I’m midway through my 7th decade and I’m still teaching. After fifty-five years of it you would think I’d be tired of it, but here I am. Many men my age hunt and fish, volunteer, garden, etc.
They spent parts of their careers looking forward to relaxing in their retirement. But here I am.
Now to be fair, I don’t teach as many private lessons as I used to, and all of my teaching is online so I’m not spending hours in my car driving daily to and fro. But I’ve replaced that with other activities. Like this blog, or my podcast, or other creative things I like to do. You see that’s at the center of it all. Creativity. I need to scratch that itch. There are elements of creativity and performing in giving lessons. And I’m still learning and improving that skill, so it’s still interesting to me.
This era of technology that I find myself living in fascinates me. I’m not necessarily smitten with it, but I find it very useful. I’m not afraid of it but I admit to being more than a little overwhelmed at times. As you know I have a website. It was designed by my friend Nina Ferrayra. She’s my go-to tech person. And with her help I’ve created an online beginning ukulele course for adults.
I created the course to help a friend. She can’t afford weekly lessons (fixed income like many of us) but she would still like to learn to strum a few chords and sing some songs. So this was a simple solution. I asked her to test drive the program and the two words she used was “easy” and “fun”. This entire course is priced at about the same cost as a single private lesson.
Cost isn’t the only reason many adults won’t take lessons. Some are just nervous. They think they are the oldest person on the planet learning from scratch. They aren’t, of course, and if they were it wouldn’t matter anyway.
Many people try to learn from YouTube videos with varying results. The problem there is that while the information is valid the teachers aren’t very good. And if you are unsuccessful you tend to blame yourself.
Nina told me several years ago that I should create an online course. She gave me some pretty good business reasons why I should do it. But I wasn’t really motivated by that. Most of my business ventures have been failures anyway so I had no reason to think this would be different. But I’ve talked with several people since the pandemic began who have asked about taking lessons and then never followed through. I thought this would be a great way to reach them and help them achieve that goal.
So my ukulele course will be released in a day or two (depending on how busy I get). Motivated by my desire to use my knowledge and modern technology to help people learn to have fun with music. To be not only consumers but participants too. If it is well received I may create a follow-up uke course and a beginning guitar course as well. We’ll see.
So when many people my age are sitting back and taking it easy, I’m still in my studio every day trying to find new ways to make people happy. Creating a new video, recording a song, arranging music, teaching, etc. I was asked a few years ago how long I thought I could keep this up. I honestly don’t know. But, for now, here I am.