Over many years I’ve heard dozens of music educators tell students to “have a pencil on your stand and mark your parts to prevent repeating mistakes”. I completely agree with this, as I think most music educators would. The problem with this is that we as music educators rarely teach our students how to mark a part on their own. Typically the students have a pencil and simply mark what they are told to mark by their teacher. This is highly inefficient. A teacher who is running a rehearsal for an entire ensemble can only point out a few things for specific instruments or individuals to mark.
I decided several years ago to teach my students to mark their own parts by allowing them to look at parts I had personally marked. In full transparency, I take marking my personal parts to an extreme. When I say I mark everything, I mean it. I enjoy spending the time marking a part because I get to study the part without the added pressure of performing it.
I point out to the students that I have circled all key and time changes. I point out that in long sections of multiple measure rests I will notate that X instrument enters with the melody at X measure. I also show them that I mark repeated accidentals beside every recurrence of that accidental within the measure. 35 years as a musician has taught me to leave as few things to chance as possible.
I will also add there are different ways or systems of marking parts. I personally do it all by pencil but I’ve seen many people who use a system of different colored highlighters and in effect they color code their music. Yellow may be used for dynamics and blue may be used for accidentals etc. I sat next to someone in a college band who would write personal notes to himself like “Don’t ever miss that note again or Santa will bring you coal” and so on. It was quite entertaining. Whichever system you prefer to teach is fine as long as you teach the students what to look for and to have a system.
Teaching our students to mark their parts correctly will empower our students to become more self-sufficient and more successful.
Good luck to you and your students!