Self-care tips for music educators teaching online

*This blog post originally appeared on http://www.jennyclarinet.com* Guest post from ISU Visiting Clarinet Prof. Jenny Maclay: Each person around the world is facing their own unique challenges in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the challenges many educators are facing is maintaining motivation and positivity, which is essential to help students stay engaged as

What the Virus has Taken Away and What We Will Learn From this as Musicians

This has been my first ever global pandemic experience. It is probably everyone’s first unless you survived the big flu outbreak of the 1920’s. If you did, good for you. The newness of college had mostly worn off by the time my second semester of college began and now it’s about business. Getting my degree

An Abrupt Ending … Or was it an Ending?

Finding out Iowa State was going to end my first year of college online put so many things into perspective; all the plans, problems, and prospects I had for the semester were now irrelevant, and I had to adapt very quickly. All of a sudden my college experience relied entirely on a MacBook I was

The Change Quarantine is Bringing Music

During this lockdown, being a music student has become much more difficult—as though it wasn’t hard enough before. A lot of our learning is based on hands-on work, participating in ensembles, and all in all classes that shouldn’t be done online to get the full justice of it. Lessons have become pre recorded videos submitted

Overcoming Covid

With Covid-19 hitting very quickly in Iowa it was quite a sudden adjustment to make. With performances, juries, and senior recitals all getting canceled it was really disappointing to see all that hard work go to waste. Many months are spent perfecting the juries and senior recital and it was such a shame for the

A Quick Look at Quarantine Streaming

Life is crazy lately, in a short time we have left what we knew to be our “normal” and entered into a brand new scenario that I think very few of the people in this class would have predicted as the ending of our spring semester. I know I wouldn’t have. This new situation we

Taking Stock

On January 13, 2020, I began teaching my first week of classes as a new visiting faculty member in music history at Iowa State University. Exactly five weeks ago today I left Ames—where our freshman musical styles class has met since that day—to return to my home in Indianapolis due to the coronavirus pandemic. From