As we’re all approaching the beginning of a new school year, Music Teacher’s Helper wants to reward those teachers who help us grow. Therefore, during the month of August 2007, we are having a referral contest!

We are giving away one free month of service for every teacher you refer, who continues on as a paying member by September 30.

In addition, the member who refers the most teachers will get an additional one year free subscription to Music Teacher’s Helper, regardless of whether those teachers become paying members!

So if you (more…)

Practicing.  It’s a loaded word.  Musicians can’t get anywhere without it, but what does it really mean, and what is the role of a teacher in the way students learn to practice?

A number of teachers provided some very interesting comments on earlier posts (for example the one about lesson policies), and this topic would be a great one for all of us to read comments (just add one at the end of this post) from you.  After all, everyone thinks about it a little differently and we can learn from other approaches.

“I didn’t get to practice as much as I had hoped.”  Is that the most commonly heard statement by music teachers?  Or is it, “I played it better at home!”

As teachers we often expect different kinds of practice from one student to another–and even different ways of practicing from the same student, depending what’s being worked on and what the student needs at the moment.

Below is a list some of the ways we think about practicing.  Do you see it and/or teach it in any or all of these ways?  (more…)

Many teachers who charge “per lesson” have requested the ability to schedule an event on the calendar that will be charged differently from a students regular lesson rate.

Before, you had to wait until the lesson was reconciled to change the cost. This caused problems when invoicing, for those who invoiced in advance, since the invoice was created before the cost could be changed.

Now you can set the cost of an event from the start! When creating a new event, there is now a “Cost” option that overrides any default costs for a student’s lesson.

This will make it much easier to create group events that aren’t charged, or to charge a recital fee to only those students who will attend the recital.

Thank you for all your feedback. You’re helping making Music Teacher’s Helper better all the time!

You asked for it! You got it! You can now make any event open for registration, and your students can login from home and register to attend.

This Online Booking system has a lot of uses:

• Easy Scheduling - let students pick their schedule at the beginning of the season
• Group Event Registration - allow up to a certain number of students to register for any event.
• Make-up times - post the times you have available for make-up lessons so students can see when they can make up.
• Schedule-Switching - By allowing registration on a private lesson, you can make it viewable by other students if you want them to see each others’ schedules. This is optional, of course.

To enable registration for an event, just click the new “For All Students” option when creating or editing an event. Then click “Require students to register to attend this event”. And everything else is taken care of for you!

We hope you enjoy this new feature! We think this adds a lot of power to the calendar, and to Music Teacher’s Helper.

A teacher recently shared with me how her studio website helped her gain three more students within 24 hours of signing up.

This is from Thanet Baggett. You can see her website at:

http://BMS.musicteachershelper.com

I had approx. 30 students when I got very sick and had to quit teaching for a while. When I started back teaching, it seemed much harder to get students than it had been the first time. (more…)

Sometimes I’ll hear of people being struck with fear at the mention of making online payments through Paypal. Most of this is due to having received some malicious e-mail claiming to be from Paypal, with the attempt to steal their credit card information.

This is called “Phishing” and really has nothing to do with Paypal, nor any other financial institution, other than there are people out there who are trying to get that information from you.

So when you receive an email from “Paypal”, how can you be sure it is legitimate?

Take the “Can You Spot Phishing” challenge and see how well you do.

What do you do for the summer? If you’re employed in a school system, how much summer vacation time do you take? If you teach privately, do many of your students continue through the summer, or do many of them cut down or take the summer off entirely?

From the post about Payment and Cancellation Policies (which has some new comments from teachers, by the way), it’s clear that some teachers set up annual tuition rates that include at least a portion of the summer for lessons. There is, however, always that pressure not to push students who want to take some summer time off. No one is at their best if they are always pushing and never taking a break.

As much as we’d like to regularize our income, we are also working with students as instructors and mentors, and can’t reduce this relationship entirely to financial transactions. We offer more than a commodity and expect students to respect us more than they respect a store or a salesman.

A number of my students continue through the summer, but maybe a third of them take a break or cut back. It’s a financial hit, but other events such as teaching at music camps or extra gigs tend to pick up the slack for me. What about you? I’m sure I’m not alone in being curious about the summer experiences of other teachers.

We all know that if someone wants to make progress in their playing, they need to (more…)