice and I feel it is partially my fault because I didn't make him do it. We will fight this battle today and he can say he practiced a little instead of not at all.
Piano is challenging for my son who has mild dyspraxia and hypotonia, but he makes a little progress each week even when he doesn't practice.
