1st Year of Work (Part II)

Having fairly extensively covered the financial summary of my first year of my private teaching career yesterday, I figured it would also be good to cover my general feelings about teaching itself:

Teaching privately is one of those things that's both really great and sometimes really frustrating. Being my first year and all, just trying to build up my client base, I don't really have much say into the quality of students I take on, as I can't really afford to say no to most of them. That said, I'm not currently teaching any students that drive me up the wall (those have come and gone), but in a perfect world, all of my students would be driven, practicing a certain minimum amount and taking their instrument seriously. I DO have a few students like this, and they're an absolute pleasure to teach, but this only makes it a little easier to ignore my students who never practice. And although you might think I only enjoy teaching students who are further along, I do have one piano student right now who is very young and who had never taken piano before but is really fun to teach because she is excited about learning and actually practices (therefore making progress). So, it's really just a matter of attitude.

Then there's the scheduling and dealing with the parents in general. I never would have expected there to be so many parents out there who don't take our lessons that seriously. In fact, I lost at least one client due to disagreements about having lessons regularly. When it comes down to it, there's nothing more frustrating than a client who skips lessons, especially at the last minute, all the time. I generally don't make my clients pay me up front for the month, so although I do encourage them to make up any missed lessons, sometimes I get the losing end of the bargain, which some of my clients fail to appreciate or have sympathy for. That said, most of my clients now are pretty flexible and consistent.

As far as advertising is concerned, I've more or less just fallen back to relying on word-of-mouth instead of my initial slow-but-generally-fruitful process of putting flyers up in people's mailboxes in neighborhoods around my parents' house. Now that I've moved about 20 minutes or more away from their place though, I have to be more careful about setting up my schedule so that I only have to drive over there a few times a week, putting as many students back to back as possible. Initially, I thought taking on my current list of students during the school year was going to be difficult, as there are only so many hours available between school getting out and the late evening hours, but surprisingly this hasn't really been an issue, especially now that I've stopped teaching in Johns Creek.

So, in conclusion, private teaching this past year has generally been a great job: although I'm not always making tons of money, I get to do something very close to my collegiate training, and I get the added satisfaction of knowing I'm making a least a small difference in the lives of some (if not all) of my students. Again, I'm not sure how much longer I'll allow myself to rely on private teaching as my only source of income, but I wouldn't be surprised if I used teaching as supplementary income once I found something more stable.