Setting up your teaching schedule can feel like trying to solve a complicated puzzle.

Are you stressing over setting up your fall teaching schedule? It’s that dreaded time of year, and I’ve witnessed many teachers expressing frustration with this process lately.

We’re grateful for all our students, of course; and having enough of them to make scheduling a challenge is not a bad problem to have. Still, the process can be exasperating.

I’m happy to say I’ve eliminated most of the scheduling stress in my studio. Here’s how I do it.

At the final lesson of the spring semester, we have a parent conference. At least one parent comes to the lesson so we can discuss progress, future goals, and fall term scheduling.

I always tell families they get first dibs on their current lesson time. That’s a big win for folks. They’ve grown accustomed to that time. They’ve managed to schedule everything else around it, making it work for the past nine months (or longer). Everyone appreciates having the option to keep their current time; and most families take advantage of it.

I should add that in order to secure their chosen fall lesson time, students must take a minimum of four summer lessons or pay the equivalent fee. Not taking any summer lessons means they get no choice for their fall lesson time and simply have to take whatever opening is left. I can’t remember any students ever having made that choice.

Of course, there are always a few students who, for one reason or another, really must ask for a new school-year lesson time. During the parent conference, I show those folks the times I already know will be available, and promise to email them with any other openings at the end of the week, when all parent conferences have been completed.

Often, families will select a new lesson time from the options I have available right during the parent conference. I ask the others to work out a new time from the pool of available slots before June 1.

If there are folks who just can’t find a suitable time from the available openings, I jump in to help.

This summer, I had to help only two families. When they told me that none of the available openings would work, I emailed a group of already-scheduled students whose lesson times were in the range of possibility for these families. I explained that the students I was trying to help would be getting out of school at a later time this year, so they required a later lesson time. Would anyone be willing to take an earlier time to help these two families? Thankfully, two students quickly volunteered, and we had a working fall lesson schedule within a few hours of my initial email.

One of the benefits of this system is that it prods folks to make their piano lesson time a priority. When families know there will be only a very small pool of lesson times to choose from, they often simply hang on to the time slot they already have. And committing to a fall lesson time at the end of May, or soon thereafter, necessitates that they schedule other after-school activities around that piano lesson time. I’m quite sure student families actually appreciate getting their fall lesson time nailed down early in the summer. I suspect it helps them as much as it helps the teacher.

Has setting up your school-year teaching schedule been driving you nuts? If so, I encourage you to give this system, or something like it, a try.

However you choose to create your schedule, I urge you not to do it in a way that makes people think you’ll be happy to jump through hoops at the last minute to accommodate all their other after-school activities. That’s too stressful.

There are kind ways to encourage students to commit to a piano lesson time before scheduling everything else they’d like to do.

How do you work out your school-year teaching schedule? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you.

Teaching piano, I use my smartphone camera in lessons every day.

• I photograph assignment sheets at the end of each lesson.
• I photograph any new books or sheet music I’m assigning or loaning.
• I often take videos of students when they’re playing something especially well.
• I take photos to document special achievements, such as completing a 30 or 40-Piece Challenge.

If I kept all of those photos and videos on my phone, the storage would fill up very quickly.

But I don’t.

While I’m teaching each day, the Google Photos app works in the background automatically to upload every photo and video I take to Google cloud storage. The uploaded photos are stored securely at https://photos.google.com. Google gives users free, unlimited storage when you allow your photos and videos to be slightly compressed. (Compressed images and videos certainly wouldn’t work for a professional photography business, but for how I use images and videos as a piano teacher, it’s perfectly fine.)

Before I leave the studio each evening, I do two things:

• I delete the day’s photos from my phone, knowing that I can now view them in the Google Photos app or with any web browser.
• Then I head to https://photos.google.com on my computer where I tag each photo I’ve taken with the name of the appropriate student. It takes about 3 minutes, but then I have a searchable photo record for each student I teach.

By now I’ve accumulated photos and videos from several years, so when students finish their study with me, I like to assemble some sort of collection to give them. Sometimes I just share a big folder of fun images that show the student participating in a variety of piano events through their years of study. Sometimes, I’ll create a video. But always, I have a nice collection of images to share with students  when they graduate or otherwise end their years of study with me.

Here’s a short clip from a senior video I made this spring. Liam had studied with me since his elementary school years, so I just overlaid some pictures of his really young years on top of a video he made as a senior. I’ve gone through a couple of phones and computers since Liam started piano lessons, but all my photos of him were easily retrievable since they were stored at Google Photos.

Google Photos is a fantastic free service. If you haven’t used it, I encourage you to download the smartphone app and give it a try.

Six-year-old Elliott sat down at the piano and started improvising when she arrived for her lesson yesterday. She was doing it so musically, I suggested we turn on the camera and make up a duet together.

“Use black keys,” I told her.

Later, I notated the improvisation, with a few minor edits. Find it here.

“Why is there an army of minions in your piano studio?”

No one has actually asked the question, but I see parents looking at all the minions (14, at last count), and I know what they’re thinking.

We were preparing for a recital, and I had put lots of effort into getting students to think about stage presence and performance procedure. I told them to show me they were remembering by giving me a fist bump and saying a secret word as they arrived at the recital.

“What’s the secret word going to be?” I asked at our performance class the day before the recital.

“Minions!” one of the boys shouted. So minions it was.

They filed into the recital hall one-by-one, all giving me fist-bumps and whispering the secret word. And their performance procedure was impeccable. Best ever.

Since then, students have been bringing me minions–stuffed minions, plastic minions, Christmas-tree-ornament minions, light-switch-cover minions. There was even a minion cake. Today, a student brought me minion Tic Tacs!

This secret word idea was something that just popped into my head on the spot during our pre-recital performance class, but I was amazed at the results it got. I encourage you to give it a try as you prepare students for their next recital.