music, therapy, and me

Oh, dear. It is Friday, and I feel that the week went both fast and slow. Having less than usual numbers of sessions and students makes the week seem unfinished somehow. We get to do that again on the week of 19th for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. That type of schedule is difficult to navigate, especially when you are a creature of habit like me. So, it is now the end of my four-day work week. I have two groups and an individual on the schedule today. That's it. The rest of the time that I am at work needs to be productive, but I have not been actually productive lately. So, I will be using my 30 minutes of work with 30 minutes of something else. I am in between visual aid projects at the moment, so I really don't have anything sitting there waiting to be worked on. I guess one of my work tasks should be to print out more visual aids to work on in the next 22 weeks. Meanwhile, back here at home, things are just piling up around here. My Christmas boxes arrived on Monday, and I h...

I am sick today. I get sick quite often in my role as a school-based music therapist and getting sick often complicates the time I have with my interns. I realize that you can read that last phrase two different ways (at least), and both iterations seem to be appropriate, in this case. I always have a plan for what interns do on the days when I have to be gone unexpectedly, but there are times when I have difficulty getting my co-workers to understand the plan. That's a whole other topic, though. Let's focus on the point that I am trying to make right now. There will be times when you, a music therapy intern supervisor, will have to take a sick day. This is going to happen, so you have to figure out what your interns will do when you have to be gone. It is better to have a clear plan that you share with your interns than to have to figure it out as you go along. Over the 25 years that I have trained interns, I have had more absences in the last 10 years than in the first 15. So...

There are so many things that are part of running an internship program that you have to figure out as you are going along. More than anything else, the recent global pandemic showed us that we could adapt and figure out things that we thought were beyond our capabilities. Due to COVID, I have a bunch of assignments that go into effect if we have another situation that we have to adapt to. In the past nine years, I have had three personal surgeries that required long times at home for recuperation. Two of those three surgeries happened when I did not have interns. The other was an emergency, so I started my addition of projects that are competency-based as well as relevant to the clients and to the intern's growth back then. The ideas that I started out with for that emergency surgery recovery became essential in 2020 when my intern was not allowed to be on campus for a period of time. The point is, you never know when you may have to be away from your internship for a period of ti...