Employed!

I am definitely going to be teaching at the Medborgarskolan! Thanks for all the positive thoughts and prayers, I know they helped  :)

As soon as I met Anita this morning, I knew that things were going to go well. She had a lot of energy, and I could tell she was a very creative and supportive woman. Along with Sven-Åke, we discussed which of my ideas would be best to start with. We decided to advertise private lessons in beginner’s piano, and the Piteå Junk Jammers for now. I really do enjoy community outreach projects; it’s so rewarding to introduce something new and fun to both musicians and non-musicians. I really hope that we get a good response!

The next step is to see how many people sign up for the classes. My salary will depend on this response. For the weekly piano lessons, I will teach a new student every 20 minutes, and get 120Kr and hour. I would usually get that much per lesson in the States, but that number is set for all private lesson teachers at the school.

For Junk Jammers, my payment will depend on the amount of students that sign up. I requested at least 200Kr for a 45 minute class. Ideally, I’ll get enough students to do 2 or 3 classes a week. (Therefore, one week would almost cover a one-way ticket to Stockholm! Also, since I'm a student and I won't be making that much, I'm going to fill out paperwork so that I don't have to pay taxes! woohoo!)

I would like to have a class for young kids, adults, and elderly. Anita has connections at a few retired communities that she is going to contact. I need to write up a bit of propaganda tonight, and make some posters to hang around town. Hopefully, I’ll start teaching as soon as my recital is over!

Read (translate) more about Piteå Medborgarskolan

The recital prep is going really well! I decided to call my piece Hittade. It means ‘found’ in Swedish. I thought it was clever, because I’m ‘finding’ a new me, plus it has the English word ‘hit’ in it…and, you know, percussionists hit things!

The rest of the day was filled with a lot of practice, as other random meetings. The Swedish language course finally met, but just to decide when we are all free to meet on a weekly basis. I finally met all the other international students, including a really nice girl from Transylvanian in Romanian! She promised she doesn’t have any fangs.