By Sarah Haughton Nothing says New Year’s resolution like doing something you dislike (e.g. eating green leafy things, elevating your heartbeat past its resting rate, etc.). So why not stretch your taste in music? Here is my challenge to music teachers, students, and enthusiasts in the year 2016… Listen to a composer you have never heard of before. Here are a few composers that you should get to...
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It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.
Actually, not really. If you’re a music teacher, you may find that this is a pretty tricky time of the year to keep students motivated.
It’s the time of the year when students who were new in August start to lose some of their initial excitement about learning a new instrument.
It’s that time of the year when parents are stressed out with all their holiday obligations and getting their kids to practice is just “one more thing” on the list.
It’s that time of the year when students’ after-school schedules are picking up — sporting seasons have begun in earnest, girl scouts is underway and school holiday performances are on the calendar.
by Jennene Estes I happen to love holiday and Christmas music, and it is not just that the melodies are so classic and they conjure up wonderful old memories of enjoyable times growing up with my family and church in a rural Virginia farming community. What I’ve discovered as a piano teacher is the power of one of those old melodies to actually change a young...
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A little over a year ago, I read an article in the New York Times about a man who had been teaching lessons online for a few years. He had several students who were all over the country! I was very impressed. His set up was quite sophisticated. He had a camera rigged to his ceiling that shot straight onto his keyboard and another camera facing him. He could switch back and forth accordingly.
I saw this and I thought… how does this happen? And how can I get on board? I definitely felt like I was looking into the future of piano lessons, because it really isn’t hard to imagine a future where every piano student just logs onto whatever current version of Skype is being used in order to start their music lesson. I mean, it definitely seems to be the direction we are all going in with everything.
Now– being someone who has never really been gifted at technology, I felt incredibly stressed out by this. My competitive side realized I would have to do this eventurally, so I may as well start now.
I hired someone to come over and “train” me. He was already established as a remote teacher for Music Recording and had students from all over the world. He had me order a second camera, download a bunch of apps and he even made me download a new browser system (apparently he didn’t like the one I was using). He showed me how to connect my MIDI keyboard and use that for the sound during my lessons. He instructed me to use Google hangouts instead of Skype, which I thought was weird. It was all very overwhelming. So much more complicated than simply showing up to someone’s house and teaching an old fashioned piano lesson! After teaching 3 lessons online by my teacher’s method, I decided it wasn’t for me. It was just too stressful to keep doing.
By Alyssa Cowell There’s no two ways about it, the year is winding down and we’re heading into the holiday season. While everyone knows that means Christmas songs will be on the radio imminently, I recently found myself wondering what kind of music the attendees of the first Thanksgiving might have enjoyed. To my disappointment, and admittedly, the small amount of research available, I find that the...
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