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Showing posts from May, 2015

Issues

I studied Music Therapy in college.  Upon completing my classwork, I ended up choosing not to pursue the two year internship that would have eventually led to me becoming a board certified music therapist.  I picked the private teacher route instead. Even though I never ended up practicing music therapy in an official capacity, I never regretted my choice of studies in college.  Had I known then that I wanted to be a private music teacher I might have decided to take more of a music education route instead of therapy.  In retrospect, however, I feel that the therapy aspect prepared me more for the challenges of private teaching then anything else ever could have. I think the biggest difference between the therapy approach versus standard music education is that in therapy you are assuming that your client is not a normal functioning individual and then working from there.  Whether it's cerebral palsy or autism or anger problems, the issues are seen as the primary concern and yo

Intricate Plots

Something that's really cool about being a private music teacher is that you get to watch your students grow up.  It's something I started appreciate a few years ago when the cute little four-year-old suddenly walks into my studio and issues a sarcastic retort to my sarcastic statement. Umm, since when did you become twelve?  I thought you were still four! It's not that bad, actually.  But it really makes you reexamine your teaching strategy.  And something that seems to come up a lot is a need to readdress listening.  To be clear, I never stop  telling students to listen to their pieces.  But many of them reach a point where they think they've outgrown it.  Listening was all well and good when they were in book ONE.  But now they are in book TWO and listening to a piece once should totally be sufficient, right? Wrong. If anything, listening should become more  important the more advanced a student becomes.  Longer pieces are like reading more complex books.  Co