“Do you want to make more money? Sure, we all do!”

These words of actress Sally Struthers ring out across the decades, enticing us to take up a new career in TV/VCR Repair, or maybe Learning the Personal Computer, training from the comfort of home.

I don’t know why this line sticks with me so much. Maybe it’s because I heard it approximately three million times on those ads.

Read More

A few years ago, there was a bit of misguided revisionism around Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. The idea was that the tree was so self-sacrificing that she enabled the boy to take and never give, and by the end she was just a stump.

I have four things to say about that: First, she was a tree. Trees don’t need to set boundaries, nor do they have that luxury.

Read More

I have trouble writing fiction, and I discovered a key reason when I attempted to do NaNoWriMo: I don’t like to make bad things happen to my characters.

I don’t want to break their hearts. I don’t even want to inconvenience them.

I mean, Dorothy Gale goes to all of that trouble to get to the Wizard of Oz only to discover that she had the power to get back to Kansas the whole time.

Read More

When Eclectic Music started doing music lessons on Zoom, it was a bit of an adjustment for everyone.

Now, more than two years later, lots of teachers and students love the Zoom lessons and will never go back to doing them in person. But at the start, lots of us felt like we had to recreate the feeling of being in the same room as our student.

And that — on top of the ongoing stress and uncertainty of the pandemic — was freaking exhausting.

Read More

I started teaching music lessons because it was a skill I had that matched what people were looking for.

Once I moved to my new city, it took a few months for people to find me, but after that, I had all the students I needed.

I didn't leave it there, though. I took a next step: What about all of the people whom I couldn't serve because I already had too many students? I needed to find a solution for them.

Read More