Who I am can be summed up by the three things I love the most: my home, my family, and music teaching.

My home: We live on 1.5 acres outside of a little bedroom community outside of Boise, Idaho.  I can’t tell you how much we enjoy our little 1500 sq ft house.   You can often find me right next to our roaring fireplace which is going most the time in the winter months.  When I am not there, I revert to my other favorite places: under the old tree next to the swing overlooking the Treasure Valley.  It’s an old fashioned life where things are a little slower, but life is much more appreciated.

My family: In that little old house of ours, you will find a crew with four young kids.  They are either running the halls, playing games together, building forts outside, or racing each other down the hill.  They keep my life full!  I never knew how much I would learn from those four little people for they have brought me the best and the worst moments of my life.  But I wouldn’t trade them for the world!

My husband is amazing.  I am constantly marveling that I get to be his wife.  He is my stability and my support!  I didn’t know it was possible to love someone so much.

I can credit most, if not all of our happiness and success in our life and family with the teachings of my church.  I don’t know where I’d be without it!  My beliefs are the foundation of my life and I stand by them with all of my heart.

Music Teaching: If there is one thing I love more than music, it’s teaching!  I love, love, love teaching music.  It’s my passion!  Being able to teach piano is such a privilege.  It could be because I have the best piano students in the world!  I walk away from my piano lessons on cloud nine.

I began taking piano lessons as soon as I hit the playground in kindergarten.  I loved piano almost as much as I loved school.  As I grew, my love for both piano and school continued to grow.  As high school came around, families who knew me started to ask if I would teach piano to their kids.  So while I had no idea how to start teaching piano, I did know a lot about piano since I had been playing so long, competed in competitions, and performed countless times.  So I started teaching!   Although young, I loved both piano and teaching.

As a teacher and as a student, I would get frustrated by the lack of resources I had to draw on.  Teaching piano was like being thrown in cold turkey.  I had no training and no experience other than my own learning experience to draw upon.  I did what most other piano teachers do.  I taught from the book.  I found a method book and would go from cover to cover.  My job as a piano teacher was to make sure that they made it to the next page and the next page.  I offered support and accountability.

In college, I studied elementary education.  It was there that I began to learn how to teach.  What I was doing in high school wasn’t what I would consider teaching.  It was more of a piano tutor.  While I am sure I was better than nothing for my students, my lack of resources and education definitely reflected on the students I had.

I would not be surprised if the students I had had back then gave up on piano eventually.  What was the fun of going through book after book like a textbook, just learning rote piano and memorization?

With a degree and a husband in hand, I thought I could go start teaching immediately!  But then, junior entered the family and my whole life was changed.  Although I would often play and be asked to play piano, it wasn’t until about five years later that families began to ask if I would teach their kids and I accepted.

How would I teach this time?  I didn’t like the way that it had worked out before.  I wanted to be a teacher, not a tutor.  So, I started to experiment and try new things. I leaned heavily on my licensed education as an elementary school teacher to help carve my path for piano teaching.  As I did so, a beautiful thing occurred.  Not only did I begin to LOVE piano teaching, my students loved piano and piano lessons too!

It wasn’t long before I began to have more students than I could handle.  I had to constantly turn students away and refer them to other teachers.  But, much to my dismay, piano teachers were frequently quitting.  They had become burned out.  They had lost the drive.

I get it.  I had been there too.

Which is what brought me to the blogging world.  I just had to share what I had learned.  Piano lessons could be fun and rewarding.  Teachers didn’t have to become burned out.

So PianoTel’s is to share all that we can to help support the teachers and the students of piano.  It is my way of trying to keep the piano community not only growing, but thriving!  I am here to help in whatever way I can, to make sure that music and the LOVE of music is kept alive not only in us, but in future generations.

PianoTel’s is evidence of my passion about kids, teachers, music, and piano!