Welcome to the Fine Arts Educator Coaching Clinics podcast- The podcast that supports art, theatre, dance, and music teachers by sharing instructional trends and exploring perspectives in fine arts education.  I am your host, Eric Sanford.  

Visit our website, FAECC.org to find resources and links to this podcast.  While you are there, follow our socials, and let us know your thoughts on the episode.

I want to provide a warning that brief content may be triggering or alarming to some listeners between timestamps 10 minutes to 15 minutes.  

If you need help, please call 988 for the suicide and crisis hotline. You can also access help by going to the website 988lifeline.org.  

Eric:

Today we are joined by Krista Garrett of the Garrett Music Academy, located just South of Washington, DC. They specialize in music lessons as well as a focus on mental health through the arts. Krista, welcome to the show. 

Krista:

Thank you for having me. 

Eric: 

Now tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey that led you here.

Krista:

Well, the Academy opened in 2004. It actually started with my husband. My husband was a guitarist and had a passion for music. So he started the school. My journey started before that. I started at age 8 playing piano and I was very passionate about playing and I wanted to be a concert pianist. So when I became a high school age, I went to a performing arts high school and started that trajectory under that career. 

What sidetracked me was the fact that when I went to start college Conservatory interviews, I found out that the ideal concert pianist or the ideal candidate for a Conservatory is the octave reach. And I have small little girl doll hands. So at that time I did not have an octave reach. I had to kind of maneuver a little bit, which is not ideal. And I was told by a Conservatory at the time that in order for me to be a candidate with their program, I would have to have surgery. And I would have to have both hands have the webbing in both of my hands cut between my fifth finger and fourth finger and my thumb and my index finger. 

Eric:

That's extreme. 

Krista:

That was the thing at the time. So that's what they did with string candidates and with piano candidates in order to do that. And I had to sit there for a minute and really think, did I want to go through a very serious surgery that could deform my hands? And also you have no guarantee that they're not going to nick a nerve or a tendon or ligament and not be able to play at all. 

So after about two minutes of really sitting there in silence and thinking about, I said no, I don't think I'm going to do that because there's no guarantees anyway in that arena anyway, of being in Carnegie Hall playing the grand. 

So at that point I took a year off from college and saved some money up, went to college, got my undergraduate, and then eventually got my masters degree in Developmental psychology from Hopkins. And at that point I was on the trajectory to be a brain neuro person. Met my husband, fell in love, got married. He had this music school. 

I really got my passion back for music and started working with him, and got involved in the business, started teaching. Fast forward to 2011. We have twin daughters. So life became extremely crazy. Fast forward again to 2014. My husband is wanting a career change. He's burned out. He's tired. He wants to go into theology. He starts considering letting go of the business and I said no, I'm passionate about it, let me have it. 

So I bought that from and his partner and he and I went ahead and started running it. 2016 was our biggest and most difficult year. In 2016, we lost one of our most wonderful teachers suddenly, she passed away. And then four months later, half of our business burned down. 

And at that point I thought about shutting everything down and wondered if this was the right path for me. I had babies to feed and I wasn't sure if I had the stamina to do it. And I had one of our voice teachers come to me after the funeral of the teacher that had passed. And I just sat him down and I said, “How can I do this? How am I going to do this by myself? And he said if anybody can do this, it's you, because you're passionate about it. You don't know how to take no for an answer. You're tenacious. And I know that you can do this. 

And as soon as he said that, I thought, OK back on the horse. And here we are, 2023. And 2024 is going to be our 20 years. I'd say we did OK. 

Eric:

I think so. Especially surviving through COVID and all the things that have been going on with the economy too. Not always a great setting for music lessons, you know? 

Krista:

It's challenging. It's definitely challenging with COVID, the most important thing that we had to do, and we'd already started working on this anyway because people were starting to go more online and spending more of a presence online. We started thinking, well, we'll start offering virtual lessons. So we'd already started putting our foot into that pool already. So when COVID hit, we already had the infrastructure to go completely online. So luckily we weren't put out of business by COVID. With the shutdown, we were able to pivot very quickly and get all of our teachers up online and so they could continue, you know, teaching through the pandemic. 

The economy's been a little bit more of a beast. It really does change the mindset of individuals when they have to choose between something that they consider a necessity and something they consider a luxury. So it it is a challenge right now in this industry because people do feel they have to make a choice and and and again. This is this is our livelihood so we see it as a necessity but but to other people it's it's more of a luxury. So there are some challenges there. 

Eric:

I think that sentiment is also shared, I mean among school districts and other things too, Fine Arts is always one of the first things- Do we really want to keep investing in that? So it's not unusual or a one off kind of idea with that.

Tell me more about what you offer in terms of the music lessons and education at your school. 

Krista:

Sure. So we offer private music lessons for all instruments, including voice. We've got 14 teachers. And they do teach in person and online. So we do offer both for anyone that may not be in our area or they may be traveling for work or they just can't have the transportation to get here. So we do still offer some small group lessons and then we do have some programs where we. We do have summer camps, but we also have programs like our Making the band program where we have kids come in for nine months and they work with two of our producers and they write an original song that gets recorded in one of our producers' recording studio. And then they also develop a short set list of covers that they can perform and then they do a big concert for their family. And then we try to get them gigs during the summer so that they can play out and get some experience performing. 

Eric:

That's really exciting. 

Krista:

Yeah, it's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun. So if you're a rock and roller, it's definitely a good outlet for you to learn how to take what you learn in a private lesson with one-on-one with the teacher and actually learn how to play with the band and be able to listen to each other. Learning it, learning what a good set list is, learning how to work a crowd, learning how to market yourself. 

Those are all things that when people think about the music industry, they don't think about the fact that it doesn't just go into practicing your instrument. You've got to be able to create a whole stage show and a whole stage presence to engage your crowd, or you're not going to have the success that you're looking for. 

Eric:

That's a really interesting and very unique skill set that y'all provide on that too. And instruction: how many students do you have not in your area but are maybe throughout the whole country? 

Krista:

Right now that's actually shrunk quite a bit because in all honesty, I think people are kind of burned out for the online experience. They want to be in person. But we do have some students in New York. We do have a couple of students out in California and then I think we've got two in Florida. So I would say probably about 10 online across the country right now, but we're always looking for anyone that wants to do that, we definitely want to help them out. 

Eric:

We'll be sure to include your website with the show notes and so they can reach out to you if teachers listening to this have any students that may be interested in taking advantage of that. 

Krista:

That'd be great. 

Eric:

We were talking earlier about some, not just music therapy, but some mental health kind of benefits of what music provides. Can you go into a little bit more about that with your school? 

Krista:

Sure. So mental health has become such an important topic and it really came out during COVID where people began to recognize the fact that we're not paying, we haven't been paying attention to it and that people really suffered through the pandemic. There was a lot of realizations of social isolation and social anxiety now that people are back out in public, and depression. So we do have some mental health issues, particularly among kids and teens that have been isolated and having to go to school online. 

And social media was the only outlet, it really created an issue and we talked about COVID babies and some of these children that have been isolated and haven't developed social relationships. So. We started developing programs, to try to address some of those issues, especially since in our area within a six month period we had four high school students commit suicide. And these were shocks to us because these were students that there were no indications that anything was wrong. 

And we felt that we had to be part of the solution. What cemented it for me was the fact that I started having students coming in for lessons that were not necessarily wanting to take a traditional lesson. I had young ladies coming in that would either sit down at the piano and just start talking. Or we're coming for a voice lesson. Warm up and then as soon as they had to face the mirror to watch their posture and their vocalization techniques, would start crying. 

I was finding that I was spending more time in those lessons just talking than I was actually teaching. And the moment that I realized I had to do something different with music and mental health was when I had two students disclose to me that they were cutting. And as someone with a psychology background, I knew there were issues of children self cutting in order to cope with pressure, but I had never experienced that in real life, in reality, right in front of me. 

And to see these children trusting me enough to tell me “I'm doing this to myself and I'm scared because I could take it too far one day,” made me think about OK, I I gotta switch gears here some. They're trusting me enough. I've got to come up with something to help them. 

So I started sending home journals with them. They would journal and then bring it back the next week. And then we would talk about what they were writing down. Or one young lady didn't want to write. She wanted to draw. So she would draw things for me. So they start bringing stuff and things in and I would look at these journals and they're just the most profound thoughts. The most profound, I mean the most deepest, darkest things that are in their souls at that moment and in their heads, and they're drawing these beautiful things and I'm going, OK, we got to do something with this. 

So I just had this epiphany one day. I was like, you know what? We could use this and turn this into music. So I had one young lady who was writing these really poetic, beautiful things, and I said, you know what, why don't we turn this into some song lyrics? And she said sure. We did it, and it was a gorgeous song. This is courageous. And this, this little girl's like 15 years old. And I'm like, you are Socrates to me right now. You know, you've got, you've got these beautiful, poetic ways of saying something that's hurting you. So we illustrated it. We wrote down a composition for her and she recorded it and it was gorgeous. 

The next one, she drew a series of pictures. I said, let's figure these out and make these lyrics. Did it. Came up with a song. And this one decided not to record it. She wanted to burn it. So she burned it, and it was cathartic for her. I thought, you know what? This is something. This is definitely something we do, and this is something that no one's done before. We need to do this and see how it goes. 

So I called some teachers together and I said, this is my idea. They said, oh, this is fabulous, let's do it. So we started this Find Your Voice program. And with Find Your Voice we have kids that are experiencing mental health issues, whether it's depression, whether it's anxiety, whether it's suicide ideation. And with the suicide ideation, I will add for anyone that wants to know, we make sure they're under the care of a therapist before we bring them in to do that, just because we want to make sure they're safe. 

Eric:

Do you work alongside the therapist as well? 

Krista:

Yes, absolutely. And it's important to do that because if we get any inclination that there's even a thought of hurting themselves, we want to make sure that we're addressing that right away. We don't want that to fall through the cracks and have something happen. Um, So it's better to cover all those bases and work hand in hand with someone else that's talking with them. Just because we want to make sure that that child is safe or that adult is safe, we don't want to do anything that's going to replace the help of a therapist in addition to. 

So we do have some children that have come in that have had ideation. And we sit, we sit down and they spend about six weeks with me. And we do the journaling, we do talking, we do, we do some role -playing exercises, things like that, and then at the end of it, we have a structured song. We have our intro or outro, our bridges, our pre choruses, our choruses, our verses, all of that. I get that structure with them and then they send them, I send them over to one of our teachers, name is Shane. And Shane is our music composition expert. So what he does is he sits down and goes “OK. This is the vibe I'm getting of the song. How can we structure it? What's your melody going to be. What's your harmony going to be. What's your rhythm going to be. What instruments do you want. Let's get in GarageBand and I'm going to teach you how to do these things. OK let's look at other softwares to see.”

Again they tailor to each one of the kids to make sure it's exactly the way they want it to sound. And then he does some engineering with them and try to take them through the process of how they can record it too. And then at the end of the day, they decide what they want to do with it. Some of them will want to put it up on Spotify, some might want to put it up on iTunes. Some may just want to keep it for themselves. And like I said, I had that one student who just wanted to burn it. And it made her feel better. 

So it's up to the individual what they want to do with it. We just want to facilitate that safe space so that they can express themselves so that in the future as they get older and they have stress or they have a difficult situation, that they have some coping strategies in place that are related, that they can go to, that can express how they feel without the need to hurt themselves. And we've had kids that have come back and come back through several times. I have two that are ongoing with me. So it's just an ongoing thing that we're just constantly writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. 

And then we have ones that come in and transition out. And just the hope of the program is to make sure that at the end of the day we have given them some sound strategies to help when they have difficult times. 

Eric:

I think that's a crucial thing, that. In the music education classes that I have attended, that I have taught, we don't focus on things like that.  We're focused on the full group. We're focused on performance value, performance on the instrumentation and just getting better on whatever the skill we're trying to focus on. So I think that there's a lot of merit, I think there's a lot more real world application. And just as an adult, looking at how you're going to use music later in life. Because a lot of times what we do in the classroom, it doesn't always transcend to the next level. It doesn't always go, hey, after you leave high school and you're not playing your instrument anymore, what are you going to be doing next? And so I think it's really nice that when you mentioned that the kids can experience this as adults, and continue with the same kind of ways of getting their feelings out, getting the information of how they're processing things. It's really crucial, and I think we should be doing a lot more of that. 

Especially, I really enjoy the how you're doing with art, with the journaling and the music and putting all these things through, because we're not silos of individual artistic content. It's all part of everything together. So I think that's really beneficial for the students as well. 

Krista:

I think it's really hard when you're in a classroom setting, because I have taught in the classroom setting. It is really hard when you have 30 to 35 kids to be able to pinpoint that one that needs that little extra because you are having to teach a series of objectives that are expected by the end of the year that are going to be evaluated. And it's really hard when that is something that is pressed upon you through administration. To be able to look at the emotional side of it is almost impossible. 

Music educators have a really difficult job. You're taking something that's emotionally based music, that evokes emotion that’s based on the way we play with the dynamics, based on the way we play, our tempo, we're conveying the emotion of a song to an audience. And we're trying to teach that to our students to feel that when they're playing, because that's when they're going to be their best at a performance. 

But when it comes down to actually looking at the individual playing the music. That's not something you can do in a classroom. That's not an objective. That's not something that you have the time to do. So I think the luxury of being a private music teacher allows for that because you have to connect one-on-one with the student. You have to have that chemistry, you have to have that rapport with someone so that they trust you enough. And they're vulnerable enough to show their true self. And you're not going to get that in the classroom with 35 kids. 

Eric:

Exactly. Especially if they're in middle school, High school, they don't want to speak up and answer a question. They're not going to say anything else. And honestly, it's it's not really a good place for that to happen anyways. 

Krista:

No, it's not. Because unfortunately in this day and age,  and I think the climate has changed significantly because of COVID. People have lost a sense of empathy. And while I think if you were to use the phrase mental health, people will be more cognizant of what that means. But at the end of the day, if you have middle school and high school kids in a room and someone were to show that side of them, you're going to get some that are going to give a round of applause. And you're going to have some that are going to heckle it and see it as a weakness. So. It's, I think, really hard for kids to feel safe enough in that setting to do that. 

And I will say there are a lot of music teachers out there in the classroom, whether it's a theater teacher, whether it's a chorus teacher, whether it's a band teacher or an orchestra teacher. I know in our area there are a lot of them that during lunch or during free periods, they open their doors for those kids to come in and eat lunch with them. So they can share that self realization with them so that they feel safe and they feel like they can say it in a small group setting where they can get advice from an adult and from a mentor. But it's the rest of the day in that big group setting that I think people are very guarded and afraid to show that side of themselves. 

Eric:

Tell me more about, I guess, the popularity of this idea. Is anyone else doing anything like this?  Is there conferences, are there other teachers? Is there any kind of organization or is it something that's very unique to which I'll do at your school? 

Krista:

I think it's very unique because anyone I've ever talked to about the program has always said I've never heard of such a thing that is so cool. How did you come up with that idea? I never thought to do it that way, so I do think we're the only ones doing this. And I had one teacher, one point, say, well, this is very pioneering. This is taking music to a whole different level. But I wish people would do more of this. I think people are afraid to do it. Or they may have not thought of it. 

It takes a certain skill set. To sit down and work through certain situations with young people. And it can be very uncomfortable and it can be very frightening sometimes, hearing some things that you hear. And trying to remain calm, collected and positive, particularly when you see someone struggling. But I think that if anyone would be interested in doing this work in their music school or in their music program, I would urge them to consider it because we were all teenagers once. And we all have been through our own stuff and, the important thing to remember with this program is you're taking your true life experiences as an adult. And you're trying to share that wisdom with kids to help them through their stuff. 

And it really is something that if people were to give it a chance, they might be surprised at how much the world would change, particularly with the young people and how they feel about themselves and how they look at the world now. 

Eric:

I appreciate just the idea behind that too. Like you said, it's pioneering. I don't know of anyone, I've never heard of anyone doing something similar. You mentioned that you have a psychology background as well. You have a lot more music and psychology together. That's a very specialized skill set like you mentioned too. And I'm curious about the future of something like that, if that could actually be something to be studied, if it could be something more common. Music schools popping up around the country or the world and adding more something to it, something that to help students or maybe as part of a therapy program to help students cope and realize what their emotions are and kind of sort through the information and their processing. 

Especially teenagers. Teenagers have a very difficult time of doing that and music, the music they listen to, number one, for most of my students, that's how they not identify, but that's how they get those emotions, that's they can identify with that more and say this is how I feel versus talking about it. 

Krista:

That's very true. That's very true because the music they listen to, they're drawn to it for that specific reason. They feel understood. They feel that someone has put words and melody to how they feel inside and then they don't feel alone anymore. I think the the big thing to remember is that the teenage years are a period of transition. They are going from a period of being in an elementary school setting where pretty much everyone's treated the same for the most part, to going to a period of development where their frontal lobe completely disconnects from the rest of the brain. The brain starts to prune itself. Neural connections start to change. Hormones kick in. Brain chemistry changes. 

They wake up feeling crummy and not understanding why. Relationships change. They start looking at romantic relationships as opposed to platonic relationships, the hierarchy of who's friends with who and who you know and you're not wearing this and why are you wearing your hair like that? Just the whole thing on looks and body type and all of these things that start to come into play. They feel alone. They feel isolated. Even in a group of friends you can feel very lonely as a teenager and feel misunderstood. 

But boy, you crank up that radio and you've got, and I think you feel a sense of self worth when you listen to those messages and going, “What? Yeah, somebody else feels this way. Somebody else gets it. You know, it's not just me.” And then you don't feel like a loner anymore. 

Eric:

Well, it creates a sense of community as well. 

Krista:

Exactly. 

Eric:

Because if that person, like this very popular song, has created this song and this many millions of people are listening to it, you're not alone anymore. 

Krista:

Exactly. 

Eric:

At least there's someone you can relate to. 

Krista:

Exactly, yeah. And then they can find peers that way too. 

Eric:

And then what you do of course is you teach them to have their own voice and it create the same kind of things exactly for their own self fulfillments, which is really important. 

Krista:

The big thing is I want them to walk away from the program with a sense of self confidence. To know that they've got a gift.  To know that they have self worth, that they're important, and that they've got they've got a purpose in this world. And that they may not know what it is right now, but they'll find it. They just have to keep chugging along and keep trying until they find that purpose and that if they weren't here, there would be one less light in the world and. That's not OK, you know? That they are something that lights up a certain area of the world and that they need to be in that position to light up that area of the world. 

Eric:

Thank you so much for the conversation on this. This has been amazing. Is there anything else you want to talk about? You mentioned dementia as well and some neurodivergence with adults. Is there something you want to go in with that as well? 

Krista:

So that was actually a happy accident. 

Eric:

Tell me about that. 

Krista:

So my husband, when he started the school and I had just come on board, he had a little guy come in who was on the spectrum. And of course, I'm book smart. I know everything. So this little guy comes in the door and I'm like, oh, you know, they wanted to try out different instruments to find an instrument that he could do. And I said, oh, we should put him on the piano. And my husband said “No drums,” and I said, are you crazy? Have you lost your mind? I said I know for a fact loud noises are a trigger for Spectrum kids. You're going to have this poor kid freaking out and I am terrified for him. And he said just let me do what I do. 

So he takes this guy down, takes this little guy downstairs where we had the drum kits at the time. And I was wrong. Here I am admitting it. I'm wrong. He absolutely knew. For some reason this little guy got behind the kit and started banging away. And it was like watching a weighted blanket on someone who was absolutely terrified calm down and find their inner peace. He went to town, was happy. The bass drum, he could feel it in his chest and it just felt so good. And this, this little guy was nonverbal at the time, and we were getting vocalizations out of him. He was engaged. He actually made eye contact a couple times during that, that lesson. And. And he ended up becoming. A drummer. Professionally. 

And every drummer my husband placed in that program has gone on to be a professional drummer. 

Eric:

That’s amazing. It’s a testament to your husband's skill on that as well. But he still, that's really great. 

Krista:

He was really good at reading them. And I was textbook smart. So I was like, that's no way it's gonna happen. But it did. And then it opened the door and we started talking about, well, how can we help special needs populations have access to music? 

So we started this program with a community called the Ark of Southern Maryland. And they service the counties in our area. And we started doing a once a week music class with them where they would bring the consumers to us. And we would have them come in and we would have instruments playing.  We would play instruments, or we would set up the sound system and do forms of karaoke. But we always had some form of movement going with it. So we always had shaky eggs. We've always had maracas or tambourines or some form of an instrument to play that they would play along, to do some kind of rhythm exercises. 

And what was so amazing about this was that if you had a nonverbal consumer, if you handed them a microphone or held a microphone up to their mouth, you started getting vocalizations. You were getting squeals. They were in pitch. You would get vocalizations that may not be coherent, but they were in pitch. And that was amazing, because you got someone who would normally stay silent in a corner singing with a song. 

If I had a consumer that had atrophy in their hands and we would have a severe atrophy, I could bring their fingers out, put a shaky egg in between and we would be able, she would, and she to this day still does it, moves her arm up and down. But we have less atrophy in the fingers because she can grip it. But we're able to pull them apart and there’s more ease in her movements. We have some that usually are not as mobile. They may use a walker or they may be in a wheelchair for some mobility, but they'll get up and dance. 

So it was like this, this aha moment. So now we're doing it three days a week for them. And we've had some that have been with us for almost 20 years and we've had some that have been with us for 10 years. But we see them come in and their faces light up and they know they're going to be a rock star for that hour and they get up and we do all kinds of music. We'll do Michael Jackson, we'll do country. We have one that loves TV themes, and he'll do Gilligan's Island or he'll do another song that he knows from from really popular TV shows, someone that loves Elton John. 

So it's one of those things where as soon as they see us come in, they get excited. They come up and take their turn and they're rock stars for that 3 to 5 minutes they're up, they're doing their song, but it's doing so much more. It's getting mobility. It's getting vocalizations. It's getting those that are having trouble with pronunciation, getting them enunciating, getting them to breathe, increasing their lung capacity, maybe doing some belly breathing. They don't have diaphragm support, so we're getting them doing some belly breathing. Andreally that is the most exciting part is being in that room and doing that. If you don't walk out of there happy there's something wrong with you. Because you're seeing the pure sides of joy when it comes to music. 

Eric:

It sounds, well, first I'm just getting all the joy from you from that too. You are obviously very passionate about it and I love just soaking that in because I get that too. One of the things that crossed my mind when you were talking about this is, in a I guess a public school setting,. there's not a lot of opportunity for students, and I'm sorry to kind of keep focusing back on public school. That's where my area is though. That's where I focus on. I had the wonderful opportunity to work with the student at one of the schools I worked at. And his parents in his plan said we want him to have music class. And I said great, let's do it. So they created just a class for that one student and that's exactly what we did. We did the songs the student enjoyed, we did, you know, movement kind of stuff. We tried learning an instrument one time. It didn't work out so great. But the kid loved music and it was an absolute joy every time he was there. But we don't get that enough. 

Krista:

No. No, we don't. And I'm glad you keep bringing up the public school system because I do do some work in the system. I usually do it with the little ones. But it was the little ones that inspired me to do the work that I do with the dementia patients. And it was. So what I do with the little ones like the infant and toddler program and we have something called the Judy Hoyer Center here that does pre literacy. I'll do classes with them where I spend half of the time doing vocal warmups with the kids to help them learn language and how to, you know, form their vowels and form their consonants. And then I'll read a book with a rhythm to a rhythm. So I'll come up with a rhythm that sounds like the syllables, and I'll do a rhythm exercise with them, reading the book to them. And then we end it with some sing alongs and dances. 

But I also realized that with dementia. By taking that work that I did in the school system and doing it with dementia patients, you do something very similar because they do forget, you know, certain certain words to talk, you know, and pronunciate and annunciate. And we do rhythm exercises and we do songs so that they can sing along and dance. And what's interesting about that is that you're seeing memory come out that is involuntary. And. You are seeing people remember lyrics when they can't remember something 5 minutes ago, but they can remember lyrics from the 70s. Or they remember dance steps that they did when they were dancing to that song. In the 80s, Um. Or they know the rhythm so well that they're doing it with their eggs. 

And I have a former music teacher that taught in the school system for years and years and years that's in this care unit that I go to every other week and she'll say, “Oh, I can't play anymore. I can't, I can't play.” 

Anything I throw in front of her as far as playing a melody, picks it right up, starts playing it again. Because those things are stored in an area of the brain that doesn't get destroyed until much later. It's recalled, and it's recalled, and it's recalled and recalled by muscle memory. And so anyone that says I took lessons when I was 8 and I'll never remember, yeah, you will. Yeah, you will. It's in there. It's in the filing cabinet. You just got to figure out which file it's in. 

But I wouldn't have come across that if I had not had the opportunity to do that work in the school system. And it was that ability to see what impact that had on those children to be able to transition it to the private sector and be able to do that with the assisted living patients. 

Eric:

That's incredible work, though. I really hope that there's more of you in this world doing the same work, because this is. I don't know how you would exist without this, though. You know what I mean? I mean, this is something that is, it's unique, but it shouldn't be. It should be a mainstay everywhere. It should be something that's another just integral part of not only therapy, but mental health as part as far as senior living or even child development. 

This is something, that there's reason why music speaks to so many people. There's a reason why people speak through music so many times. And I want to say thank you for the time and effort that you give because this is truly amazing, the work that you're doing. 

Krista:

Thank you. I appreciate that. I think there would be more of me out there if people realized that they have the gift and they could use it in that capacity. I think the reason why there aren't a lot more of me out there is that people come into teaching music, particularly privately with this model of the one -on-one, you know, you go to the teacher's house and, I'm just going to use my, my old music teacher from when I was a little girl. She literally had everything covered in plastic. 

So you'd go in and she's got everything covered in plastic. And you go in and you play the piano and it's hot summer day and you go to get off and you make that really crinkly noise getting off the plastic sofa and you know, you play your music and then you go home. And it's just that one-on-one right, one right after the other after the other after the other and that's the model music schools. 

And I think people are getting away from the individual one-on ones and going to group lessons, which is fine, but I think that we haven't quite reached that point of realizing what music can do beyond just teaching an instrument. Or just teaching how to play as an ensemble, but that there's more elements to it. But I think if people start to see that the training that they have can be used for those things, you'll see more of those things popping up, and if people in the community create that demand, they'll know to do those types of things. 

Eric:

Well, thank you again Miss Krista, for joining us here. This has been an amazing episode. I really appreciate you speaking about all the work that you do because like I said, this is truly remarkable. Is there anything else you want to add to it before we end our session today? 

Krista:

The only thing I would say is, you know, if you're teaching in a classroom or if you're teaching privately. Know that you're impacting lives. You're doing a good thing. You're doing a wonderful thing. The arts uplift. The arts are creative. They are teaching things that people don't realize they're teaching. You're teaching the math. You're teaching the science. You're teaching the creativity. You're teaching the spatial, the visual spatial. You're teaching the gross and fine motor skills. You're doing everything to holistically help your students. In every capacity. And know that you're fighting a good fight and that there are people out there that are rooting for you. 

And that if your administration or your board of Ed or your school system isn't providing the resources that you need, there are people in the community that will. So don't lose heart, just ask because there are businesses like me that will jump. And you say how high we'll jump, As high as you want us to, to make sure that you still can continue your programs. And don't lose heart. Don't quit. Keep trying, because you are changing lives every single day, every single week, every single year. 

Eric: Well, thank you again, Miss Krista. I'm going to make sure we have your information for your website and any other information you want us to have. Emails or anything else that people can reach out to you on their show notes. And thank you again for being with us today. 

Krista:

Thank you for having me. This has been a joy. Thanks.

Eric:

Thank you again for joining us on  this episode. Check out the amazing work that Krista does with her team by clicking on the Garrett Music Academy links posted on our website episode page.   

Remember to add us on social media. We look forward to hearing your thoughts on the episode, and if you want to hear more, smash that “Buy me a coffee” button.

Until next time, I wish you peace and blessings.