Tuesdays are my favorite days. At 3:00 every Tuesday, I show up at my favorite building alongside my favorite people. Tuesdays are the day of music. This past summer, I was fortunate enough to become a music teacher at my hometown’s studio. I have acquired multiple students over the past few weeks and now I have a schedule jammed packed with piano, ukulele, and guitar lessons. Together, my students and I fill the thirty-minute sessions with lots of sounds. We have the musical sounds of strings and keys playing alongside our laughter and metronomic counting. We spend lots of time in our traditional “concept by concept” lesson books. The fun then continues when we break out into playing a song of the student’s choice. This is the part of the lesson that I enjoy the most, even though it is the most challenging part. Learning a student selected song without any preparation time pushes me to be a better musician as I must come up with a way to play the song right off the bat. I would be lying if I said I was always successful. There are times where the notes and patterns are so far off from the song that I cannot help but laugh at myself.

Although I have so much fun teaching lessons, there are times where I find myself staring at the clock on the wall. I listen to the tick of the moving hand while my student roughly plays “Old McDonald.” Undoubtedly, there is the bother of the pandemic. My glasses are in a constant state of fog from the suffocating hot air trapped beneath my mask. The constant applications of hand sanitizer can certainly dry out your hands. Ah, the joy of teaching!