I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaack!<\/p>\n
So, this past month has been crazy.\u00a0 No need to tell any of you.\u00a0 Every time I’ve thought to myself, “I should go blog” I get overwhelmed and stressed out and crabby and then don’t.\u00a0 But then I think about how I’ll want to have this time in my life documented for the future… so here I am.<\/p>\n
I’m going to try and break this down into a few separate posts.\u00a0 For today, I thought\u00a0 general recap of the past 4 weeks would be good to start things off.<\/p>\n
I like to call this Virus Week.\u00a0 This was the first week that we really took action here in Minnesota.\u00a0 Schools were closed down, and my piano contest that was supposed to happen that weekend leading into that week, was also cancelled.\u00a0 Very last minute.\u00a0 As in, my van was packed and I was ready to leave to deliver everything to the U of M and then they called it off.\u00a0 Very stressful for me.\u00a0 At that point I gave the option to my students that if they wanted to move to online lessons they could–but I had never actually tried doing an online lesson ever<\/u> so that was a big learning curve for me.\u00a0 About 1\/4 of my students moved to online.\u00a0 I couldn’t wrap my head around the way things were going or the possibility that they would close down schools for WEEKS.\u00a0 I honestly thought it might blow over.<\/p>\n
It did not.<\/p>\n
This was the week where everything started to fall apart for me.\u00a0 At this point I had more students starting to switch over to online lessons and a good handful that were still coming in person.\u00a0 Those that were still coming to my house were so appreciative to get out of the house and go somewhere and just do something normal.\u00a0 I really feel for these kids.\u00a0 But midway through the week the Governor of MN announced that we would be put on “stay-at-home” protocol starting that coming weekend for the next 2 weeks.\u00a0 And that meant that I would need to officially shift all of my lessons to online.\u00a0 Oh, and my computer decided to die.\u00a0 That’s fun, right?\u00a0 This was a really bad week for me emotionally.<\/p>\n
This week was actually our Spring Break week, so I only taught on Monday (just a few online lessons) and then I had the rest of the week off.\u00a0 The kids were already pretty much on an extended Spring Break since they had not had any school work for the past 2 weeks leading up to this… so it really just felt the same for them.\u00a0 By this time they were getting a bit antsy to actually start online school since they were getting bored.\u00a0 We had implemented a schedule that included some writing and school work, but it’s just not the same.\u00a0 This was a good week for me to not have to stress about online lessons.\u00a0 It also gave me time to recover from the massive headaches I had been getting from the stress and having to listen\/look at my computer screen for so many hours a day.\u00a0 However, even though I was not teaching, I did have to spend a few days of my break working on completing the grading process for the piano contest.\u00a0 It had officially been cancelled from happening in person, but we moved it to an online submission.\u00a0 So the previous weekend I spent pretty much that whole Saturday helping the judges trouble shoot all of their judging videos and critiques.\u00a0 The majority of my spring break week was taken up tabulating all the results into a series of spreadsheets.\u00a0 We normally work on this process together (with like a group of 15 of us) so it took significantly longer with only 4 of us working in our own homes.\u00a0 But we got it done!\u00a0 By the end of the week I was feeling much less stressed.<\/p>\n
This week I started teaching ALL of my lessons online.\u00a0 By now I had ordered a new computer, transferred all my files and got everything ready.\u00a0 I was feeling more prepared and set up a new teaching station for all my supplies.\u00a0 I had even decided to try teaching standing more to combat my desire to lean in toward the screen while listening–which was killing my back.\u00a0 I had my highest load of students this week, which I just find amusing.\u00a0 I taught 66 lessons.\u00a0 And I’m happy to say that it actually went really well.\u00a0 It’s a whole mental shift.<\/p>\n
This was also the week that the big kids started their online school.\u00a0 This went a lot better than I had anticipated.\u00a0 Everyone was excited to have purpose back in their day.\u00a0 And my kids really do love school and checklists, so that worked in their favor.\u00a0 Now they get up, have breakfast, and then go to their workstations for a couple of hours to work on their assignments.\u00a0 Everyone started to feel a bit more normal this week.\u00a0 Oh, and Tim’s workers started their season this week too.\u00a0 So he would get up and head right off to work as well.\u00a0 See?\u00a0 Starting to feel more normal.<\/p>\n
So here we are.\u00a0 That brings us up to this week.\u00a0 I’m really starting to get the hang of online lessons.\u00a0 My students are all getting to be pros at it too.\u00a0 There are just some things I have resigned myself to that won’t work for right now–like really working on pedaling techniques (I can’t see their feet!) or dynamics.\u00a0 I understand now that it takes a lot longer to communicate to my students by video and I’m having them mark more in their music.<\/p>\n
The big kids are working independently on their online school.\u00a0 Tim is still heading off to do bids pretty much every day.\u00a0 He takes care of picking up food when we need it on his way home from the bids.<\/p>\n
We might be living life like this for longer than I had expected, but I feel like we can do this now.\u00a0 Life has finally hit a new groove. Whew.\u00a0 It only took 4.5 weeks……………<\/p>\n
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