music, therapy, and me

Well, everyone. My Wednesday was better than I thought it would be - the student who is giving me the most challenge was absent. The rest of the class was fine except for the BHT who spent the entire session on a cellphone with a client rather than encouraging the client to engage in music therapy. I have to talk to the principal about this... ugh. So, Wednesday went well. We have three groups today and three individuals, so it is a light session day. This means that I can finish the binder page activities that I am making for our classrooms. I can also keep working on the file folder activity innards (our post-graduate program is working on the file folder laminating - I have lots of pieces to cut out and add Velcro to before those folders come back to me - 75 folders worth! I have been busy with these things. I am currently contemplating how to distribute these binder pages and activities to the four classrooms that seem to need them. There are some things that will not really work f

I just finished watching a show that I am enjoying and there was a MAJOR twist at the end of the episode that just left me stunned. No details here, but I am stunned! I didn't see that twist coming, which is pretty unusual for me. I can generally figure these things out, but not this time. Music therapy is often like this for me. There are twists that happen that I have never imagined. There are moments when I sit and think, "Man, I was never taught how to handle this in music therapy school." For me, these twists are what keep me intrigued and working with people. I figure that I will stop being a music therapist when I stop feeling a bit of surprise each week with how the people who come into my sessions respond to music and to music therapy and to me. I had my two groups with the newly formed class at my facility. I focused on play during this week - I wanted to see how these five children played with toys and with each other. I also observed some preferences and encou

One of the biggest and most important lessons that I have learned over my years as a music therapist is that there are many times where you do not need or even want complex therapeutic music experiences or lots of visual aids or even many different instruments. There are times when simple is better than cool. At my facility, we are in a season of change. This happens every year about this time, but this year's changes seem more abrupt and pervasive than in other years. Every classroom has new staff members. Most of the classrooms have new class members. As a result, music therapy sessions have had to focus more on relationship building and learning how to do things with new people than on our music therapy goals. We have to focus on Maslow's pyramid base right now rather than the upper levels of that pyramid. It is time for meeting physiological needs and basic security needs. So, how do I do this? I go back to my own musical basics - rhythm, parallel play, and working on being

One of the great things about being an internship supervisor is getting meet many different music therapy interns - getting to know their ways of doing things, figuring out how to teach them things that they need to know, and helping them meet the demands of the professional world through assignments and program expectations. This is also one of the biggest challenges since each person who arrives at my internship is a unique human being who needs different things from me in order to be successful in my program. Now, before we get too much further into this particular topic, let's establish some things. First of all, I fit into the category of old music therapist now. I have been doing this job as a professional just shy of 30 years. It has been about 14 years since I have been in my last educational experience. I have an advanced degree in my chosen profession, and I have been training interns since the last century (barely, but still, things did start up in the 1900's). All o

Today's randomly selected post to revisit and develop comes to us from the year 2007. Yep, that's right. I've been blogging since the year 2006 here at blogspot and at this site. If you haven't been reading lately, I have decided to revisit old posts on Sundays to see what I was thinking when I was writing over the entire history of this site. To do this, I am using a random number generator that allows me to add in the number of posts that I have at the moment (3,184) and that will select a number for me. I then go into my archived posts to find the number indicated. There is some addition involved in this process, and I enjoy it, so why not? Today's post number is 28, and you can read the post by clicking here . Let's jump into my time machine and see what I felt was important to talk about during August of 2007. Please remember that this was only my 28th post, and I still hadn't quite figured out what I wanted to use this space for in my professional life

I didn't get a post in early this morning because the Online Conference for Music Therapy took over my brain and my to-do list, but all of that is finished for the day, so I thought I would try writing in the afternoon. I don't often do afternoon posts, mainly because I am more likely to be able to sit down and write in the quiet pre-dawn hours, but today is an exception, so why not? I spent my early morning hours going through several of the forms and emails that I have to send out over the next seven days, and then finished up my "work" time with a training for some of our presenters. I got to train a music therapist from Norway, one from Greece, and another from Japan - all from my home in Kansas, USA. I love this form of interaction, and I am very grateful that I can participate in things like the Online Conference for Music Therapy, Inc. I would never have "met" many of the music therapists that I have interacted with around the world otherwise. I ca