music, therapy, and me

I am going to be gone from my computer most of this and next week, so do not be alarmed if blog posts become a bit less regular. My life now includes a memorial service for a cousin who died in July as well as time with her family and with my mother's family. We all decided to sacrifice our paid time off to head back to their homes to see them. We will be living in hotels and masking as much as necessary, so it should be a strange visit, but also it will be a good one. I have not taken this much time away from work without being sick in all the time I have worked at my facility. (At least, I don't think so...) For the first time ever, I have the tools that I need to provide digital resources to my clients while I am gone, so I am working on using my resources to provide alternative session options to just using the sub plan materials that I always have available for kids to use. I hope that my students will enjoy the information that I put together on different jobs and that te...

So, here it is. Tuesday again, and the return of my TME Tuesdays. Several years ago, I wrote TMEs every single Tuesday and shared them with readers on this blog. I decided to stop doing that for a myriad of reasons, but mostly because of some of the attitudes of other music therapists on social media complaining that they did not want to pay for the intellectual property of other music therapists - that the other music therapists should just give them whatever they wanted at any time. I don't think that is appropriate - after all, the original music therapist had to spend the time, energy, and effort to create, so that author should receive recognition and recompense for that time, energy, and effort. Since I still feel that my intellectual property has value, I am not going to publish TMEs (TME stands for Therapeutic Music Experience, by the way - the term I choose to use for what I do with clients in sessions) the way I did before, but I will tell you the general portions of thes...