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Starting the workday used to mean opening my email app.
My tasks and activities would be dictated by whatever was waiting in my inbox. Whatever my clients or employees needed, I was there to help.
The volume was such that I was rarely able to get through all of the email I had. That meant that a day was filled with six or seven or ten hours of email and phone calls, with no end in sight. It was a conveyor belt that I was never able to step away from.
Read MoreI had an agenda for the summer.
Of course, I had already given up on my usual summer agenda of traveling, visiting family, and having a lighter workload than usual due to school being out. So, my new agenda accounted for the coronavirus restrictions and complications and mandated a season of creative work. I planned for a high output, taking advantage of plenty of free time.
That didn’t happen. Even though I have the time, taking care of immediate concerns consumes most of my energy, leaving little left over for more work.
Read MoreIn Laurel Snyder’s Orphan Island, ostensibly a middle grades novel but filled with allegory that would go right over the head of the average ten-year-old, nine children live together peacefully on an island. Every year, a mysterious boat arrives with a young child and takes away the eldest child. The new eldest child must teach the new youngest child the ways of the island, rules that have been handed down from child to child for as long as anyone can remember.
Read MoreBéla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos is a collection of over 150 progressive piano pieces, meaning that each one introduces a new element, making it slightly more challenging than the one before it. I guess Bartók wrote the first couple of volumes for his son, who was learning to play the piano.
When I first learned of Mikrokosmos, I was intrigued. I love progressive educational material in any subject, even though the pacing usually needs to be adjusted by supplementing with additional resources. It’s satisfying to think that someone has carefully curated a learning program and created something that flows easily from concept to concept, skill to skill. Plus, I enjoyed the Bartók pieces I played myself as a child — bold, memorable, and full of surprises. This could be great!
Read MoreAspiring (or failed) guitarists often tell me of their troubles with strumming.
“I never could get the hang of it,” they’ll say, no matter how long they’ve been trying.
They think the problem is strumming. And they’ve probably sought help from a guitar teacher with the intent of resolving this strumming problem. However, I know the reason it didn’t work. It’s because their problem is actually their chord changes.
Read MoreThe dining room table was strewn with tiny cardboard circles, little wooden figurines, and stacks of laminated cards.
These were familiar elements of Euro-style board games by now, but now we were playing a brand new game. Examining the pieces — like fifteen different kinds of pieces — I couldn’t make sense of any of it. I tried to be patient as my husband read the rules, but I found myself getting sleepy and struggling to concentrate. The words passed through me without meaning. As he turned the pages, I didn’t feel as though I was getting any closer to knowing how to play this game.
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