More on Workaholism & the Teach Piano Today Interview

Yesterday, Andrea Dow of Teach Piano Today interviewed me on the subject of workaholism amongst piano teachers<! It was great fun to chat with her about this issue and I hope it is a help to you! I’ve made note of some of the things I reference in the interview, so after listening you might want to come back here to explore these ideas and resources more fully. Of course, I’ll be blogging in more detail about some of the new ideas that we discussed, so be sure to sign up for the newsletter to get updates when new articles come out. You can listen to the interview here:

How Piano Teachers Can Battle Workaholism and Win

The Book

Manage your day to day2In speaking about the 90-20 rule of working more effectively and efficiently, I referenced this book: Manage Your Day to Day which I highly recommend to any creative person or any person wanting to more effectively manage their time in a self-employment situation. Here is the blog post in which I discuss some of its unique ideas: How This Mother of 3 Gets Anything Done

The Makeup Lesson Issue

Here is the very popular tongue-in-cheek post which explains why I don’t give makeup lessons: Top 5 Reasons You SHOULD Give Makeup Lessons. There are many ways of dealing with missed lessons and I advocate many solutions including performances classes, working the lesson without the student (more info in the “Stress-free Business Practices” workshops), swap lists, and much more. You can see links to other articles on makeups in this post.

And speaking of business issues, there is an entire category of posts here on the ComposeCreate blog which deal with the business of piano teaching. You CAN make a living, you CAN take sick leave with pay, you CAN find a way to get homeschool students, you CAN make the same amount of money all through they year, you CAN…the list goes on and on. Visit the Dollars and Sense category of posts to start learning!

The Fun Halloween Pieces Andrea Mentioned

A Scream on Halloween is going to be the talk of the recital if you integrate just a few little surprises as suggested in this short video:

The Candy Nabber is great fun for the student AND teacher. How many of you are your child’s candy nabber?! 

A More In-depth Article

Clavier Companion asked me to write about this topic on their blog a while back. In “Are You a Workaholic Piano Teacher?” you can take a quick “inventory” of your life to see if you might have these workaholic tendencies as well as see many ways of dealing with them.

And Finally…

There’s lots to explore on the ComposeCreate site. Some of the recent highlights:

  • Happy Happy BirthdayHappy, Happy Birthday – the newest birthday tune on the block can be yours in moments with a digital download. Its toe tappin’ energy will make your students want to dance, bop their head, and burst out singing this song spontaneously in their week!
  • Rhythm Menagerie and Rhythm Manipulations– Rhythm will never be the same in your studio! We recently issued a challenge to any studio across the world to beat our time and accuracy in Rhythm Manipulations (the series for older students). We love competition and your pre-teens and teens do too!
  • Take the 30 Piece Challenge – the best idea ever for piano teaching and I can say that because I didn’t come up with it! Check it out.

Don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter so you’ll never miss a new idea!

Happy teaching! I hope you all find ways to work more effectively, efficiently and happily!

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