Thank you everyone for your thoughful feedback this year! I got some really good tips and advice, a few things that made me lol, and as always some people with completely opposite opinions. I selected a few responses to reply to:

students master class not really useful…a lot of the students didn’t take it seriously and it was hard for me to practice, and I basically wasted my time in there when I could’ve had practiced

Having group MasterClass was more helpful than having a teacher there because it was less stressful, and everyone is more likely to offer constructive criticism without a teacher there.

This is a good example of people having opposite opinions about a class or teacher. In this case I think some masterclasses had more serious students and others not so much… Unfortunately I can’t be in every class all the time to supervise and this is an example of why we try to only have serious students come to courses!

Organize the theory classes. Make exams in the beginning to identify right place for the student to be.

We discussed this with teachers and will come up with a theory exam to be done at the same time as entrance exams in order to better place everyone for theory classes and waste less time with students moving up/down a class.

Let us put water on pianos

Whoever said this: STRAIGHT TO JAIL

Go back to age restriction or take discipline more seriously

Age Courses 15+

But definitely be a lot more stricter considering discipline and respecting other people. Especially when there’s lessons in the sanctuary. Like don’t be afraid to enforce discipline.

Discipline is always a struggle, and even age restrictions don’t help all that much. There were 15 year olds behaving worse than 12 and 13 year-olds. I do what I can to keep things on track but thank you for the encouragement to do more. Maybe next year we’ll fundraise some plane tickets for repeat offenders to get sent home early 😀

Have 1 hour lessons with 1 teacher instead of two for 1/2 hour. It’s a bit hard to balance two styles to satisfy both teachers. What one says, the other says don’t do, kinda. I think it would be easier to fit everything in 1 hour than really rush what you can get done in half an hour.

We did try this last year and gave a few students 1 whole hour with a teacher. Problem is some students ended up with teachers who didn’t teach them everything they wanted and felt like they should have gotten more out of courses. In general I think the value of courses comes from getting a variety of opinions and new perspectives you don’t get at home.

We tried to solve the issue of trying to balance different styles by having one teacher work on playing by ear, and the other more playing by notes so there’s not too much conflict when they have different styles.

Generally, though, if you want to come to courses and work for a whole hour with a single teacher, the better option is just to sign up for private lessons with that teacher if possible, many of them do lessons on zoom so it’s possible to have those from anywhere.

I think it would be better if we had choir altogether more often- because when you sing with a small group it’s completely different then when we’re all together

Dedicating more time for choir during the day comes at the cost of less MasterClass or private piano class time. At this point, I feel that trade-off would not be worth it! Choir sounded really good to my ear and I generally prioritize piano-based activities.

In previous years we gathered for choir after dinner, and I don’t think anyone would be down for that unless absolutely necessary.

I would prefer if the conducting lessons would actually have a plan and if every person would actually be able to conduct separately a song, not just all together.

The goal for conducting class is not really to have everyone conduct individually, there’s just not enough time during a 30 minute class for everyone to get a chance. The idea was for all of you to learn conducting basics and play your choral songs while people conducted while practicing to watch the conductor. Peter said that everyone got a chance to play through the choir song during the week multiple times.

If you found the conducting classes too easy and want to improve on this, I recommend signing up for conducting courses in Vancouver, WA next year!

PLEASE FIX THE CHAIRS IN THE PRACTICE LAB THEYRE TOO LOW MY HANDS HURT

Definitely either lower tables or higher chairs for the practice lab. Have slightly more acoustic pianos available (maybe for student masterclass?)

Better chairs in practice room.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention, I was using whatever is availabe in the church but i’ll look into other options for next year! Probably lower tables will be the easiest to implement.

we need Margaret biblenko and Alina nikolayev

Also, it would be nice to see Margarita Biblenko and Alina Nikolayeva as teachers next year.

Both were invited to piano courses this year but were unable to make it!

Maybe a little more time with teacher.

It would be nice to have more time on one-on-one lessons, like 45 minute lessons with a teacher. I liked that there was two teachers teaching.

Unfortunately I have no idea how to implement this without making the days even longer or wearing out the teachers! They already had to teach for one-on-one for 5 hours straight in addition to theory and master class time. Us teachers are people too!

Grading should be done fairly. I got same grade as last year even though I improved a lot over the year.

When people are trying, give them grace on the grades they receive.

We have a lot of discussions about grading and try to be very fair, we definitely took effort into account! The fact that your grade didn’t change could be for many reasons, including moving up a group or from the fact that group 2 and 3 got quite a bit harder compared to last year.

Also you couldn’t have gotten “the same grade as last year” because we changed the grading system entirely and separated out the different categories of piano performance for the first time this year.

I would suggest making some time before the private lessons with the students for them to practice their songs. Also, wifi would be nice.

Day starts at 9:00 which is not too early so you could get up a little earlier to practice… the days are already pretty long so I don’t know where I could add in practice time. Also any time you spend practicing on Monday would happen before Tuesday’s lesson, and so on 🙂

WiFi at church isn’t feasible, the only connection there is a cellular connection that can’t handle a ton of devices so access to it is tightly controlled.