Category Archives: Teaching

Random thoughts, Teaching

Crunch Time

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This is officially known as “crunch time” in our household. Louie got an email from his job about how “crunch time” was a small but natural part of the year and listed all sorts of ideas on how to maximize your time. In any case, we keep yelling “crunch time” at one another here and there…the issue is perhaps that crunch time seems to run from September to May, but particularly from after Spring Break (late March) to May.

My students: got their festival videos submitted. It was a slog this year, I felt. I’m not sure what I could have done to help more, but I felt like I had to remind people too many times. Oh well! And now there’s a recital in one week, which is great timing for those that just finished their recordings because they really know their stuff and should simply have fun, but for others seems fast after Spring Break.

I’m trying a new system for summer lesson signups, where they fill out a questionnaire with their summer availability and then I fill in the schedule afterwards. In theory this is a great idea, because I’m tired of teaching everyday in the summer all day with weird 30 to 60 minute gaps throughout the day, never enough time to actually do something useful, but enough teaching to feel like I worked all day for the equivalent of 3 to 4 hours pay. So I have a new plan, and hopefully it works out decently.

I worked through the weekend: two services on Good Friday, a lovely Passover dinner afterwards at Louie’s Mom’s house, teaching during the day on Saturday, attending a student recital at Wash U, and then a Saturday Night Easter Vigil (which was lovely, but very long), followed by an early morning wakeup call for three Easter services. I got home around 12:30 and spent the rest of the day wiped out. I even took a nap, which is unusual for me.

This week is stressful because I’ve got a thing on Wednesday for a medical procedure…I won’t go into details, but it’s nothing serious, just that you should make sure you get your annual exams so if there is anything wrong it can get fixed before it’s too late. I’m taking off work a bit, all of Wednesday, part of Thursday or all, Friday morning as well. I feel like it’ll somehow be a vacation which perhaps tells you how exhausted I am. It’s poor timing with the recital this weekend, but I don’t get to choose these things. I’m teaching a little extra today and tomorrow to make up for it, but also just missing some lessons. I built a makeup week into the schedule for the semester for reasons such as this.

I will say that changing up my teaching schedule to a monthly set fee has worked out well, but also been exhausting: I think I have ended up teaching more than ever! I do plan to continue, but in the fall I’m making each semester 1 week shorter, for my mental health. I’ve been feeling pretty run down lately: I am really looking forward to summer and taking some time for myself.

I haven’t even been taking any cat pictures lately! They are enjoying the catio (on the back porch, there’s a screened in place to hang out that they can access from inside, and not actually go outside, but be on a little cat porch) when the weather isn’t too cold, and they love when it’s nice enough to open the window entirely (I’ll try to get a picture of that next time it happens, maybe this week?).

The weather has been blah, overcast, chilly, rainy…I’m ready for warmer weather. I think that the weather is contributing to my general malaise, but it’s also just burnout and feeling underappreciated. Anyway! How is your week?

Teaching

Good Friday AND Passover

What a day it is! Happy Passover to my Jewish friends!

Louie’s mom invited us for Passover tonight, and we are going, but late…because it is also Good Friday and my quartet plays every Good Friday (or at least has for something like 5 years) at the Third Baptist Church in Midtown. They do a music/readings concert and it’s really nice. This year we are playing the third movement of the Smetana Quartet, a new commission by Sasha Johnson Manning named “O Sacred Head”, and then two Chaconnes: Purcell, and the famous one by Bach but arranged for String Quartet (which is a bit of !!!???##%$%#$# to me but is also fun, I guess.) We play at 7 pm if you are interested.

I’m not sure if it is livestreamed, I feel like I can never find any of this stuff out in advance anymore, and it’ll turn out that an event I played at was livestreamed, but that I didn’t know until after the fact. I suppose I could dedicate more time to finding these things out, but since I dedicated 2-3 hours to tracking down students this week and begging them for their festival videos, helping them upload them, watching them, etc, and that’s a normal week for me…but there is a livestream button and it’s worth trying at 7 pm Central if you are interested. It would also be available later IF it was, as the link goes to Facebook.

In any case, my school this morning was closed which meant that instead of getting up super early I got to sleep in a bit and then do a few different things this morning. I’m headed to my first Good Friday service soon, then some teaching, and then the aforementioned Good Friday concert later. Tomorrow is busier, with a class, recital, teaching, and a Saturday Vigil at a church in Illinois (which is just across the Mississippi River from us, can you believe it?). And then Easter Morning starts at 7 am for me, and I’m playing 3 services!

I know that many of my “I love having my weekends free” from the pandemic have been thrown under the bus lately, but do you know how expensive Norway is? Honestly, I’ve stuck with my main scheduling mantra of “turn stuff down that ruins my teaching schedule unless it’s super cool” and that has worked out really well. I had to move students today for our quartet concert, but that fit into “it’s really cool”. I have some lighter weekends ahead as well, and I’m also playing some weddings and such, but it’s nice to see colleagues. You always get used to what you are doing, whether it’s staying at home more, or running around doing a ton of things. The ebb and flow is part of finding balance, and as I tell myself, Holy Week is but once a year.

We went out for dinner last night at a place near our house, and the neighbor’s cat came out to be petted. On our way back, the cat was out front of our house and we said hello again, and then I realized Muriel was staring out the window judging us and looking angry. (No, I’m not anthropomorphizing, I know how she feels!) I felt bad then and hurried inside.

There are six weeks left of the school year. 5 depending on how you count, or 2-3 if you count the college schedule. Summer is almost here…

Teaching, Weather

November

I keep asking time to slow down. I can’t believe it’s already mid-November and soon it will be Thanksgiving, then Hanukkah and Christmas. This is my favorite time of year and it’s going by so quickly!

November has been pretty busy: the usual overload of teaching, plus some weddings and a few extra things. We’ve gone to another symphony concert, and have plans for one more before Thanksgiving. I’ve gotten more used to my early morning schedule…I had a few nights this week though where I was in bed at 8:30 pm, though I didn’t always go to sleep right away, I was exhausted! Some of my colleagues live closer, but I do have a 20 minute drive, and I like to just start my day, have breakfast and coffee before so that I feel normal.

This week I’m starting another wonderful online course. I’ve taken quite a few and this is with a teacher I’ve heard great things about. It’s about a time in the development when bow technique really starts getting exciting and I’m looking forward to learning a few more ideas. I will say this, I have found most of the classes I’ve taken to be super helpful with ideas, and I’ve found my teaching to be much more enjoyable over the past year or two. Somehow, the more I do, the more I enjoy it. I don’t know if it’s old age, or just acceptance that this is my career now, or what.

I’ve been doing some decluttering as part of a group, and ran across this bookmark. Carrie is my youngest sister, and she gave this to me some time ago!

The one thing that bothers me is when people say things commenting incredulously at how many hours I teach. It’s really not a big deal. Yes, I teach a lot of hours (33-34 including before school, university, and private, plus a couple extra students right now for another teacher’s maternity leave) but if that’s all I do, my admin work is only about 1-3 hours a week (more when there are events/recitals/grading to do). I do some practicing, but I haven’t been doing much lately–I play a lot in lessons, so I don’t feel out of shape exactly, though I may want to add more in soon.

I guess my point is: yes, I work a lot. So do many people. It’s not like people pay me not to teach though!

Okay, okay enough annoyed ranting, I know, I know.

The weather this month is finally like fall! We had cold weather, hot weather, and cooler weather again, and the trees finally turned and the leaves are falling. It’s gorgeous outside. Except our front lawn where our volunteer black walnut tree lost its leaves right away and just looks craggy and dead. I put the garden down yesterday, took down my posts, yanked some stuff, put down cardboard and leaves and such. We had a good season, with basil, swiss chard, cucumbers, green beans, lettuce, and peas. I made a lot of dilly beans, pesto with chard and basil, some pickles, and we ate lots of peas, chard, green beans, and lettuce. I’ll decide later what to plant next year.

Last weekend we got over to Forest Park for a lovely hike, though it was pretty warm. Today we are thinking of heading to Creve Coeur Lake to walk around, though it’ll be much cooler.

Cooking wise this month: I’ve made a carrot cake, black pepper tofu and eggplant (for the second time, highly recommend this dish, it’s delicious!), roasted shrimp and pea couscous salad, and an improvised crockpot lentil, sweet potato and kale coconut curry. We’ve also started eating out more normally, having gone to Union Loafers for lunch and dinner–they are seating again though you have to order at the counter and then sit down, to Rooster on South Grand for lunch, to Little Fox for dinner with Louie’s family (delicious!!!) and to Lily’s Mexican Restaurant for dinner–lately I’m obsessed with the fajitas there.

Reading wise I haven’t done anything exciting lately. I’ve been reading some new titles from a cozy mystery series I had enjoyed before (Meg Langslow series) and that’s been pretty much it. I have to read a book this week for my book club though, so I’ll start on that next. (How the One-armed Sister Sweeps Her House.) TV wise we started Yellowstone, are watching Succession, and also started season two of The Morning Show.

What have you been up to lately? Any books or tv shows to recommend?

Random thoughts, Teaching

Fall is the best time of year

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I love the change of seasons. I love when the cool weather comes, when the cold weather comes, when the flowers start peeking out again and it gets warmer, and when school is out. Every season has its good points.

Oh, and Happy Birthday to April!

April and I right before the pandemic!

It’s been busy, of course. As much as I talk the whole “ooh I want my weekends free” talk, I also enjoy making music and having more money! So I’ve taken some gigs of course, and then this weekend I ended up helping out a contractor by playing a last minute wedding as well, plus we attended another symphony concert. (We ended up going three weekends in a row due to wanting to see various concerts, but we don’t have anymore this month.)

We know the sound is better from the balcony, but you get more camaraderie and leg room on the main floor. It’s weird being with so many people, but they check vaccine cards at the door (or negative tests) and masks are worn pretty well.

I played on a real concert, real actual music with live performers and a masked/vaccinated audience. It was wonderful, and I had forgotten how performing feels so it was great to be back to that.

A picture of the rehearsal for said “real music” before I joined the stage.
A delicious weeknight meal: trout amandine, roasted carrots, and polenta. This was mostly courtesy of Trader Joe’s: polenta is a frozen meal, carrots from there, and frozen trout as well. Louie did the honors and it was delicious.

And now I’m into my week again, so much teaching, so many students, lots to do! I’m getting used to the schedule and making things work. I do a lot of planning: I use google calendar (which I sync with My Music Staff for private teaching) and have a few different calendars to plan personal things, time to work on various projects, catch up on business paperwork and things, exercising, appointments, etc. I enjoy seeing the various colors of my day (I also use different colors to keep track of which students are in person and which are online) and it helps me stay organized and make sure that things I need to get done each week get done. In addition to google calendar, I keep a few running to do lists on my phone (I just use the reminders app on my iphone) and anytime I have anything to do, I try to add it to the list (I will do this in the middle of a lesson, for instance) and then I check those lists often.

My running lists are: general to do list, which is pretty much anything I can do at home, Grocery list, food planning, gardening list (this one is being ignored as I just can’t do it all), and a curriculum to do list where I’ve been gradually solidifying my personal teaching philosophy and curriculum to really know exactly what it is I’m teaching my students and how to get them from beginning to advanced through all the steps they need. (That’s one of the projects I list above). I find the general to do list super useful for me because I don’t have strict boundaries between personal and business responsibilities, so when I have time at home, I will just work on that list, regardless. (The question of whether I should have strict boundaries is a different thought for a different day.)

A good portion of my day is spent petting various cats and such as well.

I also keep various documents for studio billing, financial planning and bill paying, travel planning, meal planning, etc, and work through those as needed. I use an app for keeping track of my expenses and mileage for tax purposes (Self-Employed through Intuit) which is a little more expensive than I prefer but I also find the app incredibly useful and I don’t use an accountant, so it probably works out in my benefit.

Anyway, this may be a boring blog post, I know, but I was just thinking about how I get things done. I’m not a paper planner person, though I do keep handwritten checking registers because I’m old fashioned in that way–I track my deposits, withdrawals, all payments for my checking accounts through my handwritten registers, but pretty much everything else is online. I’d been using handwritten teaching attendance books as well, but since I switched to My Music Staff this fall I may phase that out for next year as it’s redundant at this point. Some redundancy is good for record keeping, but too much is time consuming for no point.

Planning wise, I’m looking forward to doing some travel over the holidays (Thanksgiving and Christmas) and I’m planning to make homemade fruitcake this year, as well as a variety of cookies as usual. I will likely not go quite as over the top as last year, but there are still some things I really enjoy making as well as always trying a few new recipes. It’s October, which means it’s not too early to plan holiday baking, as well as the fact that making fruitcake is something you evidently do early so the fruitcake can “age.”

I just laugh so hard at this.

Anybody have any great ways they plan or get things done? For those who are self employed/work from home: how do you delineate time spent on work and time spent on personal things, or do you do like I do and blur the boundaries?

Books, Random thoughts, Teaching

Time Marches On

I thought I’d just pop in so you all knew I remembered I had a blog. I know blogging is dead and all, yet I still read blogs and have a blog, so it’s probably sort of like classical music in that sense.

College started up, and I have several wonderful new students as well as my returning students. I absolutely adore some of the students I teach and I’m looking forward to a great semester. I’m sorry I had to leave some students at the other school I’d taught at for 4 1/2 years, but my schedule is much more manageable without that job…it’s hard to quit things, isn’t it? In any case, it was super weird and a bit emotional returning to my studio there for the first time since before the pandemic: I distinctly remember leaving and being excited for Spring Break and visiting my friend April in Atlanta, and then…never returning.

My early morning school job officially starts up next week, and while I’m a little nervous about the early mornings, especially as the days get shorter (it’s so hard to wake up and drive to work in the dark, for instance), I’m excited to get back to it. My overall schedule is easier than it was last year, even with actually commuting to my college job, and I think it’ll be a good semester.

Wednesday night: My parents stopped by overnight on their way home from a road trip. They were here for about 12 hours total as they wanted to get back on the road and get home. They ended up having some car trouble along the way home and the part their car needed might have been a year long wait or more, so they ended up buying a new car, which seems a bit crazy, yet, they didn’t have any better options at that point. We were able to admire their new car and chat a bit.

The weekend was fun: pizza and wine with friends on Friday night, and then most of the day Saturday and Sunday I spent at a Suzuki Workshop (Suzuki Principles in Action) in person at SIUE (in Edwardsville). It was a good learning opportunity, a course about HOW to teach, not what to teach, and I learned quite a bit. I have a follow-up assignment to do over the next two months, which involves recording myself as well as answering some questions/short essays. I’ve spent most of the pandemic trying to further improve and educate myself as a teacher, and it’s been really fun, learning. The more I know, the more confidence I have that I’m doing the best I can for my students.

Sunday night I cooked this: Skillet Shrimp and Orzo. I really liked it! I had been getting tired of cooking before I made it, but I think sometimes when I’m tired I just don’t want to cook, not that cooking is in itself tiring. I made myself put together a meal plan for the next two weeks.

And then yesterday was off, Labor Day! We were going to go for a hike, but ended up getting lazy and just hanging out around the house more. I sort of regret that I didn’t get out and about, but it was a bit hotter than originally predicted and I’m just so ready for fall weather. I think I was run down from the workshop in addition to just not wanting to deal with people or hot weather. It was a nice relaxing day and I didn’t work at all, other than a couple tiny things.

I do belong to two unions, and have mixed feelings about my union membership (one union is great, has gotten me raises, the other…not so much) but firmly believe that collective bargaining is on average, a good thing, and that workers make the world work and deserve way more than they and we actually get.

I haven’t mentioned books in awhile, so let me end with some books I’ve read recently:

Books I’ve loved: The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré, People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry, Golden Girl by Elin Hilderbrand, The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley, The Jetsetters by Amanda Eyre Ward

Books I’ve liked: The Nobodies Album by Carolyn Parkhurst, The Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave , Libertie by Kaitlyn Greenidge, House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

Nonfiction I enjoyed/learned from: The Pandemic Century by Mark Honigsbaum, A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School by Carlotta Walls Lanier

Random thoughts, Teaching

Getting Ready

I’ve been working all week setting up my studio schedule for the fall. I’ve also been working on using a new website/program for my calendar…I have hesitated to use a program for organizing my lessons just because I already have my systems in place for invoices, tax prep, etc, and it seems like anything I add is trying to duplicate things I already use but not the way I want. I’ve decided to bite the bullet here though, and try it out for the year, and I’ve gotten 95 percent of the data uploaded.

I’ve changed the way I run my studio for the fall to a set monthly rate and by the semester, and it’s been a challenge getting that information out. I know parents get a lot of things to read, but when I send something with the subject line Very Important Please Read, it usually is, because otherwise my emails have subject lines like No Lessons Tuesday or Recital is November 17th or things like that. Yes, I tend to summarize the email in the subject so people know what it will be about.

It’s a busy time for new referrals, and I wish I had another day I could add students to and still have weekends, but that’s just not possible at this time. Anyway, I’m excited to make a bit more money this fall and streamline my operations! (And if you are a current student reading this, seriously, just at least skim my emails and mark your calendars, okay? I spend a lot of time crafting each one and it’s much easier if I don’t have to then go through and talk with 40 people individually…)

My sister and her kids visited last week, and we had a lot of fun. We went to the Aquarium one morning, and the kids loved it. I wouldn’t say it is a great Aquarium, but there were some nice exhibits and it was very well done and fun for young people.

We made shark hats. My coloring isn’t much better than hers…hers is definitely better for her age.

We went to Grant’s Farm another morning and it was a bit hot and crowded for us, but we still had a nice time. Not much mask wearing, even in the cramped quarters on the tram or in the Biergarten. They didn’t require it, but common sense should (and it should be required.)

Grant’s Farm is always trying to get more money out of your pockets. We paid them money to feed their goats, cows, llamas, birds, etc, and also shelled out for a camel ride for my niece.

Otherwise we just hung out, tried to stay out of the heat, had some nice meals, went to playgrounds, and such. It was exhausting but great to spend time with the kids, and of course my sister Leslie as well.

We had some bad storms the other night. We were fortunate that we didn’t lose power that night as many did, though we did lose power the next day for a few hours, likely while the power company was trying to restore power to others. We did have a chair get blown over.

I saw this the next day and texted Louie about how we had some storm damage. Before he got too worried, I sent that picture.

My nephew really liked sitting in the blue chair.

Louie went away for the weekend to visit some friends, but I have some stuff tomorrow so I stayed behind. I decided to make some jam and mustard today, so I made rhubarb strawberry with stuff from the freezer, a bourbon brown sugar mustard, and a swiss chard walnut pesto with swiss chard from the garden that we kept not using to cook with. The first two are canned and the pesto is in the freezer for the future. I also have a basil plant, so I might should make some traditional pesto this week as well!

I’m taking this upcoming week off from teaching to get ready for the fall. I think it’s important to have down time in order to recharge. We have a short airbnb trip planned for a couple nights, but otherwise I’m around, taking one more online course and catching up on things around the house.