Category Archives: Teaching

Teaching

Sundays are for the Baby Shark

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Last year around Thanksgiving we got a robot vacuum. It is a Shark brand, and since we also have a regular-sized Shark vacuum, we started calling it “Baby Shark” and of course sing the song as well. So I sit here, about to write down a few random thoughts while my baby shark vacuums around me. I usually run it once a week and then use the regular Shark vacuum on the high traffic areas on a shorter basis during the week.

I do find that the cat hair gets so embedded into the front rug, it’s obnoxious. What do you recommend for getting cat hair out more easily? Now that I have students coming back to my house again regularly I am trying more to keep it cleaner as we like to sit on the rug sometimes too.

One thing that I think I’ve mentioned here and that I’ve been thinking about a lot career-wise is how there is this dichotomy between what I want to be doing and what people think I want to be doing, and what I think people want me to be doing. The pandemic has really made me reevaluate what I want to be doing, but it’s so hard to shut off that switch of “oh, I should be doing {fill in the blank} because that’s what people will be impressed by.” The music world doesn’t happen in a vacuum (see what I did there, using an analogy poorly)…whenever I’m meeting new people and they ask me what I do for a living and I say “I teach violin” then they ask do I play also and I say, sure, around town, and then they ask do I play in the symphony. They ignore that I first said “I teach violin” and they only perk up when I say, no but I do play at the Fox sometimes for visiting shows…but nobody ever seems to be remotely interested in furthering a discussion about teaching.

Now, I’m fully aware that I shouldn’t care about this, but when it happens literally every time I meet somebody new, it makes me think about what our society thinks of teaching. I’ll tell you what, it’s actually an important and useful thing, to be a teacher, and I find that when I give myself space to really do it that it’s fun and I’m good at it. But when I treat it like something less than or something that I’m only doing because I’m not good enough for a symphony job, then it feels bad and I can get super annoyed at my students.

So my switch is to say, yes, I’m a teacher, and yes, I taught online during the pandemic, and out of the 40 plus students I had before the pandemic, I lost TWO and gained about 8. So that went pretty well.

It is nice to play concerts of course, and I even have some scheduled, and I hope to play some shows at the Fox this year as well. It’s entirely too easy to sit there and see who’s playing what and wondering why so and so didn’t ask me for this or that, and you can drive yourself crazy with that, or you can just say to yourself, whatever, it’s all good. I don’t want to be on that roller-coaster, and I’m okay with it.

And I think, that it gets easier to MEAN it, that it is okay. It’s a mantra, that it’s okay that other people are playing stuff you used to play, and for a variety of reasons, none of which are that you aren’t a good player, and mostly because you take trips sometimes and don’t drop everything for a gig…(and because you did notice, that during the pandemic once everything got settled, you actually made more money from just teaching and being regular with that than you did trying to scramble around, and while…it’s obviously not only about the money, making a living doing something is better than not doing so.)

I know I’ve pontificated on this concept a lot over the past year, longer, and it’s a tricky thing, isn’t it, trying to decide if what you are doing for a career is what you are meant to be doing? Is your life heading in the right direction, are you happy, what even IS happiness? How lucky am I to be able to ponder these questions! How lucky am I to be sitting here while a small robot vacuum cleans my house!

After lunch we are going to go for a bike ride, probably on the River Des Peres Trail. It doesn’t seem too hot today which is a nice change. I spent some time this morning trying to figure out how to set up my tripod in order to record some lessons for something I’m working towards. And my fridge is filled with zucchini, mushrooms, and a few other veggies from my CSA pickup on Thursday that still need to get eaten, so we’ll do some cooking this evening! Yesterday I canned 6 jars of dilly beans, which is my favorite pickled veggies I made last summer. Half were from my garden and half were green beans I bought at the grocery store.

So that is and was my weekend. Relaxing, cooking, “cleaning”, writing, thinking about the meaning of life and my career path, reading, and biking. How about you?

Teaching

Near the End of the Hardest School Year Ever

Two more weeks of school! I have 8 more early mornings to get up for, and then I’m done with my before school job until the fall.

I remember finding out about this job opening and thinking about applying while we were in Yellowstone last summer. I wondered if I could manage to survive getting up so early.

The fall wasn’t so bad, because it was just teaching from my home, but once we went back in person in January, some of those mornings were really rough. Between getting up at 5:40 am or so, and then having to go out in the freezing cold and spend 5 to 10 minutes cleaning off my car, there were definitely mornings where I swore I’d quit after this one year.

But then the mornings got lighter and warmer, and over time I’ve completely changed my sleep patterns…if I sleep in on the weekends until 8 it feels amazing and decadent, and I usually go to sleep around 10 and it’s wonderful…and did I mention the mornings got lighter and warmer?

And then my students have learned, and I’ve gotten more connected to them, and I got my vaccine earlier because of this job (and getting the vaccine was the biggest thing that happened, of course) and one of them wrote a really wonderful poem about her love for the violin. Basically, I have really grown to love the job DESPITE the early hours, and I plan to continue next year, assuming they’ll have me.

I did decide to resign from Lindenwood University however. I felt like I just had too much on my plate, and something had to go. It’s the farthest drive and the lowest paid of my work, and I decided it made the most sense to leave. I am sad to leave a few students but confident somebody will come in and teach them well in the future, as there are always more good teachers around looking for work. I will still have too much going on in the fall, I’m sure, and I’ll have to be careful not to accept too much weekend work for my sanity, but not having to deal with that commute as well will be helpful on Mondays.

I took a walk with a friend the other day and we were talking about teaching, and how the pandemic has changed our feelings about teaching. I’ve always taught, and mostly because it was a good way to make some extra money, and then because it was something people wanted me to do, but I feel like the pandemic really made me realize that I’m actually really making a connection with all of these students, and in a way I just didn’t really pay attention to enough before. I’m always a little slow to pick up on emotional, human, things…

When the pandemic started and all of my playing jobs went away, all I had was my teaching. And seeing those students every week was a great thing, and I felt my connection to the world through them, and I have realized that these families absolutely kept me afloat during this time, but I think I did the same for them. We held onto that connection, both musically and human, and that was one of the things that held us together during this time. Nobody cared that I wasn’t playing the violin for money, and all of the jobs and friendly colleagues that I enjoyed playing with, that all disappeared entirely, but my teaching stayed, and kept me going.

I also find that, for many students, the more I put into the lessons and the relationship, the more I get back. So it’s a worthy endeavor.

I was watching a seminar the other day online and the speaker was talking about radical empathy, and having radical empathy towards our students and their families. I have operated under this philosophy for the most part, without giving it that name. I have thought of it as “allowing myself to be taken advantage of”…and while yes, I do charge them for no-shows and set up firm payment policies and such, when they come to me with a sob story I usually cave and offer them an extra lesson, particularly if I know they’ve been having a hard time or if they don’t ask for very much from me. And now I have a name for it, “radical empathy” and I like it. It makes what I saw as a negative trait in myself into a positive.

And I also got another thing from that seminar, or maybe another one I watched the same day, which is that it is okay if my students aren’t superstar students, that we don’t all have to have the same goals for our students. I do want my students to be good violinists, but yes, I do want to have them be good humans, and perhaps that is more important. I don’t think that people can only learn to be a good human through music lessons, but it is one way to learn a lot of wonderful life lessons, and I would far rather my students be caring and loving people than be winning this or that competition at a young age. The world needs more loving and caring people. There can never be too many!

Now, this is not to pat myself on the back and say, go you, for being such an awesome person. But to say, if another teacher is reading especially, that not all of the students will learn the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto by the time they graduate high school, but hopefully all of the students will look back on their time with you and have some behavior from you that they will model into their adulthood, and that it’s okay if your students aren’t the best violinists in their city, as long as you are giving them the best you can.

I’ve had parents of students tell me I need to yell at their child more to practice. That’s just not something I’m ever going to do. I will ask them about practice, I will suggest they practice more, I will challenge them to do so, I will ask what are the things holding them back or what are their excuses, but I will not yell at them! There are violin teachers who will, I’m sure, but that’s not me, and I don’t think anybody should.

Anyway, this is a sort of rambling blog post about teaching and stuff, but to sum it up: it’s been a wonderful and busy year. I’ve pushed my students the best I could for what they needed this year, and so many have done better than I could have ever imagined, but I am equally proud of them all for making it through.

Random thoughts, Teaching

Patio Furniture

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We ordered some patio furniture a few weeks ago from Overstock.com. It didn’t seem to really be overstocked though, because it said it would be shipped in 6 to 10 weeks! I looked around and found the same furniture at Home Depot, but it cost about $80 more for the set (two chairs, small table) so we decided to just wait it out. Well, we got “lucky” and it only took about a month to get here. I am pleased with it, and think it makes the house look sharper. It’ll also be a nice place for people to hang out outside, whether that is me and Louie, my students, friends, family, whatever.

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We did a lot of organizing and some cleaning yesterday, and between this weeks organizing and last week’s garden extravaganza, I feel like we are starting to get a real hold on the house and its surroundings. The garage is still a bit of a mess, and a few closets here as well, but mostly I know what we have and where it is, and that now includes the garden and landscaping areas. My peas are growing well and grabbing onto their little poles.

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The pictures are from Tuesday, so they’ve grown more since then. We are predicted to possibly get snow on Tuesday, but my understanding is that this should be okay for the peas and the chard also (I have a few tiny chard seedlings popping up), though my flower pots, I’m not sure. I have a few pots with things in them, some of which have some tiny tiny leaves popping up, do I bring them inside where the cat will definitely eat them? That’s a no, but maybe I could put them in the garage. I’ll keep my eyes on the forecast.

Other stuff going on: my parents are visiting next weekend, so I’ve taken Friday afternoon and Saturday morning off from teaching. I basically have a full week ahead though, but getting to the end of April means getting to the end of college classes….there’s only 3 more weeks and then I’ll gain about 9 hours a week back. That will be huge as far as having my days more free. I’ll have my early morning classes until the end of school, and I still regularly teach from 3 to 8 or 8:30 most days with a few morning or earlier students, but having more time during the day means I can relax a bit more and get things done during the week.

Another fun thing we did yesterday was put up a few tiles I wanted to hang in the bathroom. Louie is always hesitant to put things on the walls when it’s a “new” wall (aka dry wall rather that the old plaster with wood paneling on top) so I have to really convince him and let him come around. He agreed that the tiles looked really nice.

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This was one I bought from Etsy awhile back because I thought it reminded me of Muriel and Miles and also matched the color scheme well.

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The walls are light blue, though the photo doesn’t reflect that as well. They are definitely a little bluer in person.

And this little tile: I think it was a gift from Leslie years and years ago and I just never hung it up. I had it sitting on my dresser instead, but this is better.

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You can see it is very small.

I am happy with the little touches I’ve made on the house over the years. I was thinking how Louie’s mom, who lives in a beautifully decorated house, full of art, plants, and other personal touches, once said she wished they had bought a vacation home just so she would have another house to decorate, that once she got hers full of things she loved she kind of wished she could keep going. Of course she moves things around and it’s not always the same (and I also think she was speaking a bit tongue-in-cheek), but I think that idea is what keeps so many people keep redecorating and remodeling: it’s fun to live around new places, and look for new little things to buy and display, isn’t it?

I also feel like we here in my house move a bit slower, and that’s okay too. Maybe it takes a year or move to finally decide where to put a tile, but that just means we are more deliberate people. Smile

I can’t believe two things: 1) my parents are visiting next weekend, after this whole pandemic thing kept them from traveling for a long time and 2) my students are coming back to my house next week. Not all, but some. (It is absolutely their choice.) It will mean real pants, but I think it’ll be really great to see everybody after so long.

Oh, and 3) that snow is predicted for Tuesday. Nothing really big, but still. It’s late April!

Hope, Random thoughts, Teaching

March Goes Out like a Lamb

This has been my “spring break” from one of my jobs, which has been nice. I’ve gotten to sleep in a bit, and a few students have missed so I’ve caught up on some admin tasks and other things I needed to do.

Over the weekend, we planned to do a nice long hike because there was excellent weather, but I ended up hurting my lower back and had to scratch that idea. I’ve been getting better, doing yoga videos and taking ibuprofen and such, and I think I’ll just keep doing some of the yoga going forward because it has been a lot of fun and feels good.

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We did go over to some friends for dinner Sunday night and enjoyed outdoor time with people not from our household, which…was missed. I miss seeing people, and really can’t wait. I’ll get my second shot in less than one week though, so it is only a little bit longer until I’m fully vaccinated.

I’ve been working on some things for my studio, some policies changes for fall that I am working on and will announce to them probably at the beginning of May, and figuring out a “return to in-person lessons” plan. After Louie and I are both fully vaccinated, in late April, it seems like it might be time to start trying to get back to it, if we wear masks and take reasonable precautions. If the kids can be in school, I think they can come to their lessons, if they and their parents want…after my household is fully vaccinated. I hope also that the kids’ parents will be vaccinated, but it shouldn’t matter too much if we are wearing masks, if I run a good air filter, and maybe even leave the windows open (at least a bit), and limit the number of students at one time.

So that’s all exciting, but strange. I assume I’ll have a mix of in-person and online students for a bit, so I’ll have to work on the logistics, but I think it’ll be wonderful to start returning to normalcy. That might mean that within a month I’ll have to start wearing real pants to teach with!

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I thought the sky yesterday looked really cool in my neighborhood.

I got a few more plants and things yesterday at Home Depot. I am trying to grow a few things in pots as well and spruce up the front of our house. It’s a little tricky, I realized, because we don’t get much sun in the front of the house, but lots in the back. There’s a lot to growing things and gardening, but I have been enjoying just trying my hand at it. I have some brainstorming ideas as well, such as making a wildflower area in our yard to attract bees and tearing down the horrible back porch we have (it is just awful, needs to be redone, but we don’t know if we want to redo it in the same way, so my latest idea is to demo it FIRST and then see what we miss about it, which I suspect will be, a way to get out the back door upstairs and nothing else.)

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The front of our house is in need of some TLC, some paint mostly, but a bit of concrete work, but I thought flowers would cover it up and make people think we care a little bit. That white splotching is where the red paint has worn off, and there’s some white paint peeling in the front, maybe these are things to look at this summer? Home ownership can be a constant time suck, I’ve realized, if you let yourself get bogged down by all the small things that are wrong. I really don’t want to spend all of my free time doing things around the house and would prefer to read, but I suppose a few things are okay.

Books!

Recently read:

Super Host by Kate Russo: I enjoyed this book quite a lot, though there was a gratuitous (in my opinion) sexual assault scene that happened to one of the characters (spoiler alert, simply for that, it isn’t graphic, but it just seemed unnecessary). Otherwise I thought it was well done, a unique novel set up, and felt modern.

Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins: nonfiction, a Black woman tracks down her family history and roots, a great read, very interesting and thought provoking, highly recommend.

(forgive me if I already told you the following, but I couldn’t find where I did)

Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad: I cried a lot during this book, so just a warning, but it’s good. It’s a book about the author, the story of her getting sick, dealing with it and the aftermath. I felt a personal connection to the story of difficulties Suleika was going through because I met Louie shortly after his wife died of cancer, and it made me see a bit more how that might have felt, from a different point of view. I think that’s partly why I cried so much, but it was a good cry.

Between Sisters by Kristin Hannah: good! This was a bit longer ago so I forget exactly, but I liked it quite a lot.

Maya’s Notebook by Isabel Allende: good in a different way. I need to read more Isabel Allende.

How about you? Any books to recommend? Thoughts on protocols for returning to in-person lessons?

Random thoughts, Teaching

Winter Was Here

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It’s been quite the week of cold and snow, but nothing like many in Texas and other places are going through.

Monday was already off my public school job, but it was snowing all day and my college class also got canceled. Since all my private students are online I taught them as usual, except one who was having internet issues, for about 2 hours of students. I got a lot of other stuff done on this day!

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Tuesday was a snow day from my morning job, but the rest of the day was still on, with the exception of two students who had to cancel for weather related issues. Tuesdays are a busy day this semester, with 3 hours of college teaching on top of an already long private teaching afternoon and evening (6 hours, which is a long time to teach from one chair.) It was nice having the early morning off.

Wednesday was still very cold, but school was on. I took Louie’s Subaru into my morning job and that ended up being a great decision on my drive home, when it was snowing again. Not a lot of accumulation thankfully but the roads were awful for my return home commute. Wednesdays aren’t so bad, and I just had a morning class I’m taking, 1 college student, and about 3 1/2 hours of students.

Thursday wasn’t as cold as the other days, but it’s thankfully the day I don’t have to go into school at all, so I taught my morning class virtually (I wouldn’t mind going in, but I do get a little more sleep not doing so, and I don’t have to go out in the single digit morning temps!). I have one morning student on Thursday but got a workout and shower in beforehand, and then the afternoon had 1 college student and about 4 1/2 hours of private teaching.

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Friday ended up also being fairly easy, with only 3 hours of private teaching and 1 hour of college teaching. One student on Friday I let move to Saturday due to big tuning problems (the problem with virtual teaching is that it is hard to help them and even those that have gotten pretty good at it still have trouble with the extreme temps).

Saturday was my busiest Saturday in months. I had a morning student, my usual improvisation class, and then I had a recording session (I had been oddly stressed about it, but it ended up being easy) and then a quartet rehearsal for an upcoming streaming concert we are playing on.

So that was my week. I had probably a few more cancellations than normal, due to the snow and some serious tuning issues. It was a pretty decent week…I often feel as if I just work and each day is a slog to the end, but there are wonderful moments within. I think it’ll be easier when things get back to “in-person” teaching, hopefully by fall.

As far as playing with people again, it was nice to play with the quartet and it was a fun rehearsal. I don’t know what it means though, but I wasn’t that excited. I see my friends on social media and a few in person saying that they are so desperate to play together again, that they are missing their whole life and their whole identity, not playing with others, and I’m sitting here figuring out my studio policies for the fall and working on a slight change going to a flat rate policy and planning to say no to gigs likely until people stop asking, and feeling okay with that. I don’t miss it. I miss having colleagues and seeing people and chatting, and that will never be as nice, working from home and having a private studio, but I do have colleagues at my school jobs and get to chat sometimes, so that’s nice. I miss playing Mahler Symphonies, but I wasn’t doing that pre-pandemic anyway.

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Fun stuff this week:

We got a box from Purple Carrot, a vegan meal kit place. I have enjoyed the Purple Carrot boxes and I find them to be easier to make and slightly less involved than Blue Apron. Blue Apron meals do tend to be delicious though.

We have been watching Dr. Who. I knew we were behind a few seasons, and thought I’d figured out which seasons we hadn’t seen, but it turns out that I was totally wrong and had completely forgotten two entire seasons. We are watching them again and have mostly forgotten things but not entirely. We’ll get back to where we need to be soon.

I spent a good amount of time this week reading. I have been working through a lot of cozy mystery series’ by Dianna Xarissa through an Amazon Kindle Unlimited membership. I’m not sure if I mentioned a few other recent reads, so I’ll just do it again: The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner and The Book of Lost Names by Kristin Harmel. I think I did mention them, as I type this…but either way both are good, with a preference to the Book of Lost Names. That reminds me of another great book I enjoyed this year by Jodi Picoult, The Book of Two Ways, which I loved, and you should also read the American Royals by Katharine McGee.

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The house across the street from me is for sale, so if you want to be my neighbor that’s an option. Our neighbor said the market is really hot right now so he is selling and plans to rent for awhile and then buy again when things settle down. Sometimes I think I must know nothing about money, because I’m happy to just stay in this little house that needs some work because it’s home and it’s nice enough, and I don’t want to move again…but then again there’s no mortgage on it and the electric bill is only about $75 a month average and that’s being pretty comfortable year-round. I don’t know…it would be nice to have a house that wasn’t kind of weirdly set up and needed some work done (the kitchen here is particularly awful) but I’ve spent so much time here over the past year that I just don’t even know any better! I’m not sure where I was going with that beginning though, except to say that, I would worry if I sold my house and got out of the market that it would just keep going up. I’m not sure why the market is going up, but imagine if you lived in California in the 90’s and figured you’d buy again when the prices dropped.

Nonetheless no one wins the comparison trap, and thankfully I never worry too much about my house: I know I will never win any interior decorating awards, and it is easier just to know that if you invite someone over it is likely their house is nicer, but perhaps my cooking is better. My cats are probably cuter too Smile But really, how better to be a friend that let your friends feel better about their own houses? At least, this is what I tell myself.

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Louie’s office: he set up a place on top of the filing cabinet for the cats to hang out. This is  a room that is very functional and useful but ugly: wood paneling and a mini-blind! The room also doesn’t have good heating and cooling because it was an additional at one time, so he sweats in the summer and runs a space heater in the winter (it gets very toasty and warm!). It overlooks the backyard and gets lots of natural light though, and he has all of his computer equipment set up and works from home many hours a day.

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After Louie finishes his doctorate we have some longer term house goals. This is looking like the end of Summer 2022. It was supposed to be earlier, but COVID and all the online teaching work has pushed it back. But the longer term goal is to remodel the garage in the back yard into a studio/guest house. We’re thinking pull out couch, full bath, and then I can mostly use it for my teaching, but when we have guests they can stay there as well. It seems far away, but I’ll still have a good 20 years left of my teaching career so that seems well worth it, even if it takes a few more years. I think once we start the project, if we really work at it, we can get it done in a summer. So maybe that means 2023 is garage summer, but gosh that seems far away! Maybe we’ll be able to start working on it a bit this summer, at least the big task of clearing it out.

Truly clutter is still our biggest issue. Both Louie and I are clutter people, in different ways, and while neither of us wants to be minimalists, we do have too many random things. I’m also realizing we probably just need two or three big bookcases to replace a few shorter ones and that could help a bit as well. (If you are local and getting rid of a large bookcase, let me know, as I’m not quite ready to look in the marketplace yet.)

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In any case, I think that’s enough randomness today! I had grand “week in the life” plans for this blog post, but then I started overanalyzing my house, and feeling bad about it. I think I’ll do a little cleaning and tidying now and then I’ll read Smile

Quarantine, Random thoughts, Teaching

Career musings

It’s tough being a freelancer. Or maybe I should say, it was tough? I have had several phases of my career, and this latest one is certainly less stressful in many ways.

I started out as a full-time orchestra player, right out of grad school. I also taught and added in extra gigs and tried to make as much money as possible to start paying off student loans and start saving. I was young and had energy, drive, and a great love of music. My job tried to take that away from me, and ultimately I made a very personal choice to leave. I haven’t regretted that choice, though I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had stayed.

I then spent a few years being a more full-time freelancer and teaching in the Cleveland area. I played all the gigs I could, was a member of up to 5 different regional orchestras, and spent a lot of time driving to and from with small groups of friends. It felt very temporary, but it was a lot of fun and I had a large amount of satisfying and fulfilling musical experiences. I worked nearly every day and worked long hours, and it had its ups and downs.

I moved to St Louis then, and hoped to continue in  much the same way, but there weren’t the same opportunities…there weren’t 5 or more regional orchestras in driving distance, and in fact only one really, and that wasn’t even really within driving distance, so I tried to up my teaching and did what I could. I played a bunch of gigs, here and there, everywhere, trying to get my name out there, and ended up being really busy as well, but not having that many satisfying or fulfilling musical experiences. Truthfully my great love is orchestral playing, but my second great love is doing things my way, and the two are hard to reconcile.

I talked with a student yesterday who had her first full orchestra playing experience before her lesson, and she described it as overwhelming. It is! I recall my first time playing in an orchestra (with winds and percussion and all) and it is overwhelming, the sound is unlike anything you can ever experience, but it is amazing. As I’ve gotten older, I have come to terms with the fact that that just isn’t something I will do very much in my life, if at all, and that just might be okay. It’s a hard thing to come to terms with, honestly, but getting upset over a $150 gig that takes up two nights a week isn’t the same as playing a Shostakovich Symphony with a group.

I have a lot of thoughts about orchestral musicians, and what work is worth, and the music world, and they are often jumbled, every changing, and not without a little bit of bitterness but also with love and hope. I won’t share most of them here, but I will just say this: I’m tired of the stress, and I’m tired of the hustle. I have been busier teaching than I’ve ever been in my life, but it’s so much happier. I miss seeing colleagues, but I don’t miss feeling so replaceable and being belittled.

I have a group I’ve played with for years that I have debated quitting for awhile, because of how it makes me feel. Sometimes I really enjoy it, and other times I feel taken advantage of. I’ve been yelled at, I’ve had a score thrown at me by the conductor, and to add insult to injury, my position wasn’t even considered worth mentioning to a new contractor. Nothing about the group ever made me feel good as a person (or hadn’t in a long time), but I hung on because I occasionally enjoyed playing the music…that’s how my performing career has felt over the past few years, maybe since I moved here.

That’s not to say that every experience has been that way, but enough for me to say, enough. I read other musicians who say how much they miss playing together. Maybe I’ve made other musicians feel bad as well, but I don’t miss being made to feel bad. I don’t miss pouring my playing into a job only to be passed over in the future to somebody new or somebody who grew up here, or somebody who was more “connected.” Maybe people read this blog and say, well, she doesn’t want to be hired anyway, she has a bad attitude, but there have been years that I have said yes to every single job I could, showed up early and prepared, practiced for hours and hours, and that didn’t matter either. And then once I stopped working, during the pandemic, I didn’t miss it. I filled up my schedule with students and there I am.

I have thought about this because there are gigs coming back. Now, some of those are an easy no, because, well, there’s a pandemic. But how to balance it? There are people I do want to play with, and there will be jobs I do want to take, but there will also be ones I don’t want to take. I know if I say no jobs will dry up, but they also dry up when I say yes, so I’m not living in fear anymore.

I’m being honest here, because this is a tough profession, and you should all know it. I don’t want the accolades and the pressure anymore. I’m tired of it. I don’t miss the audiences. Maybe that will change, maybe I’ll want something different in a few years, I don’t know. Maybe once the pandemic is over I won’t be afraid of crowds anymore, but maybe I’m just tired. I know I play well enough to play anything I want, and I’m okay with that. I’ll always be asked first if I play in the St Louis Symphony, and unless the answer is yes people won’t ever think I’m any good, so who cares what they think anyway?

So, those are my current career musings. I added it up and I’m currently teaching about 40 hours a week, counting a little bit of driving around, but not counting grading or admin work. No wonder I feel so busy! We’ll see what I decide to do next fall (I think I need to drop something) but for now, I’ll just work and work, which is something I’ve always been good at, and I will hope that I make a positive impact on some of my students. I’m not going to pretend that music is some sacred thing, that being a music teacher or musician makes me a better person, because I think that’s rationalizing something that we are worried we are wasting our time doing. (A good friend once said, “Musicians always think they are doing the Lord’s Work” and that made me think!) I think music is worthwhile and it is fun to play the violin. I think learning to play an instrument is good thing for kids to do and helps them in their lives overall and that’s a good enough reason.

But that would be going off on another tangent, so I’ll just say…lots more students to teach today, and then a nice weekend of relaxing and trying to do something fun in the cold and during the pandemic before another long week of teaching.

What about you? Do you feel like the pandemic has made you second guess your life choices or change your trajectory or work-life balance?