Question asked by a teacher: Any ideas on how to teach students who get frustrated and cry when they make a mistake? I have one who says that she gets upset because she doesn’t want to be wrong. Her mom says her teachers remarked on the same behavior in school, too.

What a great question! I’m sure we have all had to deal with students like this. I certainly have and here’s what I have learned over the years.

When students get into these states, they aren't worried about the mistake, they are worried about how they feel about the mistake: what it means about them. This is pure ego and, above all, a very bad habit. Why? The student is not thinking about what he's doing, he’s thinking about himself. Not much gets done this way. 

Ask yourself and then your student to make sure he understands what’s going on;

1.  Did he fix the mistake?
2.  Did he try to figure out why he made it? 
3.  Did he then practice it correctly and slowly? 
4.  Or is he so caught up in his emotions that he does none of the above?
5.  Is it more important to do things well or just not to be “wrong”?

What can we do? Tell such students that it’s a great thing that they want to do well, whatever their reason may be, and so we are going to help them..

First of all, convince them that they are wasting a lot of time on being upset rather than fixing the problem. Use an example: 

• Mother is cooking
• Mother accidentally sets fire to oil in the pan.
• Mother gets angry and starts to cry because she made a mistake, throws her spatula on the floor in frustration, and the whole house burns down.

Or, mother puts the fire out while it's still contained to the pan and starts dinner over.

Then inform them that best way to be a perfect player, or as close as possible to one, is to fix one’s mistakes with a minimum of fuss and energy. How?

When your student makes a mistake, make sure she

1. Acknowledges the mistake and that it doesn’t mean she is a terrible person. Have her notice that the earth did not open under her feet and engulf her. Nor did God strike her with a thunderbolt. She made a mistake: She can sit here and cry, which is a colossal waste of time, or she can do something about it so she won’t make that mistake again. Which is it going to be? And what's better—doing something right, or just not being wrong?

2. Analyzes why she made the mistake: I give my students various categories to consider for an out-of-tune note, for example:                      

      a. Hand position (in my experience, most out-of-tune notes in beginners are caused by poor position)

      b. Not hearing the note correctly in your head before you put the finger down.

      c. Not analyzing the interval correctly (even small children know the difference between near and far).

      d. An accident. This happens to all violinists, I tell my students, but to beginners only 0.0001% of the time, so take another look at the first three hypotheses..   

3. Re-practices where she made the offending mistake, playing it three times in a row (or more, depending on the age and  concentration span of the student) without making a mistake. That means she has to be present in the moment and really pay attention to what she’s doing, not how she feels about it.

The whole idea is to take their attention away from their feelings and put it on what they are doing. And you can point this out to them by saying:

“I hear that you’re frustrated. Good! If you get angry or frustrated about a mistake, you are more likely to correct it. It’s the ones who don’t care who never get better. So you feel lots of energy right now, don’t you? How are we going to use that energy? You can cry and be angry with yourself, or you can direct your energy and attention to the problem at hand. C’mon, what are the steps I gave you to take when you make a mistake?”

Helping our students deal with their emotions is part of the job—after all, don't we have to teach them to use them productively to interpret a piece? As they can’t let their emotions take over while performing, it shouldn’t happen while practicing either (how you practice is how you play!). The trick is to use your them, not be used by them. So take that anger and frustration and put it to good use. I always say that the real first step in correcting a mistake is to be offended by it, as this this summons up the energy to deal with it. Not offended personally, but: “What's this??? How could this happen?? Let’s see what went wrong!”

So let’s say that you have set up this protocol, everyone has agreed on it, and it seems to go pretty well most of the time. What do you do when you see your students go into that downward spiral of self-flagellation for some mistake they see as yet another confirmation of their wrongness? Remember that this is just a bad habit reasserting itself and ask them the following question that I used with one early adolescent student:

"Are you thinking about what you’re doing or about yourself? Because if you’re thinking about yourself, I will have to stop the lesson, as there isn’t much I can do for you. Why? Because you aren’t going to be able to correct that mistake or learn anything from it, and you will continue to be wrong, which you don’t like very much.”

It worked like a charm. He snapped right out of what was promising to be an epic snit.

After all, the only way to avoid being wrong is to practice right. And that means paying attention not only to what you do with your hands, but practicing how to use your energy and emotions. This is a valuable lesson for all students, especially for those with an abundance of these two elements.

It all boils down to helping our students direct their emotional energy in a way that's going to be of use them in everything they do in life—and live well, too. We can teach them to understand that what they do about a problem is going to get them a lot farther than wasting time and energy caught up in how they feel about it and themselves, and we can give them a procedure that they can use to restore their equilibrium. It all starts with asking themselves one little question every time they feel they're going off the rails;

                          What's more important—being right or getting it right?