Welcome to the new year, and new goals for myself as musician and new goals for my students. Here are the basics of what I want to accomplish this year.
First off, for my students, I want to make sure to focus on "the checklist." Basically, the checklist is set of skills that every student needs to know. Half are flashcard skills, that is, recognizing things. These skills include being able to name all the notes on the staff in a minute or less, identifying all the major key signatures, and identifying intervals 2nds through 8ths. The other half are keyboard skills, and include playing all the major and minor scales and cadences. For some students, the goal for the year is to pass the rest of the checklist skills. For others, it's just to pass the first few skills. Either way, as a teacher, my goal is to make sure that every student is making progress on these skills. I also want to find more creative ways to practice the skills so they learn to approach it in different ways/keep their interest while practicing.
Secondly, for myself, I want to refresh on my minor scales and cadences. In 2019, I played though all the major scales and cadences every day (except for when I was out of town/on vacation). I also want to continue to build up my endurance for practice times. As part of building up endurance, I also want to pay attention to/solve the issues that lead to lack of endurance. That is, muscle weakness and what to do to strengthen those particular muscles, any areas of pain that need attention and refocusing on technique to ensure that I am playing properly at all times.
So, those are my skill goals in a nutshell. I have plenty of other goals related to numbers of students and classes, etc. but for our purposes here, I think it is more important to have the outcome goals listed. Let's reconvene in a year and see what goals we have reached.
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