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Virtually Relearning Everything About Teaching During COVID-19

My apologies for the lag in blog posts!  As of writing this post, we have been in COVID-19 quarantine lockdown for about five weeks.  I find the memes and jokes about suddenly finding all this time on your hands hilarious but they don't exactly ring true if you have young children.

While there have been quiet moments for me, I haven't felt the willpower to write anything.  Writing--even if it's nonfiction--requires a certain amount of "creative juice" and I found that I just didn't have that in me at first.  Too many things were changing.  Too many little stresses added up to make me prefer relaxation over creativity.

So many online teaching resources suddenly exploded into existence when the lockdowns started.  It's been absolutely amazing to watch happen.  Many teachers that were suddenly bursting with creative juices when presented with this new challenge of 100% online lessons.  I think that has been a wonderful balance for teachers like me that would have been content to sit back and just take it all in for months.

Now that the proverbial dust has settled a bit at my house, I feel like I'm able to appreciate what this change has done for the music teaching community.  Obviously, I would have preferred this sort of change to have been sparked by a less horrible scenario.  But that seems to be an ongoing theme with humanity: we thrive with strife.  It seems to take horrible events to really break us out of our ruts.

I love how this experience has forced everyone into the 21st century.  Technology certainly has its limits but we have intentionally held ourselves back simply because a portion of the population just did not want to learn how to use technology.  There seems to be a growing feeling of openness and learning.  Whereas before there was no need to try a new approach, that need has now been forced upon us.  New ways of communicating, new ways of creating a community... in many ways people are becoming closer because of this shared experience.  Not having toilet paper is something that everyone can relates to, ya know?

For my own personal studio, it's been really interesting seeing my students in a different setting.  It's made it clear to me what things are successful with my teaching and which things are not.  So many of them had to learn how to tune!  Knowing how to tune and working up the guts to actually turn the pegs are apparently two different skills.

I still strongly dislike not being able to physically show students how to do things.  Online lessons require considerably more talking and often just to explain one small adjustment that would have taken me three seconds to show in person.  But this has given me the opportunity to reassess how much really needs to get done in a lesson.  I've been trying to take the Suzuki goal of "one point lessons" to heart.  If it takes thirty minutes to explain one pinky adjustment then so be it.  It is not lost time.

I've also been trying to use the opportunity to have my older students do things like music theory workbooks.  Since we do so many theory activities in our physical group classes I had not felt the need to have my students do workbooks as well.  But this has been a nice addition to the online lessons.  It's something that's easy to work and ask questions.  I picked a workbook series for them that also has an ear training portion.  This has made me feel better about the lack of intonation and tone exercises in our online lessons.

Adaptation is the key to survival (to quote Star Wars Clone Wars).  There have been some good things and some annoying things about adapting to this new teaching environment but it's heartening to me to see so many trying to adapt.  That we can change.

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