This is how the winter went for me. It seemed as if the days of freezing temperatures and snowy, icy pavements and roads and being cold morning to night would never end.
But the weeks between my last student recital back in December and my next one - which is
today - seemed to rush by too quickly.
And I can say that everyone, thankfully, is off my Anxiety List.
Which is an actual list. (Even my anxiety can't function without a list. See post from 3/7/2014).
I organize my teaching year into trimesters, each of which ends with a recital. The week after each recital is the beginning of a new trimester, at which time everyone will be given their new performance piece for the next recital. At the beginning of each new trimester I make a list of each student's name and their new piece. This is my Anxiety List.
Students consider it special to be the first one crossed off the list, though that honor usually goes to a young student playing an elementary piece, as the more advanced pieces naturally take more time to conquer.
This student was so unprepared that on the afternoon of the recital I scheduled and extra lesson to see if I could somehow miraculously pull a half-way decent performance out of them. But alas, four hours before the recital they could not play the piece to save their young life.
But low and behold and to my total shock, they played their piece quite decently.
During our post-recital reception the student's mother informed me that the student came home from their lesson and spent 2 1/2 hours knocking the piece into shape.
Anyway, it was from that hair's-breadth close call that my Anxiety List was born.