Towards a Studio Policy in the Era of COVID-19 Part 2: Sending Regular Updates

My setup for a recording project last week.

This week our studio will be starting lessons for the year with a nearly full schedule (Natasha still has a few spots open on Tuesdays for anyone who is interested). We’ll be welcoming students for both distanced in-person and online lessons - parents and students will be able to choose based on their preferences and level of comfort. Oakville at time of writing has only a small number of active cases. Public and private schools in the area are slated to open for a largely hybrid model of in-person distanced and online classes.

As the year progresses, this may change.

As private music teachers, we all need to wrap our heads around the concept of uncertainty. Once the weather starts getting colder, things might get better, they might stay the same, or we might go back into lockdown for several more months of misery. Different regions will experience different outcomes. We all need to know the lay of the land and be prepared for multiple scenarios so that the time comes, we can act in a responsible manner.

I’ve already written about crafting a studio policy that takes into account the realities of COVID-19. You can find our 2020-21 studio policy here. We waited until last week to offer an update so that we could be relatively certain that things would remain the same in the period of time between the email and the start of classes. At the bottom of the article, you can read the email that we sent out last week to our studio community.

Here are some things you need to be on top of:

1. Follow the COVID-19 numbers in your local area. Every day I check numbers for Canada, Ontario, and the Halton region in order to know the lay of the land.

2. Know the details of your area’s re-opening regulations and guidelines. Music teachers work either in businesses or institutions (I work in both), and we are subject to our area’s most recent legislation and by-laws. At time of writing, I’m consulting with the re-opening plans for Ontario and the Halton Region.

3. Clearly lay out your procedures for lesson formats. Your three choices are in-person, online, or a combination of both. If you’re offering in-person lessons, develop very clear procedures for teachers, students, and parents.

4. Communicate with parents and students regularly. Don’t become a ghost ship! Send emails regularly to students and parents, and do it based on a knowledge of fact and up-to-date information. There’s nothing wrong with changing your policies throughout the year based on updated information and circumstances. The important thing is to communicate as much as possible and update as needed.

Since Oakville at time of writing is largely a green zone, we’re offering parents and students at the start of the year the choice between distanced in-person or online lessons. Fortunately, we have two large studios where distancing will be possible.

Here’s the email I sent out a few days ago:

Hello students and parents,

I hope that you’ve all had an enjoyable summer and I would like to extend a fond welcome to all our new and returning students!

This email will detail current procedures for distanced in-person lessons for students of Chris Foley and Natasha Fransblow at our Oakville studio for the start of lessons on Tuesday, September 8. 

Parents and students can opt for either online or in-person lessons at their own discretion. Online and in-person lessons are freely interchangeable at any time.

For in-person distanced lessons at our Oakville studio, please observe the following guidelines:

1. If you are sick for any reason, do not come for an in-person lesson. You can easily switch to an online lesson without the need to reschedule. 

2. If we are sick, we will switch all our lessons to online-only until we are fully healthy.

3. Students coming for in-person lessons must wear a mask. 

4. Please enter the studio area for your lessons right at the start of your lesson. We can no longer offer the entrance area as a waiting room. Natasha and I will do our best to be on time as much as possible. 

5. When entering, please use the provided hand sanitizer before proceeding to the studio. When exiting, please use hand sanitizer again. 

6. If possible, please use your own washroom at home before the lesson. We are trying to minimize use of the washroom throughout the teaching day.

7. Please bring all your music as well as a pencil. 

8. Parents are only allowed into the studio area in the case of students who need assistance in going to the bathroom.  

9. Parents are welcome to watch the lesson on WeChat, Zoom, FaceTime or other video messaging services. We will have a device set up at all times to facilitate this, so please notify us in advance to get things set up.

These procedures are offered in alignment with the Stage 3 reopening plans of the Halton Region and Ontario Provincial Government. Should the situation change, I will send an email with amended procedures. 

If you’re opting for online lessons, please inform us as soon as possible so we can set things up on either Zoom, FaceTime, or WeChat. 

Thank you and we are absolutely thrilled to be working with you once again!

Sincerely,

Chris Foley 
Co-founder, Foley Music and Arts, Inc. 

Best wishes for a healthy and successful teaching year!

9 Mental Models and Organizational Systems That I Use in Daily Life

The other day I had a realization that although I make my living as a musician, most of my core operating models and principles are not taken from the field of music.

Over the years, I’ve developed a way of thinking, planning, and working that draws on models and systems from a wide assortment of writers and thinkers. The ideas that work for me are the result of a lot of experimentation and tinkering over the course of years. When determining your own operating principles, the important things are to read widely, understand what drives you to work creatively, and discover what scaffolding you need in order to get your best work done. This is the way to create a scalable, repeatable system that can weather the ups and downs of professional and personal life (2020 is the perfect example).

Some of these concepts are frameworks for thinking, while others are well-developed systems. All of these are ideas formulated by others, are things that I’ve practiced over time, and found to work for me.

1. Neuroplasticity. There is a growing body of research in this relatively new field which shows that the brain’s power to remap itself, even under conditions of extreme disability, can allow us to heal, compensate, and grow throughout our lifespan. Two useful books on this subject are Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Heals Itself and Caroline Leaf’s Switch On Your Brain.

2. Growth Mindset. This is a concept that grew out of Carol Dweck’s work on motivation and mindsets (see her TED talk here). In order for neuroplasticity to happen, we need to have the belief that we can grow our core abilities through dedication and hard work. For me, this manifests as an intrinsic desire for continual professional development, even if it results in a few dead ends and tinkering that doesn’t always yield effective results. But when COVID-19 hit, the openness to change enabled me to move our entire studio operations online and identify developing trends in the music education field.

3. Little and Often. I’ve got too much stuff to do. One of the ways that I avoid paralysis is by working at important things for a short time, put them away, do something else, then work on them again a while later. I learned this concept from Mark Forster in his book Secrets of Productive Poeple and found that it helps me to develop a rhythm and clarity that helps me power through difficult things. This idea also works extraordinarily well with practicing an instrument.

4. Getting Things Done. An important part of being able to function at work or home is how to deal with the multiple inputs of email, phone messages, and daily life, put them into relevant contexts and projects, organize our priorities, and do the things that need to be accomplished. At the same time, we need our everyday stuff to be congruent with our medium- and long-term horizons. David Allen’s Getting Things Done system (aka GTD) has been a mainstay of my daily process since 2007.

5. Inbox Zero. We’re all deluged by a mountain of email in our inbox. Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero system (originally devised as a natural next step from David Allen’s GTD system) helps you to maintain control of your expanding inbox with three simple steps: reply, archive, or delete. Now that we have multiple inboxes, it also becomes increasingly important to identify key areas of focus and learn how to triage our email.

6. Plus Minus Next. Developed by Ness Labs’ Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Plus Minus Next is a short weekly journaling practice were you take stock of what worked and what didn’t over the last week, as well as what the next steps are for the coming week. This is a great way to maintain direction over changing contexts and situations from week to week.

7. A Morning Routine. This is by far the most pliable, and the one for which an ideal solution for me might not exist, and if it does, would need to change over time. Starting off the day, early, with the right focused activity can set the stage for the entire day. I’ve tried many different systems over the years, including Morning Pages, the 21-Day Brain Detox, meditation, yoga reading, blogging. All of them work, just not all the time, depending on my mood and situation. A rotation between several of these over the course of time is what works the best. But for me, the important things to consider are getting up early (6:15 is ideal), brewing amazing coffee, and launching into a focused activity right away.

8. Zettelkasten. When developing an idea in creative work, we need an organized place where chaos can live, and which allows us to make the connections that can lead to meaningful output. Nicholas Luhmann was a sociologist who developed a system of writing ideas on index cards and putting them in a slip-box (Zettelkasten in German). He then reviewed these cards regularly in order to find connections between them. The connections he discovered between them led to a steady body of work throughout his career: 58 books and hundreds of articles. In the last few years, there has been significant work in the tech community to create tools that can help to uncover connections between ideas with programs such as The Archive, Roam Research, and Obsidian, to name just a few.

9. Antifragility. Stress and random crap that happen to us (like trying to stay afloat in a pandemic) can be beneficial rather than negative, especially if we take responsibility for our actions and have skin in the game. One of the most important and challenging concepts in Nassim Taleb’s work is antifragility - being able to gain from volatility, randomness, and disorder. I highly recommend Taleb’s book on the subject, and although it’s a long read, it’s highly entertaining and informative, with many applications in real life.

Black Writers and Productivity

Part of what we can do to begin to redress the wrongs perpetrated against the black community is to read the works of black writers. In assembling a list of books to read in the next while, I discovered that there’s an astonishing depth with the quantity of writing available by nearly every black writer of note. Howard Ramsby II writes about this high level of output:

In the last 18 months of his life, Richard Wright wrote 4,000 haiku, which is to say, he composed 12,000 lines of poetry. Between 1976 and 1984, Octavia Butler published 6 novels.  From 1990 through 1997, Walter Mosley published 7 novels and a collection of short stories. From April 1999 to March 2006, Aaron McGruder produced The Boondocks, which contained about 2,500 multi-panel strips. From August 2008 through August 2009, Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his first year of blogging for The Atlantic, published more than 2,000 blog entries.

At some point, we should say more about high productivity and black writers.   

Many of the scholarly articles on African American literature in our field concentrate on one or two works at a time. Scholars tend to focus on the quality of a select work by an author as opposed to the quantity of works some writers produce. Why has that been the focus for so long? Is it because of the auras associated with "best" and "masterpiece," considerations more well-suited for studying a single work as opposed to a body of works?

Mozart's Laudamus te with Key'mon Murrah and Donald Lee III

It’s always a pleasure to hear Mozart performed beautifully. Here is countertenor Key’mon Murrah and pianist and Kentucky State faculty member Donald Lee III performing the Laudamus te from Mozart’s C minor mass:

Remote Examining, Summer Blogging

For most of the next two months I’ll be examining remotely for The Royal Conservatory’s Certificate Program, all from my home studio. Instead of traveling across North America to examine (which I’ll sorely miss!) I’ll be seeing these same students remotely on Zoom so they can achieve their goals in the same way that they would with in-person exams. You can watch and read more about remote exams on this CTV News report.

At the same time, I’m going to try and keep up my blogging in the next few months, although in a different way. Writing time will be in short supply, so you can expect shorter blog posts with plenty of links. We all need to find a viable way forward from strife the of the last few months, so this summer’s blog posts will focus on creativity, hope, and ways of growing.

Play the Metagame to Succeed

If life is a game, then part of the game is the water-cooler talk on how to apply the best strategies to play it, whether the rules stay the same or constantly change over time. Cedric Chin offers some advice on how to succeed through playing the metagame, either in games or in real life:

Every sufficiently interesting game has a metagame above it. This is the game about the game. It is often called ‘the meta’.

Sometimes, the metagame is created when new options are introduced from outside the game. Magic The Gathering is famous for having a game system that changes every time the publisher releases a new set of cards. MtG’s metagame is thus a race to see who can discover new card combinations or strategies given the new options. The players who do so are rewarded with easier wins, especially when going up against players who have not adapted to the new possibilities. This makes MtG a game of two levels: the first game is the game you’re playing when you sit down and shuffle cards to battle an opponent; the second game is the race to acquire, analyse and adapt to new cards quicker than your competition.

Metagames like MtG’s also exist in, erm, more physical games. Judo — the sport that I am most familiar with — has a metagame that is shaped by rule changes from the International Judo Federation. A few years after I stopped competing, the IJF banned leg grabs, outlawing a whole class of throws that were part of classical Judo canon — many of them used regularly, even at the top levels of competition. The Judo that exists today is very different from the Judo I left — with changes in gripping strategy, entry styles, and technique combinations — many of them responses to responses to responses to the ruling.

In my field of expertise (piano pedagogy), the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the rules of the game dramatically. For piano teachers, what was a time-honoured, tradition-bound field has been upended, and has now become online learning. By the fall, the need to return to in-person teaching will require attention to health and distancing practices as never seen before.

The teachers who succeed will be the ones who learn skills relevant to both online teaching and public health guidelines in order to navigate a change back to what will hopefully become tradition-bound once again. However, none of us will be left unchanged by what we’ve learned during this time.

Where do you find the piano pedagogy metagame? Here are several places:

• On Facebook, Piano Teacher Central and The Art of Piano Pedagogy are two longstanding groups. The AoPP has stronger moderation, although both have lots of viewpoints. For more discussions there is also Piano and Instrumental Teachers with Coronavirus Concerns

• The Frances Clark Centre’s Teaching in the Time of COVID-19 has lots of recorded and upcoming webinars that help teachers to navigate the quickly changing circumstances of the profession.

(Photo courtesy of Dave Henri on Unsplash)

The Finest English Dictionary That You've Never Used

Via the Maker Mind newsletter, I was alerted to a James Somers article about the provenance of the Webster’s 1913 Dictionary, and how all modern dictionaries fall short of its penchant for finding the ineffable qualities of a word, as well as tracking down its provenance in a most succinct manner.

James on the value of a genuinely illuminating dictionary:

There’s an amazing thing that happens when you start using the right dictionary. Knowing that it’s there for you, you start looking up more words, including words you already know. And you develop an affection for even those, the plainest most everyday words, because you see them treated with the same respect awarded to the rare ones, the high-sounding ones.

More about how Noah Webster built the dictionary:

Dictionaries today are not written this way. In fact it’d be strange even to say that they’re written. They are built by a large team, less a work of art than of engineering. When you read an entry you don’t get the sense that a person labored at his desk, alone, trying to put the essence of that word into words. That is, you don’t get a sense, the way you do from a good novel, that there was another mind as alive as yours on the other side of the page.

Webster’s dictionary took him 26 years to finish. It ended up having 70,000 words. He wrote it all himself, including the etymologies, which required that he learn 28 languages, including Old English, Gothic, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Welsh, Russian, Aramaic, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. He was plagued by debt to fund the project; he had to mortgage his home.

Let’s put the Webster’s 1913 Dictionary to the test with a word I used from the first paragraph: penchant. The current Merriam-Webster definition of penchant is this:

: a strong and continued inclination

broadly : LIKING

Interesting, but not enough to make me want to use penchant in a sentence when I could simply use inclination instead.

Here’s the definition of the same word in the Webster’s 1913 dictionary:

||Pen`chant" (?), n. (Card Playing) A game like bézique, or, in the game, any queen and jack of different suits held together.

||Pen`chant" (?), n. [F., fr. pencher to bend, fr. (assumed) LL. pendicare, L.pendere. See Pendant.] Inclination; decided taste; bias; as, a penchant for art.

Whoa. Here we have references to an obscure card game, French and Latin root words, and a type of jewellery in addition to its more traditional meaning. Embedded in the meaning of the word is the context from where it came into traditional usage.

So you can see where using the right kind of dictionary can re-animate your love of language. Having a sense of character, history, and context behind words can help you gain a brighter picture of what they are all about and prod you to look up more of them.

But that’s not all. You can also use the Webster’s 1913 dictionary on your Mac as part of its hard-wired dictionary functionality. James’ article is a little out of date with its source archive for installation, but Jonathan Buys’ directions on how to install it on your Mac are up to date.. For your iPhone there’s even a free iOS app with the entire dictionary.

This is the kind of discovery that might just cause you to dive into literature again, trusty dictionary in hand. Happy reading!

(Photo courtesy of Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash)

Thursday Morning Coffee Links

Projects are in development, the weather is improving, and each day presents its own challenges. However, a few quiet moments with the first coffee of the day can put everything into perspective.

Here are some coffee-related links to ponder on this Thursday morning:

1. A man who drinks 25 cups of coffee a day.

2. A look at the dark side of the coffee world.

3. Coffee labor shortages might be on the horizon.

4. Bix Frankonis’ switch from coffee to tea.

5. A short history of pourover coffee, with brewing tips.

6. Sameer Vasta’s idea of putting together friends from different social spheres together with a virtual coffee break.

Not Easily Replaceable

This 2017 quote from Yuval Noah Harari from a conversation with Nate Hopper has been in my notes folder for some time, and I stumbled upon it recently once again. How very relevant for these times.

Do you have advice for people for finding an occupation that cannot be easily replaced?

I think our best bet is to develop your emotional intelligence and your resilience, the ability to keep changing all the time. Previously in history, even in the 20th century, life was divided into two main parts: In the first part, you mostly learned, acquired knowledge and skills, and you built yourself a personal and a professional identity. In the second part, you mostly made use of those skills and those identities. The pace of change in the 21st century will be such that most of what you learn as a teenager will be completely irrelevant by the time you’re 40. If I were like in charge of education or a school or, I would try to crack that: How to educate people to be very resilient and to embrace change throughout their lives instead of to teach them coding or mathematics or whatever.

Towards a Studio Policy in the Era of COVID-19 Part 1

This week I’ll be revising my studio policy for the coming year. Every year, the process consists of iterating the document for the previous teaching year, making changes that involve rates, teachers, cancellation policies, and other small details (like parking on the correct side of the driveway and keeping your water bottle away from the piano).

But this year, it’s a completely different reality. Most of us have already made the transition to full online teaching, and we now have to navigate how to communicate to parents the policies and procedures for dealing with a tremendous amount of uncertainty regarding the progress and transmission of the disease in our local areas.

Below are a few issues I’m working on for the coming year’s Foley Music and Arts Studio policy (for reference, here is my current 2019-20 studio policy):

1. The rate issue. Don’t cut your rates unless you absolutely have to. Your value as a music teacher is more important than ever and you need to come across as a professional. The range of extra-curricular activities might be much smaller than before, especially without team sports or large ensembles. On the other hand, avoid raising your rate beyond a small amount lest people accuse you of price-gouging in a pandemic. We intend to keep our rates the same.

2. Equivalency of online and in-person lessons. In order to maintain stability of income and scheduling with your studio in the face of future risk, there needs to be a one-to-one correspondence between in-person and online lessons. They should be interchangeable.

3. Sickness policies. If students are sick, they should not get an in-person lesson. On the other hand, if they’re already comfortable with online lessons, they can continue in their regular lesson times online if they’re well enough and until they’re back to full health.

4. How to describe management of the transition back to in-person lessons. Each of us is hoping to be able to teach in-person by the fall. However, we must also account for the eventuality that there might be a second wave of the virus precipitating further lockdowns in your area.

5. Things you can and cannot bring into the studio space. One of my professional students has already laid out a policy that students need to bring their own soap and towel to wash their hands in the studio. On the other hand, I no longer feel comfortable with people bringing in stuff to the studio beyond their books and music.

6. Adherence to new health and safety procedures in the studio. Rebekah Maxner’s article on health-proofing your studio is the best article I’ve seen in this area. Distancing, use of masks, hand-washing, and limitations of in-studio touching all need to be considered.

7. What to mention in the studio policy and what to mention via email updates. One possibility is to mention health and safety procedures in a general sense, then elaborate on them via email as you get closer to the beginning of the teaching year. Then further update them through the year as the situation warrants.

Above all, communicate how to facilitate structured learning through a time of uncertainty. Stating clear policies with relevant updates can put you ahead of many other extra-curricular activities (and school districts).

I’ve already taken some heat for “perpetuating fear and anxiety” and “throwing tradition out the window” when talking about current realities of the piano studio (members of Facebook’s Piano Teacher Central can find the comments here). But it is vitally important that we communicate to our customer base how we intend to engage with health and safety issues in the coming year. Far from being disrespectful to the tradition of musical instruction, dealing with health issues in the middle of a global pandemic goes to the heart of our mission and professionalism.