Originally posted on Treble Makers: A Music Education Blog:
From time to time, parents of beginner (and more often than not, young) music students face a tough challenge: their child’s motivation to learn wanes to a gradual standstill. They no longer want to practice and it becomes a daily struggle just to get them to open up their music book that sits atop the piano collecting dust. Alas, dragging them to their weekly music lessons is as easy as drawing blood from a stone. As a music teacher, I admit my bias when I say that quitting lessons, no matter… Continue reading What’s the point of music lessons if my child won’t practice?

Originally posted on The WordPress.com Blog:
This week’s three posts all explore a similar topic — being comfortable in one’s own body — yet diverge on that theme in markedly different ways. Bikini Body This, friends, is a cultural phenomenon that confounds me. In Los Angeles specifically, and the whole of America more generally, we are confronted again and again with the universal understanding that women need to be ashamed of wanting to eat food. Whiny Baby’s blog title may be tongue-in-cheek, but her observation of the feminine relationship to food is astute and real. Women should be the… Continue reading Freshly Pressed: Friday Faves

Originally posted on According To Hoyt:
Today I should do the chapter, but I’m still not QUITE up to it (though no antihistamines today.) I should also – in the sense that it’s my obligation – write about why the voting changes in Colorado are wrong, and can’t even be covered by the fig leaf of “greater voting opportunity.”  There is in fact no fig leaf except the destruction of the individual right to vote.  It has to be the intended result.  (And btw, would there be a remedy via the courts?  That at least ties it up long enough… Continue reading The Fractured Writer