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I said it the other day almost without consciously deciding to. “This is your last chance to make music in the month of August!” One of Steve Zegree’s many lessons was to deal in real time. Seeing the time passing under your feet can motivate you to make the most of your chances. When […]

Day 2 of school – the whiplash is real. After all the anticipation and preparation for Day 1, you get a few hours of respite, and then you do it all again! Remember that students are experiencing the same whiplash: nightmares, midnight headaches, tears at bedtime are common from elementary school to college. Go […]

I often hear teachers and parents ask their wards questions, only to make them into hypothetical questions by providing the answer moments later. I’m a firm believer in the long 15 seconds of silence. It can feel painfully long as a student stares back at you. (Often, they’re waiting for me to answer myself, […]

Sometimes change happens all at once. I have just begun my last day as a full-time at-home dad. Tomorrow my family heads back to school, and my youngest starts kindergarten. I’ll be at-home, but home alone. It’s been an incredible journey, and one that fulfilled me professionally as well as personally, even as I almost always prioritized […]

Elizabeth Gilbert has said that following your passion is the wrong advice. She says, “Passion is rare; passion is a one-night-stand. Passion is hot, it burns. Every day, you can’t access that.” She suggests we follow our curiosity instead. If you don’t have one white-hot passion to follow, you at […]

There is something to be said for getting your first performance out of the way as soon as humanly possible. Of course you won’t be polished. You won’t sound like you’re going to sound in six months. Energy, focus, ensemble, stamina: these are all skills that need to be learned and […]

You’ve always got a perfect game before you start. There’s never an out-of-tune chord in the silence before the downbeat. Every student masters every concept you instruct–until the first day of school. You will make mistakes. You will have poor tuning, wrong tempos, poor literature choices for your choirs. But the messiness […]

Would you actively discourage your children or students from pursuing a profession? I have a colleague, a fabulous teacher, who shared that he discouraged his children from pursuing teaching. For big and familiar reasons: too high-stress, too low-pay, too low-respect. For children with maturity, intellect, and ambition, he feared it would be demoralizing. […]

The first week of school for a teacher is always rough. Your days are a blur and you finish utterly exhausted. I don’t think you’re actually any busier than you were a week or two earlier; it’s a different busy, but not necessarily busier. The challenge in that first week is […]

For our choir retreat, every year I ask my students to make a list of three personal goals for the year (in the context of the group) and three goals for the group. We meet one-on-one to review their audition rubric and discuss their personal goals, and then sit together and discuss […]