Your comments would be great on this one. It’s about the tension between parental expectations and student interest.

For kids to have instrumental music in their lives, they do best with music lessons. But some kids who love music and want to learn it are not ready to focus and dedicate themselves to serious practice. Meanwhile, parents find themselves paying good money for lessons without necessarily seeing their kids practice at home. And there’s the rub! Parents are naturally looking for value for their money, while kids may enjoy lessons but not always do their “homework.” (more…)

PayPal has become one of my hardest workers. Signing up and using PayPal is free and painless. Using PayPal with MTH is even better.

When a student pays by credit/debit card through PayPal, you get an immediate email from PayPal as well as MTH advising you of a student payment. That’s not all! MTH immediately updates the Accounts Receivables and credits the payment to the student’s account. What do you need to do? Nothing. The fee you are charged for a student making a credit card payment is $2.62. However, if you want have the funds transferred from PayPal to your bank account, there is no charge.

Occasionally I have a student, who has set up reoccurring payments through PayPal, wanting to stop the reoccurring payment and is unsure of the procedure. Below are instructions I received from PayPal to terminate reoccurring payments. I just copy and paste the information shown below in an email to the inquiring student. Try it. You will like it. (more…)

This feature has been long-awaited by many of you, and has been one of our most oft-requested features. The Studio Website you get with Music Teacher’s Helper used to have fixed pages, meaning you couldn’t change what showed in the menu, or add additional pages to your site. This was somewhat inhibiting if teachers wanted to put more on their website than their teaching policy and a little about their studio, because they had to either cram it all into either of those two pages, or not include it at all.

Well, now you can add your own pages to your studio website! You can have as many pages as you like and can even disable the system pages such as the photo gallery, student registration page, contact page, login page, and resources page if you decide not to use some of those options. You can also rename the menu items to whatever you want, and change their order in the menu. Some ideas for pages you can create are:

• A page describing your rates and fee structure
• If you perform, a page advertising your services or describing what you do
• A showcase page where you highlight a particular student or composer - you can change it as frequently as you want
• A testimonials page with quotes from your students about your teaching ability
• Embed a YouTube video of a famous performance
• The possibilities are limited only by your imagination (more…)

I recently thought it would be great to host a contest because:

1. It would be a fun way to get the kids thinking creatively
2. It would bring the students together, even if just online.

I love poking fun at guitarists who make those goofy rock and roll faces on stage, and I thought “Let’s see which students can make the craziest faces!” After explaining what a “Guitar Face” is to all my students, I let them take a picture with my camera all through the month of January. I let my neighbor, and local rock star, Tim judge it so that I wouldn’t seem biased. The kids were so excited to learn who the winners were and the parents loved seeing the adorable students pose with guitars and put on their best rock and roller faces. 3 winners recieved iTunes gift cards, and the rest got honorable menton.

With the help of an easy to use MAC computer I was able to launch the photo in a simple website template to share with all the parents and students. If you don’t have a mac, there are tons of other great website hosts/templates out there such as yahoo.com and moonfruit.com . If you are interested in getting a better idea about this project, check out my own Guitar Face Contest site here:

http://web.mac.com/michellepayne1/iWeb/Guitar%20Face%20Contest/Photos.html

As a beginning private teacher, I used to feel uncomfortable concerning lesson payment. Coming from academic situations where music education superceded all, I hated ending a lesson asking for money, or reminding my student about next month’s invoice due. What needed to change, however, was my view of what I do, its value, and how I convey its value to my students.

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When teaching a student or a class a particular musical piece, I share the history of the song with them. This induces more interest for the student. I will occasionally write a blog about the history of a particular song that I use with the students.

The first song I would like to discuss is “Let It Be”, recorded by the Beatles. I teach this song on the piano, guitar and bass guitar, and all of my students love learning the song.

Paul McCartney, who wrote the song, sings the vocal, backing vocal, and plays piano and the maracas. John Lennon plays bass, while George Harrison sings backing vocals while playing lead guitar. And, of course, Ringo Starr plays the drums. Other instruments used in the song are an organ and electric piano played by Billy Preston, and two trumpets, two trombones, a tenor sax and cellos played by uncredited musicians.

During the summer of 1968, the Beatle sessions had become hostile. McCartney was worried about the band’s future and threw everything into keeping the group alive. One night he had a dream in which his deceased mom, Mary, appeared to him and told him not to get so depressed about things. She told him to just :Let it be”. This dream quickly became a song.

For some time Lennon thought Mother Mary was the Virgin Mary, and wanted to add a giggle to the song. When Paul said “No”, Lennon went into the studio one night before the song was to be cut, and added a little phrase to the beginning of Let It Be, “Now we’d like to sing ‘All The Angels Come’”. Paul was not happy.

Students know this song, and are instructed to play the song smoothly with a flowing progression. The bass lines consist of many runs from one chord to another. The piano also progresses smoothly from one chord to another (chords from C down to G use C, G/b, F/A and G). Thus, this song teaches students flowing techniques and sequence. Let It Be!

Amplified music can be hazardous to your hearing, but what most people don’t realize is that acoustic music can be damaging to your hearing as well. According to the ASHA (American Speech-Language Hearing Association) website sounds louder than 80 decibels are potentially hazardous to your hearing. Here is a list of sounds from their website and their approximate decibel levels. As you can see, it doesn’t take much to get to that 80

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Here is the monthly list of the improvements we’ve made to Music Teacher’s Helper since January 14, 2008.

- Send to multiple email addresses per person. This feature has been requested so frequently, I know many of you will be happy about this. Some families have situations where there is a divorce, or even where each parent has their own email address they both want email reminders and invoices. Now Music Teacher’s Helper will allow you to enter multiple email addresses for a parent. In the Email field in the student (or parent) profile, just separate the email addresses with a semicolon. For example: john@google.com; jane@google.com. Then when email reminders, or invoices, or any email is sent to that person, the message will go to both addresses. (more…)

Do you use the Reports feature in Music Teachers Helper?  I’m sure many teachers would be interested in how other teachers make use of reports, so please add a comment below and share your insights.

The report I use all the time, the daily summary report, just got better this week!  I’d like to discuss that below, but first I’d like to encourage you to explore the reports if you haven’t already.  They make a lot of information available to us very quickly, in about a dozen formats, such as bar graphs, pie charts, in addition to simply viewing the numbers.  Most also can display information split out daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly.  By calling up a report, we can quickly take a look at income from each student over time; the number of lessons we’ve taught; earnings from a particular student or (by holding the control key down while selecting) any selection of students; projected earnings for lessons scheduled ahead; and details on students who owe money.

The report called “Student Account Summary” not only shows all the charges and payments but also all lesson notes for the periods selected, so you or a student can see quite a bit of information on one page about what the student has been working on.  This report is similar to the Lesson History under the “Lessons” tab, but quicker to access and easier to print or email.

The Daily Summary Report (look under Reports tab, last report) is my favorite, and it just got better this week because it now lists whether a student has credits on account.  This seemingly simple change means that I can know on the spot at a lesson where a student stands in lesson payments.  I can remind a student who owes today, or answer a question if a student wonders how many more paid lessons they have.  (more…)

Have you ever been at another computer and could not log in? Has a student or parent reported login problems? When logging in, the screen returns to the Login Screen.

My website, ronniecurrey.net, is directed to MTH. Sometimes, at school or at another computer, I am not able to Login. Why? Because the security level on many commercial computers is set so that a link cannot be redirected to another link.

EXAMPLE: By typing ronniecurrey.net, I am redirected to www.currey.musicteachershelper.com. If I am at a computer, such as a school computer, I am not allowed to be redirected. Instead, I am asked for my user ID and password again.

The solution: Go directly to the site, such as www.currey.musicteachershelper.com instead of ronniecurrey.net. It works every time. I frequently will have a parent complain about not being able to log into MTH. This fix gets the parents in every time.

Remember, this is not a problem with MTH, but with the security level on the computer or server being used.