Six hours after sitting down to hammer out my next Songwriting Class assignment, my brain is tired, I’m very hungry, and I feel only marginally closer to my goal. I suspect that if someone else were around, I’d discover that I was a bit cranky, too.

I am diligently following processes professor Pat Pattison recommends online and in his book Writing Better Lyrics, optional reading material I am finding quite necessary. There are steps a lyricist can take to discover ideas, word combinations, and effective story telling. For me, some of it straightforward (object writing), some tedious (exploring the thesaurus, identifying rhymes), and some quite difficult (finding an effective angle, avoiding cliches, finding metaphors).

All of this creates great sympathy to my middle school and high school piano and composition students, and it has offered me some opportunity to reflect upon what it takes to learn a new skill.

Several years ago, fellow piano teacher and performer Christina Cuda Robertson took 6 months off of teaching for what she called her sabbatical. During this time, she maintained a tremendously reduced teaching schedule, where students only scheduled lessons every two weeks or so if and only if they had completely prepared everything assigned from the previous lesson.

Within her sabbatical, Christina learned new music, attended workshops, and focussed on personal musical growth. I remember feeling quite envious of her ability to plan ahead for such a valuable experience, and I was quite confident that I would never be able to make room for a personal sabbatical as long as I still had children to feed and educate.