music, therapy, and me

This has never happened before, but today's selected post is a Sentimental Sunday post. Post #3360 was written on October 1, 2023 , and it was all about a post I wrote back in 2011 (there is a link in post #3360 to the original post). Rough weeks happen, and they tend to happen quite often at my job. They seem to be happening more often these days, so it is nice to be reminde d that things really haven't changed much - I might just be more attentive to the continuing issues of the people that I work for and with right now than I have been in the past. All of these posts are concerned with figuring out what I need to do to engage my clients in their music therapy treatment process. I still struggle with this with some of my clients, but those clients are the ones that do not engage in any sort of education with any sort of enthusiasm, so I know that music therapy is not the only thing that they hate about school, but it still bores into my brain. I want people to love music and ...

'Tis the season of watching classroom set-ups on social media. Do you know the videos I'm talking about? The ones where teachers set up their super cute classroom themes and bulletin boards in a fast-forward type video? My sister, who is an elementary school teacher, is currently in the process of getting her classroom theme put together. I always love watching the creativity of others in setting up their environments, and I am always jealous of their space and ability to keep things up on the wall with their students. My students and my space are not conducive to cute themes and color-coded, coordinated wall decorations. The things that I have up on the walls of my music therapy room are functional rather than coordinated. My room is already decorated with lots of paintings from various murals, so things are already as busy as I want them to be. These facts don't stop me from wanting a classroom where I could make my own cute theme happen though. As I am a week away from t...

Today is our busiest day, We have six groups and one dyad session to get through before the end of the day, and then we have a meeting with our pod to finish things up. After that, I have choir practice and worship planning to do before I can crawl home to set out my trash cans and then stumble into bed. At least Thursday morning can be a later morning since I can't take my meds until later which means the side effects don't wear off until later... Wednesdays are one of the days that I leave for myself to go wherever my brain takes me. I am still waiting to hear about the other job opportunity that I applied for recently. I want to know the results, and I am not all that keen on waiting without any sort of information from the potential employers at all. The job was supposed to start a week ago, and there has been no announcement made at all about anything. I hate the not knowing and the lack of information. Ugh. This is one of the things that frustrates me more than anything e...

My brain is reaching post-COVID stage, and I am starting to think logically again (at least, I feel like I am being logical...), so I am thinking about things that are not entirely important but that make a difference in my life. Yesterday's post on systems was about classroom systems that my sister (Hi, KB!) uses in her second grade class, and included some talk about centers. Now, centers are one of my favorite ways to check for independence and generalization of skills for my clients, but they are hard to run in my music therapy room - mainly because of constant staff turnover and the need to constantly train staff members on how to interact and how to stay out of what clients are doing! **We all want to help, but we don't all realize that helping too much hinders people rather than actually helping them.** I want my students to explore and figure out answers without interference from well-meaning staff members who just don't get how we all learn. Anyway... Lately, I hav...

Aren't human beings fascinating? We've gone through ten chapters of musical development in Music, Therapy, and Early Childhood: A Developmental Approach by Elizabeth Schwartz, and we are just now getting to the end of the early childhood developmental process. This last bit, responsibility, indicates the time when the young child starts to work within the group structure and is able to start playing an individual role within that group. This is the last of developmental stage chapters, and it illustrates the ideal musical development - that of being independent in making music, but also being able to use that music within a group context with others. For this chapter, Schwartz illustrates the fact that goals are individual, for the individual within a group, and that there are also group goals that the individual also addresses. Music becomes purposeful for many during this stage. We sing in a choir. We play set patterns on the drum. We make our patterns match the ones pla...

It is 4:17am, and I have already blown through three different blog topic starts that just didn't work this morning. Everything turns out to be a "poor me" topic when I start to develop it a bit more, so I'm giving up on writing about these things. So, instead of writing about my own current gripes, I am going to focus on solving a problem that is happening with my work environment. Some background information - Every other year, our current principal finds an "inspirational" book for the entire faculty to read. This year's book is " The Energy Bus ," by Jon Gordon. If you haven't read it, I found it to be quite interesting and an easy read. It took me an hour to read (and take notes), and we are starting to put the rules of the book into place at my facility. Enter the difficulty. We've been invited to "get on the bus" with a set of nebulous goals that are framed similar to "we want to do better." We've ...

I think I'm a bit of an odd duck when it comes to research questions. At least, that's what it seemed like when I was in graduate school. The questions that made me curious often didn't jive with the ideas of my advisors. That both concerned me and made me curious. Why weren't others interested in developing tools for music therapists to use during sessions? Why weren't others interested in how music therapists made decisions about their live music making with and for clients? It was this, more than anything, that led me to leave the world of academia and go back into full-time clinical work. Most of what I want to know can't be quantified, measured, or researched other than participant reporting. This is why I didn't find that my questions meshed with the ideas of my advisors. How do you really track the inner dialog that goes on inside the head of a music therapist who is making decisions about music presentation in the moment?      I have always ...

My four-rooms ago music therapy room - the one I loved! I start moving today! The current music therapy room More of the current music therapy room In a facility where I have had eight different rooms, I am ready to find another "forever" home. I am absolutely positive that this will not be the last place that music therapy is placed at the facility, but I would like this to be my last music therapy room move at this place. We shall see. I had a perfect music therapy room at one point. It had built-in storage, custom designed to accommodate my drums and guitars, and was large enough for movement by entire groups but small enough to feel like things were contained. We could use ribbon sticks without risk of tangling up our neighbors. It was wonderful and taken away from me for the room I'm in now. In between those two rooms, I had three other rooms, but I eventually was able to move into the gray music therapy room three Novembers ago. Some of the cabine...

I am stuck in a thought loop these days. The thoughts are not always positive and have lots to do with the happenings of last week here in the States. I think I have a handle on what is going on, and then I see or hear something that just sends me back into a tizzy. Many of my thoughts are based on the just past election, but I don't discuss my politics with other people, so this will NOT be a political blog post. There are many other things going on in my small world - are you ready for a glimpse? My family is currently going through a situation that we had to live through about 20 years ago. I know this experience will make us a stronger nuclear family unit, but we have to live through it first. This all started on election day and has taken over most of my family interactions over the past week. This experience covers everything like a haze, coloring all other things. I was offered a new space for music therapy yesterday. The space is four times the space that I have now. ...

Shaping A Song I've started my gra phic organizer for the concept of how I think about shaping music to eac h cli ent. It's a bit more difficult that I thought it would be since I can't seem to pin down what I am trying to convey , but it's a start. This is my way of showing that any song can be used for therapeutic in tervention with any cli ent. I just cannot figure out how to show that qui te yet. It's coming, but slowly. I' ll be hashing out this concept for some time on Sundays - trying to pin down exactly what I want to say about this idea. It's my process. I fiddle with things and thoughts until they solidify into something concrete. Right now, nothing is sol id. It's all l iquid. What I have right now is the three things that I think are the most impor tant about music therapy - cli ent state of being, client preferences for music, and client goals and objectives. Then comes the music. That's where I start to get fuzzy, but I wi...

This was a rough week. It started with a day off - which is always nice - but that meant that we all went back to four days of being a bit off. The iPod had a meltdown, stopped talking to the computer and then stopped talking to me. Middle school clients were rioting, fists were flying, screaming was happening everywhere, but definitely in the music therapy room. There was some consolation in the fact that middle schoolers were screaming everywhere, but it didn't make things any quieter in my small, acoustically difficult space. What are your biggest group therapy challenges? How do you engage diverse clients into a common therapeutic music experience? I know what I usually do in these situations, but my current methods of interaction just aren't working these days. My philosophy about this is if the  clients aren't fitting to the current treatment service delivery model , then you change the delivery model to fit the clients. I spent the entire afternoon thinking ...