music, therapy, and me

It is Monday, which means that I now give myself permission to get into a bit of a rant or express opinions that I hold near and dear. So, here it goes. I was thinking in the shower this morning about education and how students interact with the world these days. My sister, a second grade teacher, has a group of students that are challenging her this year. The students have not settled into any sort of learning routine. They have no interest in learning anything. All they want to do is play without consequences. Almost all of her students are performing significantly below grade level, and they have not been taught how to learn in their school experience so far. She is struggling to find ways to engage their interests while teaching curriculum (which is an entirely different rant) and reining in the extreme behaviors that happen every hour in her current classroom. I feel that we have shifted so far away from teaching into the realms of social-emotional development that we have forgott...

I was able to wake up on time this morning and also haul my ponderous self out of my very comfortable bed only an hour later, so I am considering this a win. I have had significant difficulty getting up and out of bed since our last time change, and this is unusual for me. I can say that I feel 100% better than I did three days ago, so I am also considering that fact a win. As a result of recovering from my latest illness and my need to do things differently, I am trying to come up with new things to talk about here on my blog. This happens occasionally. I get an urge to shake my thinking up and one of the ways that manifests is in new topics for this space. So, I am not doing an internship supervision post today. If that is what you look for in my blog, please send me a message or leave a comment. I can continue that topic, if you want. Otherwise, I think I am going to leave that topic behind for a bit. In the past, I have used the following Monday labels: Make It Monday and Music Mon...

My intern is getting ready to graduate from my program, and I will be a solo therapist starting next week. I am looking forward to it. I am always happy to see my interns go - this isn't because of them, but because I got into music therapy to be a music therapist not an observer of music therapy. When I am supervising, I am not doing music therapy as much as I want, and that is difficult. I am getting my topic plans finished for this month. We are going to do the country of the month next week (it's Australia), my intern graduates in the middle of the week, and then I will continue with the country for the last two groups that will not see it before my intern graduates. After that, I will get back into my rotation of country, music education concept, instrument, and musician of the month. When there is a fifth week or a partial week, I focus on a technology/career concept. In addition to these general categories for my rotation, I also have monthly themes to incorporate. The c...

I am feeling better. This is a statement that I haven't been able to say since my birthday on May 21st when I woke up with a bronchitis taste in my cough and a fever. The fever broke after about a week and a half, but the cough, bronchitis taste, and lack of breathing ability continued. I've had two tests for COVID, influenza, and strep, a round of allergy tests that state that all the things that I am not allergic to any of the things that I thought I was allergic to, four chest x-rays, and two rounds of blood tests. Forty-six days of being sick is not my idea of a good way to start off a new year of my life. I am hoping that I am actually better and not just riding a medication wave. The best thing about feeling better and being able to breathe without coughing is that I have experienced a renewed sense of creativity and energy. Yesterday, I hung two shelves and put up some small canvases that were left after I finished a gift for a friend of mine. I spent some time moving cr...

It is time to start my back-to-school blathering again. I have already found my word of the school year - Transform - mainly because my school is in the process of changing every single thing that happens as part of the program in one way or another. Time to figure out what types of things I will strive towards this year in my main professional endeavor. I keep my full-time job separate from my part-time pursuits as much as I can. I have two journals - one for my full-time job and another one for everything else. My everything else journal is my Star Wars themed journal, and I get to do some drawing and some exploring of a galaxy far far away in that book. I recently added a sticker to the cover (from a packet of stickers that I have been looking for since I moved in November!), and I get all sorts of joy from the process of decorating that journal. My full-time work journal functions very differently, but I am trying to think of ways to strengthen how I use it to help me expand my cre...