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Assignments

Assignments with actual exercises in them.

Not a title and a due date. A student opens the week and finds numbered steps, in order, written by the person who heard them play.

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This is a whole assignment, printed as the student reads it.

From the studio we seed a new database with. It is here in full because a summary of it would prove nothing.

PublishedPiano

Reading the Bach Inventions

How to learn a two-part invention without learning it wrong first. Covers hands-separate practice, deciding articulation before the notes are fixed, and hearing the two voices as two people rather than one texture.

Exercises & Instructions

1. Play the right hand alone, all the way through, at half tempo.
   Sing the left hand while you do it. If you cannot sing it, you do not
   know it yet.

2. Same with the hands swapped. Most students skip this one and it is the
   one that matters.

3. Mark every entry of the subject in both hands before you play a note
   with both hands together.

4. Choose your articulation now and write it in. Detached eighth notes, legato
   sixteenth notes is a safe default for a first pass. Fingers left to
   themselves will invent an articulation and it will not be a good one.

5. Hands together at quarter tempo, four bars at a time, and stop the
   moment either voice disappears under the other.

Target for the week: bars 1-12 hands together, evenly, at any tempo you
can hold without stopping.

How it actually works

Draft, publish, assign, and a progress figure the student owns.

  1. Write it, then publish it

    An assignment starts as a draft and stays invisible to students until you publish it. You can leave one half-written for a week without anybody seeing the half.

    Each one holds a description, the exercises, an optional video link, and sheet music from your library in the order you want it played.

  2. Assign it to the students who accepted

    You can only assign to a student who has accepted your invitation. Sending an invitation grants nothing on its own, which is the same rule everywhere else in the app.

    Assigning and unassigning are both one action, and only the person who wrote the assignment can do either.

  3. Progress is a number, not a mark

    Each assignment carries a progress figure from 0 to 100. Usually the student moves it; the teacher who set the assignment can move it too, for as long as the relationship holds. At 100 it is marked complete, and if it drops back the completion drops with it.

    It is a self-report, not a measurement, and it is more useful for that: the number tells you how the week felt.

What the student opens

The exercises, then the sheet music for the piece they are about, then the thread. One page, and nothing else on it.

  • Sheet music attached in the order you want it worked through.
  • An optional video link, for when a demonstration says it faster.
  • A progress figure, moved as the week goes.
The assignment page: the exercises for Reading the Bach Inventions, the attached Bach invention, and the notes below.
The same assignment in the app, opened by the student it was assigned to.

The notes run both ways

Every assignment carries one thread, and both people write in it. A student can ask about bar 24 on Thursday instead of saving it for the lesson, and the answer is attached to the piece it is about.

Every note above is quoted from the seeded studio. Whoever wrote a note can edit or delete it; nobody else can touch it.

Notes

  • Emma SmithTeacherMonday

    Watch the tempo in bars 20-28, you are speeding up when it gets easier. That is the tell.

  • Henry MooreStudentThursday

    Recorded it and I hear what you meant about rushing. Working on it.

  • Henry MooreStudentThursday

    The left hand is fine on its own and falls apart together. Any suggestions?

  • Emma SmithTeacherFriday

    Try the passage hands separately again this week. You have learned an error and it needs unlearning.

The fine print

What an assignment is not

There is no grading, no rubric, and no attendance record. The progress figure is a self-report and the notes are a conversation. Nothing in here scores a student against anyone else, and there is no report to export because there is no report.

Teacher access rests on the relationship the student accepted. If either of you ends it, your access to that student’s work ends too. The notes stay attached to the assignment.

You assign one student at a time, from a list of the students who accepted you. The same assignment can reach the whole studio, but it is a click each. That is fine for a private studio, which is who this is built for, and tedious if you teach thirty people the same piece in the same week.

Next to this

What the assignment points at, and what comes back from the week.

Library

The PDFs and interactive scores you attach to an assignment, and who can open them.

How the library works

Practice log

What the student actually did with the week, logged in about ten seconds a session.

How the practice log works

Write the week down once.

One assignment, with the exercises in it, and a thread underneath for the questions that used to wait until Tuesday.

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