Practice

In my experience, to see the bare minimum progress, students need to practice at least 4 days per week for at least 15 minutes in the beginning. Less than this tends to mean coordination never develops and no progress is made. This amount of practice will potentially allow progress for the duration of level 1. By level 2, you would, at minimum need to up this to half an hour 4 days per week.

More practice means faster progress, and you should be aiming to practice every day.

Less practice than this tends to mean no progress is made at all and the student becomes bored and frustrated.

Royal Conservatory Exams

For anyone interested in Royal Conservatory exams, it is important to understand that in general, it takes a minimum of 1 year to work through each level. This INCLUDES the preparatory level before entering grade 1. Think of it as violin/piano kindergarten.

Also, before even starting the preparatory level material, some time needs to be spent learning basic set up, posture, notes, and rhythm. The exact amount of time varies but you can assume at least 6 months.

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All of this is assuming the student is practicing adequately at home. Inadequate practice means progress will be much slower.

Occasionally I get asked to rush a student through the levels or to skip a level. This is a bad idea that will lead to major problems later on. Even if a student does manage to rush through the beginning levels, this generally means not enough time was spent setting up the basics, and a large amount of remedial work will need to be done in the later levels. This is a bit like trying to rush a student through academic grades, only to end up with a child in grade 7 reading at a grade 3 level and failing tests. Some teachers do allow this, but in my experience this always means the teacher did not take the time to set the student up properly and it always ends with the student getting discouraged, frustrated, and stressed because they reach a point where they can't progress without going back and working on the beginner basics, and it is hugely demoralizing, and boring, to have to do this when you think you should be playing higher-level material.

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RCM Exams for high school credit

This is a fantastic thing to do if you have been studying for years already by the time you reach high school. It is not, however, a good idea to try to start an instrument in middle school with the idea that you can get high school credit. It takes years of work and hours of practice to make it to level 7 and 8, the levels for which you are given high school credit.  While I don't know if I would say it is impossible to cover 8 levels in 4 or 5 years, you have to understand what you'd be looking at in terms of time commitment. To get through that amount of material, and more importantly, develop your playing, muscle control, and coordination, you are looking at an hour or 2 of home practice EVERY day for the lower levels, and most likely 2-4 hours of practice for the upper levels. Even then, it would be a stretch.

If you want to learn to play an instrument well in a condensed amount of time, it is something you can try, as long as you fully understand the challenges, but if you are looking just for high school credit, this is not the best course of action. 

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