A Personal Update

For anyone who follows along closely enough to notice, you can see that I’ve taken a bit of a hiatus here on Music Matters Blog. It’s been exactly three months since my last post – the longest break I’ve ever taken in the 15 years I’ve been blogging here! Some of that has been due to busyness and other pursuits, but in all honesty I’ve had to step back and contemplate my purpose and future vision for this blog.

As we all know, the year 2020 turned much of the world upside down, including the music world. Teachers who were proud of themselves for just learning how to text or navigate social media were suddenly thrown into offering online music lessons full-time. And the online music education world exploded with resources to meet the sudden shift. For someone who’s been accustomed to being more at the forefront of technological developments on the user end, I suddenly felt way behind the rest of the pack.

Since I’ve pared down my studio over the last several years, I have a small enough number of students now (and our local restrictions have been flexible enough) that after the initial month of forced lockdown/virtual piano lessons, we were able to resume normal in-person lessons. We were even able to hold a completely normal Piano Expeditions summer piano camp last year, for which I’m extremely grateful!

So, all that to say, I’ve felt in a bit of a bubble here in my studio (and not of the Covid variety…) and I’ve been wrestling with the relevance of continuing to post “normal” resources when so many teachers are teaching every day in far from “normal” lesson scenarios. I’ve been exploring a few virtual lesson resources (one in particular that is awesome! review coming soon!), but most of my day-in-day-out teaching, creating, and exploring still looks like traditional piano lessons, in studio, face to face. So my personal crisis of sorts was the question of whether I still had anything of value to offer the music education world in this vastly altered new reality. Or should I just delete the blog and join the “obsolete in-person piano teachers club”? (ok, maybe that’s a little too dramatic…!) I’m sure you get the idea.

Anyway, it finally occurred to me after much prayer and soul-searching that even though a lot of the externals may look different for us when it comes to teaching piano lessons right now, the heart of it is still the same. We are still dedicated teachers on a quest to invest in the lives of our students, utilizing the best approaches and ideas and resources we can find or create to aid us in this endeavor. And that is still the heart of Music Matters Blog as well. We are walking this journey together, and I have benefited (and continue to benefit!) immeasurably from the creative and generous music teachers all around me, so I want to keep sharing whatever I find along the way that may be of use to others. I’m still tossing around some specific new ideas that I might implement, but in the meantime I’m planning to just share as I go – things I’m learning, cool sites and resources I find, teaching ideas that seem to work well, and so on. If you have any specific suggestions of what would be beneficial for you or what you’d like to see here on the blog, I’d love to know!

I know we’re already over a month into the year, but consider this my belated Happy New Year to all of you. I’m excited to see what is in store for us in 2021 and always love to connect with and hear from other teachers, so feel free to comment below or send me an email with any of your ideas, suggestions, resources…or just to say hi! Many blessings to each of you!

A shot of my husband and me during a hike on our recent trip to the Smoky Mountains.