Rethinking Genius

I recently saw the Disney/Pixar movie Inside Out.  It wasn't as good as some of their others but still pretty darn adorable.  They did a nice job mixing in some "adult" humor to keep me chuckling in between the more emotionally heavy scenes. The movie is about a little twelve-year-old girl who's family decides to move.  Most of the movie follows the characters inside her head, each one representing a major emotion like "Joy" or "Sadness."  The movie centers around teaching kids why they are feeling what they are feeling when upsetting life things take place.  The movie even ends with a surprisingly mature message that memories don't have to always be "happy" or "sad."  As we get older they are sometimes a mixture of the two. What actually impressed me the most about this movie was how much they explore the concept of memory formation.  Obviously, it's dumbed down for the sake of the movie.  But there were a surpr...

Something I talk about a lot with my students are the "silly little mistakes."  It's an interesting point that everyone reaches when learning a piece, no matter how complicated.  Lots of time will be spent learning the tricky sections.  Once the tricky sections feel smooth, more time will be spent figuring out the easier sections.  And then, finally, a piece must be played through from beginning to end. And this is when the silly little mistakes arise. It takes an enormous amount of concentration to play a piece through from beginning to end.  In the process of trying to do so errors will pop up.  Finger patterns that were fine during practice but, for whatever reason, become garbled and confused while playing the entire piece of music.  The worst part about this is that 95% of the other notes will sound fine!  95% success in anything else  is a totally acceptable number.  Unfortunately in music, that last 5% is the difference betwee...