I learned a lot during my dancing years. Of course I learned how to dance. And I also learned the other benefits often touted about dancing like hard work, dedication, teamwork and discipline.
But there are two things my high school ballet teacher taught me that have stuck through me without life: Frustration is just misused anger (sooooo true!) and, my most favorite and life changing, Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent.
I think pretty much everyone knows by now that practice doesn’t make perfect and many people have instead adopted the phrase “practice makes progress” but I don’t believe either of these are true. Simply practicing something repeatedly will not guarantee perfection, proficiency or even positive progress.
Why is that? Because practice alone does not guarantee you are learning or doing a skill properly. You can practice addition for months, believing that 7+2=10 and you will never gain “perfection” nor will you gain “progress” but you will, most likely, gain the permanent idea that 7+2=10. And changing something you’ve learned is never easy.
It’s the same with any skill. If a dancer constantly performs a movement incorrectly, his/her body will learn to perform the step that way, the movement will become permanently ingrained improperly in his/her body and it will be hard to change (hence my personal teaching attitude of process over product, even in the dance studio).
This is a concept I’ve been really trying to drive home with Honeybun. She learned what I consider to be a completely ridiculous and useless way to write the letter ‘A’ (both upper and lowercase) when in pre-k. It caused her to be overly frustrated because the letter was always sloppy and never looked right to her. I tried to teach her how I make an ‘A’ but she insisted she had to do it the other way so I tried to compromise: do it your teacher’s way at school and try mommy’s way at home. But she had trouble switching and even my way was hard for her because the difficult way was ingrained in her process already.
(Side note: I hate the current handwriting methods, I try to teach my children the most efficient ways to write their letters so that they don’t have to re-learn later when fluency becomes important).
We’ve had similar struggles with spelling and even her dancing. When I try to correct a movement, it’s not that she’s unwilling to make the change, it’s that she’s usually unable to because her immature body can’t self-correct as an older child or adult body can. She has learned (for now) permanent bad habits that will have to be worked on over time and hopefully fixed when she is older and more capable.
“Practice makes permanent” is a phrase you’ll hear often at our house. I try not to let my girls get too far with mistakes on their work, I want to them to not only see but understand the proper answers and methods for their learning tasks before they have the chance to learn it improperly and I point out when it’s true. “See, you did this whole page the wrong way and now it’s hard to change what you learned…practice makes permanent!”
It’s become such a mantra in our home that when Honeybun went to golf camp last month, she told me she got in an argument with her coach because he said “practice makes perfect” and she tried correcting him. Who knows how she actually handled the situation but I’m glad she was able to assert herself and stand up for what she believes to be true.
