music, therapy, and me

Yesterday, I spent my morning attending a series of webinar trainings offered by the Kansas Department of Education and our local Public Broadcasting Service stations all about things to think about when making video content for educational purposes. It was an interesting morning and went over many of the things that I've encountered over the years that I've been making content for music therapists. It inspired me to try some more stuff, so keep an eye out on the blog and the website for information about new videos... I found myself thinking about the discussions that I heard yesterday up to and through my sleeping last night. I ruminated on one thing that was mentioned by one of the presenters - content should be only about 4-5 minutes long for each segment. I started thinking about Sesame Street and how this rule was definitely part of their programming and then wondered if it was due to the attention span of young viewers or if the Street had programmed young viewers to wan...

I have signed up for two different webinars - both for free. The first is a series of discussions about how to use different resources for telehealth type education. It is offered by the Kansas Department of Education and covers three different topics. I am looking forward to trying some new technology. It will not be relevant to my life at the moment - we are not doing any sort of telehealth sessions or programming - but I can't pass up a chance to learn something new. The next webinar will be next Tuesday and will cover working with trauma-impacted youth. I am interested in getting as much information as possible about all of these topics and may then share it with you all in a bit. We will see. There are so many things to do and so little motivation to do much of anything. Frankly, I had forgotten this particular webinar, but an email refreshed my enthusiasm to learn. I will listen and watch as I take notes and do things around my home. I think I can fold laundry while learning ...

Okay, okay. I know that you didn't come here to get an advertisement, but I've decided that one way to let folks know what I do with and for music therapists is to tell you about it. If you don't want to feel any type of pressure whatsoever from this blog, then just skip Tuesdays for a bit, okay? My business consultant tells me that I need to be marketing things to others, so here goes! Tuesday posts are going to be dedicated to the things that I offer to other music therapists on my Teachers Pay Teachers Store . Just so you know, Teachers Pay Teachers does require that you sign-up with them and make an account, but you do not have to pay anything to be part of the website. Once you have an account, you have access to millions upon millions of digital files to use (with some adaptation or addition of our medium) with clients. There are all sorts of things that you can find on that site, but here is my particular site . If you end up browsing around my site (or TPT itself), ...

Today is Song Switch Sunday, and I cannot sing because I cannot breathe. This is not the dreaded pandemic, I have no temperature, no loss of taste, nothing other than my usual "It's hot and humid outside so my lungs are closing up" event that happens every year about this time, but it does mean that a video is not going to happen. Sorry. I hope to catch up later when all this goes away...

This morning, I awoke to find an email from one of my favorite companies to get stuff from ( Oriental Trading Company ) offering Teacher Supply Clearance Sales!! Oh, this is my kryptonite - stuff on "sale" and teacher supplies and school stuff and all that. I dove into the site, adding things to my shopping cart as I saw fit. (Just some information here - I am not sponsored to write about any type of product, company, or material in any way. If you decide to check out Oriental Trading Company from the link here on my post, I do not get any sort of financial benefit. I recommend things that I like and love so that you will know that they are out there as well - not for any sort of financial gain. If that ever changes, I will let you know. The only exceptions to this rule are when I share links to my own products, of course. I do get a small financial benefit from others purchasing my own products, but I try to keep the expenses very small for you.) School supplies are somethin...

I started delving into the emerging research about singing yesterday. I'm trying to figure out how all of the tests that are going on right now will be affecting my various jobs in the near and far future. There is some evidence that singing is a super-spreading activity, but the results are not yet large enough to know for sure. I am watching this topic pretty carefully as I am still singing with my clients, but I want to make sure that I'm not encouraging folks to engage in a potentially dangerous activity through music therapy treatment. The thing is that singing is part of what I do on a daily basis and it is something I love to my very core. It is part of what I do, so what happens if I'm not allowed to do this activity with other people until we get a vaccine? In therapy, I have plenty of other things to do that do not include singing, but one of my other jobs is church music director - all singing, all the time. My choir loft is not big enough to allow for social dis...

Wednesday is one of the days that I reserve for just general thoughts about things. I have some theme days to help me offer information that I think others will find interesting, and I have some days where I just write about whatever I want to write about. Wednesday is one of those "whatever" days. I started my blogging experience by writing my current feelings about going back to work after two days off waiting for medical clearance. After a failed telehealth experience followed by another better telehealth experience, I finally got the note stating that my shortness of breath and changed cough were most likely due to my seasonal allergies and chronic asthma. As of 1:30pm yesterday, I was cleared to return to work today. I have been having mixed feelings about all this. I admit that I thought long and hard about just moving about my day with my interns on Monday without declaring that I had answers that had changed to the basic health screening, but I went on the side of eth...

In last Tuesday's post, I decided to use future Tuesdays to get into the practice of showing others what I do over in my Teachers Pay Teachers shop - mainly because I need to become more comfortable telling others about the resources that I have made available, and also to decrease my queasiness around all things selling. (More on all this on last Tuesday's post .) I am now going to do my first Teachers Pay Teachers self-promotion post and please know that if you purchase anything from my store, you provide me with a small amount of income, so thank you for reading this and considering downloading one of my digital creations. (Boy, there is the queasy feeling.) The first thing that you need to know about Teachers Pay Teachers is that it does require a membership, but you do not have to pay for anything. Once you have made your account, there are so many files to peruse that you will be able to find almost anything for almost any type of music therapy theme that you have concei...

Yesterday, I did a little experiment with my new Song Switch Sunday series. I posted the links on Twitter and Facebook and not my blog (that was more a function of how long it took to upload the post than anything else). Here is the video link to the entire thing - 14 minutes of talk about the therapeutic elements of music and a song to share. Please give it a look and consider subscribing to my channel. I hope to be doing this type of video every weekend for a bit of time. I think I will start to film on Saturdays and then upload overnight so I can do other things instead of just sitting in silence watching YouTube take over my entire bandwidth for hours...Blech. Today is the first day of the work week, and I've been up for an undetermined amount of time. I finally gave in and went to the bathroom just as my alarm light went off, so I've only technically been out of bed the same amount of time as always, but I have been awake much longer. Next week at this time, I will have t...

I read another futuristic description the other day - I am collecting these opinion pieces to inform one of my current projects - writing a series of essays/stories about a music therapy student who is studying 27 years from now. The most current opinion in my library is from David Leonhardt . This article is an editorial from The New York Times and offers some of the ideas that others are kicking around these days - envisioning what things will look like when the current pandemic becomes history. I love thinking about the "what-ifs" of life. So, I've been thinking about the "what-ifs" of music therapy education and clinical training. I just put my protagonist, Persephone, through a rough clinical music examination. Today's thoughts start from where the last chapter left off... CHAPTER TEN Subject: Clinical Musicianship Examination Results. Persephone's hand hovered over the message for a split second. She had never really understood the whole Shrodinge...

Do you remember all the posts that were coming across social media about how rough 2019 was for many of us and how much we were looking forward to the new start that was 2020? I do, and I long for those naive days when 2020 seemed to be a big step forward into life. Little did we all know that 2020 would be what it is now. Since it is now July and quarter three, I've been sitting down to do some things that I do pretty much every quarter. I sit down to make goals for myself and evaluate my progress on the goals for the previous quarter. This quarter also coincided with filling up my old bullet journal, so all of this planning and evaluation is happening in my new journal - the one I'm designing for myself. What have I learned from doing this exercise?? I am great at establishing goals but LOUSY at working towards them at all! I always have really sound and appropriate goals written down for myself, but I rarely make any progress on them at all. I am constantly making grandiose ...

I did something risky yesterday. I told two other people of a project that I am working on because it is something that is fun and COMPLETELY out of my regular experience with life. I'm not going to tell you what it is because I am completely and totally scared of what I am doing, but rest assured that it is not dangerous, may never be shared with other people, and is something that I find fun but many people would not waste the time or effort to even try. The biggest part of this post is that I did something that I was scared to do and now it is something that three people know. It is no longer mine and mine alone. That is a huge risk for me. I am running a bit late this morning because I spent my first part of the morning browsing through Oriental Trading Company's clearance sale and spent my allowance on crafting supplies and charms and stuff. It was a good experience in self-care as I looked at what I was purchasing and thought about what I will be able to make with these t...

On Sunday, I spent my entire blogging time trying to figure out my new Sunday blog series. I eventually ended up selecting Song Switch Sunday , and I'll be making some videos to go along with this concept. They will be videos made in the early mornings, so don't expect perfection or much editing, but I will try my best to present things in something other than my pajamas (wink). Here I am, on Tuesday at 4:41 am, trying to figure out what sort of topic I want to put into place on Tuesdays. I thoroughly enjoyed doing Teachers Pay Teachers Tuesdays where I featured TPT creators and told you about their free resources. I have no idea if anyone ever went over to TPT and downloaded these files, but I enjoyed finding them and finding uses for them in my own music therapy life. I also have about 30 files in my own Teachers Pay Teachers store , so I could focus on my own resources for quite a long time, but I feel queasy when I do things like that - my business coach recommends that I ...

Here it is, Monday morning at 5:04 am, and I am sitting down to write a blog post. I am getting ready to head back to work after my mid-summer break to a facility where we are significantly understaffed and changing how things are happening for the fourth time in the past four months. My state has one of the largest increases in COVID-19 reporting/positive results, and my caseload is being reduced to our residents only AGAIN after two weeks of including everyone. I feel like I am constantly having to react to things happening around me and around us all, and I am engaged in fear responses more than others. This last week was a good one. I interacted with about five people through checkout lines and one food delivery person. I received lots of packages (I had to get a new computer and all the auxiliary stuff that goes with it, of course), but other than a knock on the door, I did not have any type of human interaction live and in person. I slept when I wanted, I arranged things, I craft...

Here I sit, on Sunday morning at 5:04 am, staring at my computer screen, searching for an idea of some sort of theme that I can sustain for several weeks in some sort of series. I usually do something on Sundays, and I have enjoyed some of the things that I've written about. The last one was a Research Synthesis Sunday which turned out to be more chore than useful. I sort of discarded the idea about the time that all this COVID-19 stuff came to my door. I've also done Just a Song Sundays, Song Switch Sundays, Song Conversion Sundays, Supplemental Sundays, Song Lyric Sundays, and Sing a Song Sundays (these are the labels to search if you are interested in seeing some of my past Sunday thoughts). I want to do something new for this day, so I am brainstorming something that I want to do. I thoroughly enjoyed the Sing a Song Sundays - I enjoy analyzing music into various therapeutic elements to see how I would use these pieces for music therapy. I did not really sustain the Song Sw...

Well, I gave it the old college try and attempted to move my blogging to the evenings. What I found was that I was too tired and lazy in the evenings to string together some coherent thoughts, so I am throwing in the towel and am moving blogging back to the mornings. I tried for three weeks to make this part of the new evening routine, but it did not stick, so back to the first way of doing things. I have also remembered that I am more prolific if I am in the habit of writing using themes, so I am coming up with some weekly themes to help me with my blogging motivation. The themes that I liked the best (over all the years that I've been blogging) have been Teachers Pay Teachers Tuesdays, Thoughtful Thursdays, and something TME related on Sundays - Sing a Song or Strategy Something Sundays. I like having a structure to what I write about for some of my days and then changing it up on the other four days of the week. I seem to be more successful in creating content when I have some s...

I spent most of the day sleeping. My bed was too uncomfortable for a bit, so I went into the craft room and laid on the floor there before heading back to bed for a four hour nap. I think I skipped my medications yesterday which made today a "getting back into the routine" day which means extreme exha ustion and sleeping all day. When I did get up, I felt better, ordered food, ate it while sitting on the floor (my favorite place to sit), and then finished up a revamp of tonight's webinar program. I am still exhausted, but I think I'll be able to stay awake through the webinar...I hope. We are going to talk about how I write and organize my therapeutic music experience strategies. There are so many deliberate word choices in that sentence, that I feel that I need to elaborate on why I wrote what I wrote. I have chosen to call what I do with clients in the session "Therapeutic Music Experiences." I started off calling them "applications" because my ...

Last year, I was here... For the last couple of weeks, I've been trying to switch my blogging routine to the early evening hours with limited success. I find that my brain is more adept at thinking of topics and things to say in the mornings than in the evenings. I also like sleeping in the evenings, so I am not as prolific with this new routine. That may be a good thing or maybe not. Time will tell. I can tell you that I feel like something is missing from my morning when I don't blog a bit. It is my mid-summer break right now. I have a webinar in about 45 minutes for students about chord progressions, and I think I missed my medications this morning (nothing life altering, but it would explain my lack of interest in things today...hmmm). I have spent the day in feeling less than. Less than what? Less than EVERYTHING! Summer is a hard season for me. Most folks have seasonal affective disorder in the winter months, but I tend to have it in the summer months. This is something t...

On Wednesday evening, as I was getting ready to do a meeting with two friends of mine from way, WAY back, my computer died. It...just...stopped. Now, in the long run, this is NOT any sort of emergency for me, but I have lots that I have to do in the next two days to meet my deadlines, so I hopped onto the internet with another one of my devices and ordered a new computer for two day delivery (it was free!) so I could get things done! So, yesterday was delivery day, so I took out the various components and assembled the entire thing. Then, I took on the task of trying to find my files. I thought I had backed things up recently, but I cannot find anything past about 2017. Ugh. So, my new computer is currently copying things from the cloud onto the hard drive, and I am replicating things that I need to replicate to be organized for the things I need to do in the next two days. (I started this post early this morning and then remembered that I'm trying to establish an evening post rout...