Waking up to a new post-Covid world of music teaching practices

A friend was writing in his blog about the changes that large companies are considering in their practices as a consequence of this year of predominantly ‘work at home’ ways of doing things brought about by the pandemic. WFH and different mixes of WFH and work on site will probably become the norm for many people.. Away from the corporate field, me as a private music teacher have found (or confirmed, at any rate) that I can do what I do anywhere in the world where there is good internet (this does put into question, why then live in one of the more expensive cities in the world). With some limitations but one can get around those and my pupils can learn and get to where they want to be, without all the travelling (mine or theirs) etc. There even are some small advantages. For instance, I record (with their consent, of course) small sections of the lesson when I need to make a particular point clear and mail the resulting video to them -and this has turned out to be very useful We cannot play together, clearly, because of the latency in those systems but I can record second guitar parts for them to play along with. All in all, a little more preparation on my part but the results have been satisfactory. There is one big fly in the ointment: I teach in two secondary schools as well as private lessons. Online lessons there have been a different thing and had, say, mixed success. And the schools want face-to-face lessons to resume as soon as, probably in three weeks’ time as I write this (15 Feb 2021). I’m finding I don’t like that idea very much, from practical points of view (sharing air and mingling with a thousand-plus kids in the middle of a pandemic, etc), having to deal with the thousand little annoyances (the bathrooms..) and little things like, again, getting up at ungodly hours and commuting after I’ve found that it is not really necessary to do things in this way. We’ll see how this all pans out.

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