Working with middle schoolers has taught me a lot about the process of learning and growth.

I’ve observed that some students struggle more than others to get their work done independently. The desire, knowledge, and skill necessary to complete an assignment may be present, but the student is missing a key ingredient: stamina.

Without stamina, the work is a grueling uphill climb. Everything is harder than it needs to be. There’s no ease, no coasting, no respite from the intensity. Accordingly, the student burns out quickly and is unmotivated to return to the work after a rest.

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It's a very different scenario when you study an instrument as an adult. It's great that there's no one monitoring you and making you practice.

On the other hand, there's no one monitoring you and making you practice. So what will happen?

You’ll play when you feel like playing.

The "all or nothing" thinking that some of us carry with us from childhood is not helpful here. If you miss a day of practice, it's no big deal. Just get back into it the next day, or the day after. You don't have to prove anything to anybody.

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I wasn’t allowed to watch Saturday morning cartoons as a kid. (Yes, it killed my elementary school social life big time.) For some reason, we were only allowed a bit of Mr. Magoo before the TV was shut off and it was time for breakfast.

Mr. Magoo centers on the adventures of a hapless, legally blind retiree who has frequent brushes with death and disaster as a result of his inability to see — and his seeming unawareness that he can’t see. He bumbles through life oblivious to the danger he’s in and the degree to which other people are constantly rescuing him.

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A friend of mine shared with me a document sent home by her child’s teacher. Amidst clip art and whimsical typefaces, the flyer listed the qualities and habits of a person with a fixed mindset followed by the qualities of a person with a growth mindset, then offered some tactics for helping your child “get out of a fixed mindset and into a growth mindset.”

These mindsets, developed by Carol Dweck, a professor of psychology at Stanford, were first described in her 2006 book Mindset. In recent years, they have been adopted by the mainstream educational community. Simply put, a fixed mindset means that you believe that your talent and intelligence are fixed traits; they cannot change. A growth mindset means that you believe that you can always get better.

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The weapon that can inflict the most pain, as we know, is words.

Even in a world where parents and teachers still hit kids, a remark can sting more deeply.

When a child’s primary motivation in life is to please the adults, to disappoint them is crushing.

Some adults make it difficult or impossible for kids to hit the mark — or to know whether they have. I hear it all the time: “I feel like I never do anything right. She’s always mad at me,” or “No matter what, she’ll still be disappointed.” Eventually, kids will give up on trying to figure out what elicits praise or disappointment, but the voice of the disapproving adult may become the voice in their head.

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