Music teachers find silver lining in cloud of COVID-19

If every cloud has a silver lining, then so must the cloud the COVID-19 pandemic has cast on all of us.

Ben Westfall and Kristin Paxinos of Da Capo Music Studio are doing their best to stay focused on the lining and not the cloud.

The Elburn music teachers have switched all their classes to an online model for the time being and say they've retained about 95% of their students while making a few changes along the way.

"It's changed the dynamic a little, like when I teach the younger kids piano it's easier to move their hands in person," Paxinos says. "So now I have to explain things differently, but we figure out a way to do it."

Another change has been the length of some lessons. "For 4 and 5-year-old students, a 30-minute FaceTime lesson is not going to work for them," Paxinos says. So they've broken it up in to two shorter lessons per week.

And that's where they found their first silver lining.

"We're going to start utilizing something like that in the future actually, doing a midweek checkup online," Westfall says. "We've learned so much about technology and how it can help what we do to be better, and we're going to keep doing it," he says.

They opened in 2009 in the Elburn Community Center. They initially just planned for it to be the two of them teaching high quality music lessons in acoustically correct rooms so students wouldn't be distracted by simultaneous lessons. In the ensuing years they've expanded to have nine employees and have moved to their current location at the Elburn Crossing Shopping Center.

Now those teachers are teaching from home using a combination of Skype, FaceTime and Google Duo.

The two believe that they've learned some lessons themselves while delivering them online.

"In this moment, it's kind of like, 'what a drag, it'd be nice to be back in person,' but in the big picture I think we come out ahead because we ended up learning more about their home practice situation and the parents are more involved and when they come back the kids might appreciate what this space is even more," Westfall says.