052021 — Blog — Rulerless

To embrace being terrible

A couple of summers ago, my husband and I decided that we wanted to learn to play tennis.

To begin our journey, we and I obtained some used racquets and dead balls at a local shop and then headed down to the neighborhood courts, as far away from other humans as we could get.

Then, we started tapping the ball back and forth over the net. Trying to, anyway. The balls bounced wildly all over the court and into the net. Movements were clumsy and awkward on my part, overly aggressive and baseball-like on his. We laughed a lot.

Casey von NeumannDecember 3, 2020122420, 052021, 071421, 012422 Comments

Explaining is not teaching

I’m thinking of doing a series of crafting meetups this fall on Zoom, just for fun.

My usual knitting group has been on hold for many months now, but I miss the sociability and comfort of stitching with others.

I’ve mentioned this idea to a few people. Some are interested, but not all of them know how to knit or crochet yet.

Casey von NeumannOctober 14, 2020121120, 052021 Comments

Meeting students where they are

One of the newer members of my teaching team had a breakthrough moment recently.

She was working with a student on a straightforward topic: Nouns. (I just accidentally typed “nuns” and it made me laugh, but let’s stick with the true story.) The lesson material was basic. It gave a little info about what a noun is, some examples — and then the student was asked to circle the nouns in a series of sentences.

When the student circled only some of the nouns and not others, her teacher was perplexed. She asked the student to look at every single word and decide whether it was a noun. Again, the student failed to circle all of the nouns — and circled some other words that weren’t nouns.

Casey von NeumannAugust 14, 2020052021, 070821Comment

Until the water runs clear

The secret of my success in my early days as a piano teacher was a simple tweak that motivated my students to practice more, made them sound great, and caused them to stick with the instrument instead of quitting. On the strength of this basic framework, I built an entire music school.

This tweak can be applied to learning virtually anything, at any age, to create massive results in a short period of time. However, in order to accept it, we need to give up our desire to be the hero and resist the temptation to tell ourselves unhelpful stories about our progress.

Casey von NeumannJuly 19, 2019080119, 010421, 032221, 052021, 112322Comment

The secret to success

It's really pretty simple. If you want to succeed at something, whether it's learning an instrument or mastering fractions or running a marathon, you've got to just not quit.

Simple, but not easy, right? Here's what I've noticed in working as a teacher and coach across subject areas:

When we think we are pretty good at something, we'll keep going until we have completed our objective.

Casey von NeumannMay 21, 2019072419, 062220, 101420, 122420, 052021Comment