My partner and I recently built a violin studio– more on that soon!

We installed a taller than average desk to accommodate a cool husky rolling tool box which houses my teaching and tech gear. A hidden benefit of the tall desk is that I can now teach standing rather than sitting. The discovery totally transformed my zoom teaching.

I LOVE teaching standing up.

A few of the many benefits…

1. Posture. I was coming away from my teaching days on the computer with back pain. As a 25 year old I felt way too young for chronic back pain, but no amount of fiddling with my chair set up helped the problem. After a day of standing I immediately felt better.
2. Effortless transition to playing. When sitting I felt like had to make adjustments every time I wanted to pick up my violin to demonstrate. With the standing desk I could simply pick up my violin and play. No computer angle adjustment, no hitting the edges of the chair, no hitting the bow on the roof or wall.
3. Variable proximity to the screen. When I’m standing, not stuck in a chair, I can back up or get closer to the screen whenever I want. If I’m watching a student play a long piece and can stand on the other side of the room and lean against the wall. This helps the child feel a sense of change and distance, but it also helps my eyes and legs to stay in constant motion.

You can buy a mechanically operated desk online. This one seems to be a popular option. Ours is much simpler– just an old piece of reclaimed wood (9″ wide) balanced on top of 2×4’s drilled into the studs. 34 inches from the ground is perfect for my height when I consider the height of our monitor and webcam. I can type easily, the computer is mounted of the back of the board on an adjustable arm, the web cam mounts on top of the monitor. This set up is available to you for under $10 if you have the computer on a mounted arm, and $50 to buy the computer mounting hardware. It can be put together in under an hour.

I remember my first semester of studio violin teaching. I was a sophomore in college in Austin, Texas. I had a wide open course schedule and let my students choose, free for all, when they wanted to meet.

The school of music was located in the heart of downtown Austin– a nightmare to get to on a weekday afternoon. So of course I ended up teaching early mornings, weekends, late at night, or otherwise convenient times for my students but VERY inconvenient times for me.

I learned my lesson.

Since then I’ve completely streamlined my lesson scheduling process. It offers a fair amount of flexibility to my families while keeping my teaching schedule concentrated onto a few days. Furthermore, my process reduces back and forth emailing which can completely overwhelm a teachers’ inbox.

1) At the beginning of the semester I figure out when I am going to teach. I’ve been pretty consistent for the last three semesters. I teach between 2 and 7 on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

2) I create a spreadsheet, pictured below, with all of my available teaching times. I send out a fresh one in the fall for the full academic year, and a separate sheet for summer.

You’ll notice that I list my lessons in 15 minute increments which allows students to sign up for 30, 45 and 60 minute lessons.

On the right hand side of the sheet I list all of the weeks of lessons, highlight weeks off, and note special events. This allows parents to have the semester long calendar right in front of them as they are making their scheduling decision. It’s also a link they can return to on their own if they need to check whether we have a lesson or not. If a parent claims they didn’t know we did/n’t have a lesson I’ll just point out the calendar was right there on the document they used to sign up at the beginning of the semester.

At the beginning of the spring term I re-send out the same sheet just to remind parents that the scheduling is staying the same but if they have new conflicts they need to switch to a new time.

3) Which brings me to my third ESSENTIAL point. I allow students to change their lesson at any time within my scheduled teaching days. So even though I don’t teach all the way from 2-7 on Tues/Wed/Thur, I keep the times protected so that if a student needed to switch lesson times for one week only they can.

I ask that if they do switch their spot permanently they just delete their name and sign up in an open spot. If it is a one or two time thing they write their name in a new, open spot, highlight their name red, and type in the dates of the change. After the dates have passed they (or I, if I’m tidying up) will just delete their name and that time is open again.

Occasionally students will request to switch to a time already taken by another student. I simply send them the contact information of that student and the two of them work out a switch on their own.

4) We use the open times to schedule makeups (either necessitated by me or the students) written in red (a one time lesson). Rather than going back and forth in our email inboxes in simply send the sheet link to the parent who needs to reschedule, and they enter their name at the time it works.

Now I do have other free time in my life– mornings, Monday and Friday afternoon, some parts of Sunday– but I do love that by default almost all of my teaching is directed to that Tues/Wed/Thur timeframe. So not only is scheduling effortless on my part, I just send a link, but it ends up being nice and concentrated. I know on Tues/Wed/Thur I’m going to go deep into teaching and then have Friday through Monday to recuperate. I can protect before and after the teaching times for getting into the zone and taking notes. I can slip into a much deeper teaching state because I don’t have to process as much email shallow work and I’m not going in and out of teaching for short bursts every day of the week like I did early in college.

What process do you use to schedule lessons?

Do you remember when we used to be able to gift music? Fold wrapping paper around a Compact Disc and literally hand it to someone?

Some of my most cherished musical experiences were jamming out to classical music in my bedroom — listening to CD’s my violin teachers gifted me.

I wanted to do the same thing for my studio as a new year’s gift, but I had to think carefully how to do so. I decided a matching playlist over multiple platforms was best. Though it didn’t guarantee students could/would listen, at least it was something free I could pass on. I could put my own twist on it. It would be an opportunity for exploration… a launching point.

The Spotify playlist and YouTube playlists are embedded below.

Do you notice any common threads? I aimed to share music that I both loved and I thought were in some way ‘new’ for the classical community.

New artists. LGBTQ+ and BIPOC artists. Female musicians. Queer composers. Non western-classical composers. Innovative performance techniques. Different instrumentation. Something fresh.

Is it possible to teach grounded in the Suzuki philosophy without overemphasizing the white, patriarchal heritage of the standardized Suzuki repertoire? Perhaps. But I know that right now, in 2021, I can be sharing music beyond that limited scope with my students who I hope to be music lovers, not just violinists, and not just classical violinists. If we hope to develop the citizenship of our students then as teachers we must use our platform to direct our students to ‘new,’ openminded, expansive, liberating music.