Great Piano Lessons | What Happens in a Day at Curtis Music Academy
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Curtis Music Academy podcast. I hope you are all doing fantastic. Today I wanted to kind of give an inside look as to what a typical day looks like within the walls of Curtis Music Academy. I wanted to do this both to give prospective students a better idea of how Curtis Music Academy operates, and for those who are already our students but who may not see much more than a brief moment in our lobby before they are whisked off to their studio by their instructor to start another great piano lessons.
The best way I can describe the operations of Curtis Music Academy is organized chaos, but that often has a negative connotation to it, and my personal experience here, as well as everything I have witnessed or discussed with other staff members or students has been nothing but positive. The chaos aspect comes from our willingness to really customize each lesson to the student and what they want to get better at, as well as what about their instrument and what kinds of music excite them and make them want to play their instrument more. We also want to be as accommodating as possible to the scheduling desires of our students, and we have a large and ever-growing number of students, so there are always a large number of last minute schedule changes, but we are so blessed to have a really flexible group of instructors who are genuinely excited about helping their students learn and having the opportunity to teach them great piano lessons.
So, because of all of the different scheduling desires of our students, we have instructors, students, and parents coming in and out of the studio from early in the morning until late at night, and we often play “studio musical chairs” where after one lesson an instructor goes to another studio for their next lesson, and another instructor steps into the first instructors original studio to begin their next lesson. So there’s always a lot of logistics at play (and a lot of Lysol spray being used), but over time we have gotten really efficient about moving people, equipment, and instruments, and just kind of rolling with the punches of life.
In addition to the actual scheduling and carrying out of the weekly great piano lessons, there is a lot of other work that goes on around the studio. For example, we always keep a variety of beverages and condiments (coffee, tea, water) for our students, families, and other visitors, so those need to be refilled regularly. To accommodate the scheduling of students into their lives, staff are more than welcome to keep and eat food between their lessons at Curtis Music Academy, so the kitchen sees regular use in addition to its usage every week for night-time staff dinner and meeting.
Instructors also spend time filling out reports about each of their students after each great piano lessons detailing what they covered, what pieces the student worked on and how much they advanced through the pieces, any requests the student had for future music pieces or areas of study, and upcoming schedule abnormalities for the student, really just anything and everything that came up during the lesson. These are all kept in a central system, and the staff can bring anything they need to (generally a schedule or lesson location change) to the attention of Ron Curtis or another staff member whenever they need to.
As part of our commitment to provide a customized great piano lessons experience for each student and to help ensure that we are getting each student’s lessons as close to perfect as possible, we also conduct routine check-up calls with our existing students. These are performed every few months for all of our students, no matter how long they have been with us, because we never want to slip into complacency and stop trying to improve and perfect the learning approach, we have with each and every one of our students. For our younger students, we conduct a check in call with their parents to inquire if we can improve anything for either the student or the parent.
And these are not limited simply to great piano lessons content, we are also more than willing to hear ideas about subjects like how we can make the lobby more comfortable for parents who are waiting for their children to finish their lessons, or how we could improve the efficiency of our monthly payment process. We are also constantly following up with prospective students. We like to allow students to start their process of joining the Curtis Music Academy family whichever way makes them most comfortable, so we allow prospective students to reach out to us via phone call, email, text, apps such as Thumbtack, or through our website.
So we also have to be consistently keeping up with all of those mediums to ensure that we are replying promptly to all prospective students to get more information about their musical goals and where they are at right now and their schedule to figure out the best instructor and great piano lessons time to get them started, as well as giving them more information about us as a studio and how we operate. And, of course, there are the less enjoyable areas of making Curtis Music Academy run smoothly. Things such as processing credit card payments for the month, ensuring that all of the bills and receipts have been properly filed and organized, and ensuring all office and music supplies are stocked.
So, from greeting students at the door and juggling the specific circumstances of each great piano lessons, and making sure that all student and instructor schedules are running smoothly, to keeping up correspondence with our current and future students, to doing the behind the scenes work to make sure that all supplies are ready to go when needed, Curtis Music Academy is always a busy, bustling studio. But it is also always a fun, friendly place full of people who really love their jobs and their students, and that makes it a fantastic environment to be in. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Curtis Music Academy podcast.