My new assignment sheet for this year has a new check box indicating if a student should send me a video of their playing during the week. Here’s my assignment sheet and how I enabled student video upload.
Piano
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
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.
Continued professional development is important in any field. In the past few years, I have been expanding my professional development experience to beyond the annual teacher or musician conference I would attend. One valuable resource I have learned to tap is the world of Massive Open Online Courses. These are online courses open to the public, typically with thousands of enrollees.
I am a big fan of coursera.org. This site currently aggregates over 400 mini-courses (typically 5-6 weeks long) presented by respected universities and colleges across the world. There are more than a handful of courses related to music that I have on my watch list for future participation.
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.