Your Teacher Has Homework Now: I’m Starting a Master of Music at USF
This fall I am starting a Master of Music in piano performance at the University of South Florida. I was accepted this spring with a scholarship and a graduate assistantship as a collaborative pianist, which means that in addition to my own coursework and lessons, I will spend part of each week accompanying other musicians on campus. I have spent my whole career on the teacher’s side of the bench, assigning the scales and marking the trouble spots. Now somebody gets to do that to me.
Why now is a fair question. I have been teaching and performing for a long time. I trained with Kenneth Amada, whose own lineage traces back to Chopin, and I have competed internationally. Nobody is requiring this degree of me.
That is exactly why I want it. Everything I tell my students about music rests on one claim: that it is worth studying seriously, at any stage of life, for its own sake. I believe that claim. It seemed like time to act like it. There is also a simpler reason. I love this instrument and I want to go deeper. There are pianists on that faculty who know things I do not, and the only way to get what they have is to become their student. So that is what I am doing.
Being a student again may be the best thing I ever do for my teaching. I have already noticed something just from preparing: being on the receiving end of instruction is humbling in a way that no amount of remembering your own school years can replicate. I will be juggling practice time around a full teaching schedule, precisely what every one of my adult students does. I will play for professors and be evaluated, the same thing every one of my students does at every recital and exam. And there will be weeks where the calendar wins and the practicing suffers, weeks where I have to apply my own advice about short, intentional sessions instead of waiting for a free afternoon that never comes.
I expect to become a better teacher because of all of it. Not because a diploma changes how I teach a five-finger pattern, but because there is no substitute for standing in your students’ shoes while you are asking them to walk in them.
For my students, the practical answer is that very little changes. What does change was announced in the fall newsletter. My campus obligations are consolidated on Tuesdays, so the studio runs Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, as it does now. Lessons continue year round at Piano Distributors in Clearwater, and my church and performance work continue as usual.
The less practical answer is the one I care about more. My students, from the four-year-olds to the retirees, will have a teacher who is actively in the practice room, preparing repertoire under pressure, taking lessons, and being pushed by teachers of her own. I think that matters. I have always told families in Clearwater, Dunedin, Palm Harbor, and Safety Harbor that music study is a lifelong pursuit rather than a childhood activity you age out of. Starting this degree is the most honest way I know to demonstrate it.
If you are an adult who has been circling the idea of lessons, quietly wondering whether it is the right time to start or restart, consider this post your answer. I will be doing homework right alongside you.
