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Episode 241: Cheers to The “Stuff” Of Holiday Teaching

Well hello there, my teacher friends!  Welcome to the Beyond Measure Podcast. My name is Christina Whitlock and I’ve made it my responsibility to bring you a little dose of music teacher solidarity every week. I’ve been calling myself your Anytime Piano Teacher Friend for a little more than five years now and I have to say: maybe it’s the warm gushy feelings of the holiday season, but I am so grateful for those of you who choose to listen to this podcast. There are many things you could be doing with the next 20 minutes of your life, and I am humbled you are spending it with me.  I want to give DOUBLE-thanks to the members of my SuperFriends community on Patreon, who keep this show going through small contributions of $3 and $6 each month.  For more information on how YOU can help keep this show ad-free, head to ChristinaWhitlock.com/community and see how you can help.  For now, friends, let’s get on with the show: You are listening to episode 241 of the Beyond Measure Podcast.

I’m all about balance over here, and since last week’s episode was a little heavy… I thought I’d bring you a light-hearted reflection today on the STUFF I’ve accumulated over the course of my teacher career.

We live in a conflicted time:  on one hand, society tells us there is SO MUCH STUFF WE NEED… yet, we are also bombarded with messaging about minimalism and getting rid of non-essential items. I’ve learned over the years that I’m hyper-sensitive to both of those messages.  I love stuff. I do. My teacher heart loves piano books and manipulatives and pretty much anything that will fit on the surface of a piano key.  I have a hard time getting rid of my kid’s toys because my brain is constantly telling me things I *could* do with them in lessons.

At the same time, I love clean, clear spaces.  I love drawers you can open without having to jiggle them around to free up space above or beneath. I love being able to look into a cabinet and see what’s in there without moving 17 things out of the way first.

Since I do have kids at home, and I do have a genetic predisposition to collecting STUFF, it’s easy for me to approach this dilemma as an all-or-nothing solution… but that’s almost never the answer, is it?

I’ve spent a good part of this year vilifying the STUFF in my house. I’m so overwhelmed by the amount of THINGS that live here, sometimes I just want to take a torch to it all and start over with better self-control.

But then… here came the holidays. And even though the holidays means decorating my house with more STUFF, I couldn’t help but look around this year and appreciate many of the memories that come with these material items.

It’s not all bad, friends.  I know New Years is around the corner and we’re all going to be filled with that hope that THIS IS THE YEAR we all become better, more organized people, but today I wanted to have a little storytime episode about some of my favorite holiday STUFF.

Here’s a good one to start:

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 18 years ago, I was teaching a pair of brothers who drove me NUTS. They were some of the most unruly students I’ve taught.  They would NOT stay put in the waiting room while the other was in their lesson, and their mom – who stayed for the whole time – would just smile and shrug her shoulders at me.  These boys wandered my house. My husband came home to find one of them in our basement once. They would take food from our dog’s dish and leave little pebbles of it in random places on the floor because they loved to watch him hunt for it. They weren’t great students, either. They were whiney and a little lazy… it wasn’t great. Mind you, this was almost 20 years ago so I’ve learned some things since then.  BUT… I put up with these kids because I also taught their mom. And – despite my frustrations with her when it came to controlling her children – I *loved* working with her.  She was the epitome of why I love adult students. She would get so pleased with herself when she realized she had learned something new. She was thoughtful and hard-working and very pleasant to work with.  I loved her lessons, and didn’t want to risk those by expressing frustration over her sons.

Anyway. Once December, they announced they were moving to California and would be discontinuing lessons at the end of the month. It was one of those GREAT teacher moments where I got to let out a huge sigh of relief. These are always telling moments, aren’t they? When you realize JUST HOW RELIEVED YOU ARE when a student quits?  Before they left, they gave me a Christmas gift: a pretty sizeable white porcelain sleigh. Honestly, it felt completely impersonal… likely a regift or just something that was on sale.  Since they were moving, I packed it away to sell at our garage sale that spring and called it a day.

It turns out, that sleigh did not sell at our sale that spring, so I kept it and decided to display it the next year. Friends, as the years have worn on, I have absolutely LOVED pulling that stupid sleigh out of its box every year. For almost 20 years now it has served as a humorous reminder of ALL seasons of teaching come to an end. I laugh about how AWFUL those students were, how THRILLED I was when they left, how much I ENJOYED lessons with their mom… so many things.  And I get to relive them every year as I unpack my Christmas boxes. It’s an important reminder to my teacher heart that every student comes and goes. The great ones and the not-so-great ones.

I’m sure you have all kinds of student gifts that bring you memories. Some good, some funny, some insulting… I shared one of my favorite teacher gift stories here on the podcast last year, and I’ll link that episode in today’s shownotes in case you’re interested in more.

Here’s another story for you that relates to one of the most important holiday fixtures in our home.

While I was in grad school, I worked with a lot of student composers. I had the pleasure of debuting a lot of new piano works by young composers I really enjoyed. But. In 2005, I was assigned as part of my assistantship to perform a new work by a student composer… and it was NOT a pleasant experience.  This composer had written a piece for piano and tenor, and when he decided he could not find a vocalist that met his approval, he decided he would sing the vocal part himself.  Mind you, he was not a trained vocalist in any way. During rehearsals, he frequently berated me for not sounding like what he imagined in his head. We also had a notable argument involving his emphatic directives to use the sostenuto pedal…. Which I was doing… only to find out after MUCH yelling on his part that he ACTUALLY meant the una corda pedal.

Anyway…this was a mess. My faculty advisor was livid with him… it was a whole thing. I just needed to get through the student composer’s concert so I could move on and never speak to this person again.

The day of the concert, I found myself in such a state – in hindsight I recognize it as a panic attack – but I did what every music major did in the early 2000’s and I left the practice room to go sit in the computer lab. 😊  Yes, before we all had internet on our cell phones, we would avoid practicing under the guise of needing to check out email in the computer lab…. Imagine…

That day, I ripped off a panicky email to my then-fiancee, now-husband, explaining how I couldn’t see how I was going to survive the day.

A few minutes later, Michael wrote me back and said, “I have a surprise for you. You just have to breathe, get through this concert, and I promise it’s going to make you feel better.”

Well, I survived the concert. I still remember sitting with Michael in the parking garage after and him saying, “What WAS that?!”  There was one particular moment when the composer emphatically yelled something about sheep… it was a whole thing, friends.

I was happy to have it behind me, validated that many people acknowledged what a terrible experience I’d had… and then, my sweet husband-to-be took me to his house and surprised me with an artificial Christmas tree he’d purchased and set up earlier that day.  He’d picked out some light and some ornaments and I just thought it was the sweetest thing.

I was in my second year of grad school, in that weird limbo between being a child in my parents’ home and preparing to be a wife in my own home… and there was something so comforting about seeing what would become our family Christmas tree.

And – friends – I have to tell you… neither of us had any money at that point. I know he did not pay much for that tree. But TO THIS DAY, that is a beautiful tree. We set it up this year and it hit me that this is our 20^th year with that tree and I just can’t believe it.  We lose 7 million needles off that thing every year, but it still looks full and people often mistake it for a real tree.

And even though setting up artificial trees is a total pain – it ALWAYS gives me a chance to reflect on that December day in 2005 when I went from the worst feeling to the best.

(Thanks for indulging me with that story, friends).

Back to teacher-things… I can’t let an episode about my favorite holiday things go by without talking about the ornaments I’ve made for my students each year. See – when I started teaching at age 14 – my mom wisely suggested I make ornaments for my students that Christmas. I did it for my first few years of teaching, and then stopped…. But in 2006, I resurrected the tradition and have not missed a year since then. I’ve also only repeated an ornament design once.

Many of you make or gift ornaments to your students each year. I know this is not unique to me. But in 2006, I started making MYSELF an ornament, too. And as both of my girls have become students of mine, they’ve started getting their own ornaments as well. Every ornament is unique, but they each have the year and the student’s name.

Now, every year, one of my favorite parts of trimming our Christmas tree is to pull out each ornament, 2006 and forward. Each ornament has its own memories: The cheap and quick foam snowflakes I assembled one year in the car on the way home for Thanksgiving… the bulbs I handpainted glittery piano keyboards on while my newborn baby laid on her Boppy pillow next to me… the sleds my husband handcrafted for us all one year…. It’s funny. Some of my ornaments are really cute. Some are, well, not.  They remind me of the years I really needed to phone it in because time or money was tight.

I love seeing the ornament collection grow from having just one for me… to having two and then three as my daughters earned their ornaments.

While some of my students don’t particularly care, I am pleased at how many students show genuine enthusiasm over what ornament I will make this year… and how many longtime students have entire trees devoted to studio ornaments in their homes.

I’m going to share some pictures of my ornaments through the years to those on my email list this week. If you aren’t already signed up for the Piano Teacher Confessions e-letter, make sure you get on that list so you can see what I’ve done over the years.

I think the ornament collection is a lovely reminder of the various seasons we travel in teaching.  We are all guilty of thinking life will always feel like it does today… even though experience has taught us that it changes in the blink of an eye.

This feels like sort of a self-indulgent episode to share… and maybe it was… but my hope is that it reminds you that there CAN be value in the memories of “stuff”.  While it’s true that memories live in our hearts and not in our possessions, having tangible reminders to trigger those memories is something I’m particularly grateful for this year.

I also have to note how much of a throughline music study is in all my memories. On one hand, it’s important we all realize we are more than piano teachers and our identities are made up of many more things than what we do for work.  BUT also: there is something about music teacher life that is all-encompassing.  The memories we have from being students ourselves… of our teachers…  to BECOMING teachers… and being musicians through all of it… it’s impactful on many levels.

That old adage about the days being long but the years being short?  Yeah. I feel that. Who knows how many more years I’ll be making ornaments for my daughters.  Will I stop once they graduate and move out? Who knows…. I guess I’ll make that decision when I have to.

Sigh. Okay, friends. Let’s toast ourselves out of here and get on with this memorable season, shall we?

Studio Teacher Friends from all around the world:  I raise my glass to you today in hopes that you will enjoy a walk down memory lane of your own today. If you don’t have possessions to trigger these remembrances, maybe this episode was enough to spark some good thoughts. Cheers to feeling all the feels, my friends!  Hear, hear.

Thanks for joining me for this trivial little episode, friends. I’m leaving links in today’s shownotes for past holiday episodes, how to sign up for my email letter, and information on becoming a SuperFriend so you can help make sure this show stays on the air in 2026. All that and more await you at ChristinaWhitlock.com/episode241.

Next week, I’m offering up a year-in-review of sorts… it should be fun so I hope you’ll tune back in for that one. I can’t wait to let you in on what’s in store for the new year. Thanks again, friends!  Enjoy the merriment of December!