How do you eat an elephant? The answer is simple: one bite at a time.

It may be that the success of some of your students is having is leading you to believe that all of your students should be having that success. If that’s true, you wouldn’t need to have a chair test, because every single kid could play every single part. This march May be more difficult than your lowest chairs can play.

If you still want them to master the part, you need to make sure that you skill and drill every single day, for about 10 minutes at a time. Don’t just play the entire section, but make sure you break it up into one, two, four, and then finally eight measure chunks. Have the students learn to eat smaller bites of this elephant rather than try to bite down on the entire thing at once.

Finally, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that you may simply have to simplify or cut people out of the part. Sometimes not everyone can play it and they simply muddy the waters, and you need to cut off a person here or a person there.