Learning the Minor Scale

I've been going for a lesson every other week, and one of my assignments for the last two lessons has been to get the A-minor scale down cold - all five positions up the fretboard.  Actually, according to this page, what I'm learning is the "natural or relative minor scale."

The first week or two was just leaning the positions - lots of slow repetition until they start to get burned in.  I have that down pretty well now (not perfectly, I'm still doing repetitions every night), so the assignment two weeks ago was to start improvising using the minor scale.

Actually the assignment was a little more complicated.  I've been improvising over the blues scale, so the assignment was in a couple parts:

• Improvise over the blues scale, throwing in a few notes from the minor scale.
• Improvise with an even mix of notes from the two scales.
• Improvise over mostly the minor scale, throwing in some blues notes.

Learning the scale positions and playing something that sounds interesting are two very different things.  My improvisation is still *very* rudimentary.  I also get stuck in one position, and the idea is to be able to move fairly seamlessly from one position to another up and down the fretboard.

Then of course there's moving to a different key.  Once you A-minor, then B-minor is the same thing two frets higher.

It's not easy.  I can see little glimmers of progress, but there's still SO far to go.