Music Teacher's Helper Blog

When I first signed up for Music Teacher’s Helper, I needed a way to manage the full range of musical activities that I engage in.  After some experimentation, I discovered a few methods of using the functionality of MTH to keep track of not just my teaching, but performing, administrating, and a number of other musical activities that I needed to manage under one roof.  The first step in this process requires upsizing the “student list” to encompass a lot more than students and create the basis for being able to flexibly schedule your entire musical life in the MTH calendar.  Here’s how you can do it:

1.  Create a list of all the people, companies and organizations that you work with on a regular basis. Depending on your musical activities, these could include any of the following:

• orchestras
• opera or theater companies
• ensembles
• performers
• MTNA or NATS chapters
• committees
• churches
• synagogues

2.  Add these contacts as adult students. You can easily get to the right form with the following sequence of dropdown menus from the MTH dashboard: Students –> Add Student –> Add Adult Student. Remember that both first and last names are required fields, so add only a hyphen for the first name (ie. “-”) and add the title of the organization as the last name.  This way, the organization will be easily identifiable on alphabetical student lists.  You can now proceed with adding contact information.

3.  Add login info only if you want someone from the organization to view the information you enter. One of the beauties of MTH’s functionality is that it can create a large amount of transparency for students with regards to scheduling and invoicing.  Then again, by not creating login info, you can create complete privacy for your own details of record-keeping.  In my experience, it is essential to promote end-user accounts for students but best to withhold them for companies and organizations where you want to keep your information to yourself.

4.  List the default lesson cost as $0 and enter dollar amounts for events as needed. Not every musical activity is billable.  For example, I put in a huge amount of time sitting in various committees, where I don’t usually expect any renumeration aside from coffee and pastry.  Then again, I also work for an opera company where each engagement and event may have a separate pay structure.  The way to add the most flexibility for these types of situations is by using $0 as the default cost, and then being sure to add appropriate lesson costs for events as they come up.

5.  Add any additional information on the Notes section of the Miscellaneous field. Often organizations have a number of phone extensions that you need to access.  I’ve found that adding Notes on the Miscellaneous field can be a big help in this regard.

6.  Add a Freelance student account. Many of our musical activities can be “one-off” engagements, such as:

• accompanying a singer for an audition, jury, or competition
• playing at a wedding, bar mitzvah, or funeral
• teaching a master class as a visiting artist
• playing a recital
• adjudicating at a festival for a limited period of time
• attending or giving a workshop

For these types of engagements, it’s often not worthwhile to create an entire contact on the student list in order to keep track of a handful of events.  For this reason, I created a catch-all Freelance category.  That way, whenever I get a new engagement that I know will only encompass a few dates, I can quickly create a Freelance event add all the relevant information on the event listing itself.  As I mentioned in #2, be sure to list the first name as a hyphen and the last name as “Freelance”.  A word of warning: if you create a Freelance category, you won’t be able to invoice for these events using MTH but will need to do it separately.

7.  Finally, create a student account for yourself. You can use this account to do things like schedule appointments, tasks, and prep time, view the appearance of the student login area, as well as create and update your own practice log.

Having an accurate student list is the basis for many of the tasks that you can do on Music Teacher’s Helper.  If you haven’t already done so, it’s probably a good idea to sign up for or upgrade your account to the Platinum version in order to take advantage of the unlimited number of student accounts available with this price plan.  In Part 2 I’ll be talking about ways to leverage your expanded student list in order to create customized event listings.

Feel free to leave a comment with your own MTH student list hacks or if you have a question.