One Week Down

Thus concludes my first week of teaching private lessons in 2009.

In my first year here I had 11 private students per semester, each receiving a half-hour lesson per week. At that time I had only given a small handful of private voice lessons, and having 11 private students assigned to me every week sounded so daunting. My inner monologue was all, "Eleven students? Every week? What am I going to do with them? What do I know?" and so on. But after a few weeks I got rolling and 11 students was no big deal.

Last semester I had the assignment of teaching a group voice class in the theater department (more on that below), so they only gave me three private students on top of that. The class that I taught is only offered in the fall, so this semester I am back to strictly private lessons. They just bumped up my GSI (Graduate Student Instructor) appointment, which is great because it means more money, but it also means more private students, namely 15. After having only three private students last semester, I went through many of the same doubts as before: "Fifteen? Are you kidding me? Can I handle that?" and so forth. But once again I've found that it's not that big of a deal, especially since this semester I only have classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, leaving my M/W/F open exclusively for teaching. That's a really nice luxury because it allows me to really focus on classes when I have classes, and teaching when I have to teach.

However, I can't say that this first week of teaching really gave me the correct impression of what the whole semester is going to be like. Here's what I mean:

• Monday: Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so all four of my lessons were cancelled.
• Tuesday: I had but one student and we had a nice first lesson.
• Wednesday: All four of my students showed up punctually and the two hour chunk just flew by.
• Thursday: My lone student of the day sent me an email saying her grandfather had a stroke and she had to cancel.
• Friday: Only three of my four regularly scheduled students showed up, and a Monday student who rescheduled for Friday was also a no show. He later sent me an email saying, "Sorry! I honestly completely forgot since I forgot to write down the rescheduled time for this week."

That makes 14, and then I had one student drop out and another one added on, so I will see him next week, making 15 total. So this week I taught 8 out of 15 lessons this week. Hopefully next week will be normal so I can gauge what my teaching schedule will actually be like this semester.

As much as I enjoy teaching private voice lessons, I feel like my real strength is teaching in the classroom. Last semester I taught a class in the University of Michigan's theater department called Voice 111. In the theater department there are musical theater majors and then there are non-musical theater ("acting") majors, and Voice 111 is a requirement for all entering freshman acting majors. Many of whom have no prior singing experience whatsoever and the object of this class was to teach them basic singing technique. I had taught a similar class at the University of Utah, but that class had over thirty students. This time I was teaching just one of two sections of the class, consisting of only eight students. This was a fantastic change because I really got to know each student really well and have lots of individual time with each of them. We were a really tight-knit bunch and I feel like I was really able to help them.

My Voice 111 class. I felt a little weird about putting a picture of my students on a public website, so I drew little smiley faces for them. Now I feel a little weird about the smiley faces. Oh well.

In teaching this class I thought a lot about the presentation of content and I wanted to employ many different teaching tactics to reach out to the diverse learning styles of my students. On the first day of class I met briefly with the whole class to introduce myself and the syllabus and let everyone meet, and then I met individually with each student for 10 minutes to get to know them and hear them sing. We held class in a black-box theater, meaning that we had tons of room to spread out for exercises (like lying down on the floor in the Alexander position to learn about breathing) and other movement-oriented activities. I also gave an occasional lecture with visual aids, I invited guest speakers, we took a field trip to the music building to acquaint them with the resources available over there, and I had them give group presentations.

While we studied a lot of diverse material such as vocal anatomy, vocal health, and singing diction, the main focus of the class was on singing and performing. I had them sing alone for the whole class four times over the course of the semester (many thanks to Stijn, our Danish accompanist). I let them pick two of their songs and I picked the other two. It was so rewarding to see the progress the students made over the course of the semester. One student was afraid to even open her mouth and sing at the beginning of the semester, but for her last performance she got up and gave a confident rendition of "In My Own Little Corner" (I assigned all my students Rogers & Hammerstein songs for their final performances - some of them had never even heard of R&H!).

I really hope that I get the chance to teach that class again in the fall. But in the meantime several of my students from that class are now taking private lessons with me so I get to keep working with them.

This post is dedicated to my own voice teacher, Professor Rico Serbo, who had quadruple-bypass surgery last week. May he recover soon.