This is another thread i'm adding to my tracer, both for myself and for my students.

I'm starting a new class in the Berkeley independent studies program in the spring semester, called "Home Made Music." It will be a bit of a departure from the usual independent studies class structure in which students see each of their teachers for a half hour of individual instruction each week, during which time they are checked for their previous week's work and given new assignments--perhaps a hundred pages of a novel plus an essay per week (per class). Students are in the program because they have to work or because they find the pace in regular classes too slow for them or because they are agoraphobic, etc.

My class will be unusual because we will have a weekly group meeting as well as individual instruction. The weekly meetings will be song sessions with some musical theory and discussion of poetic form and imagery in songs thrown in, and the individual sessions will be lessons in guitar, banjo, autoharp, and harmonica, or for students who play instruments i can't teach or whose instrument is their voice, playing and singing together, learning new songs, learning to play by ear, etc.

Anyway, I will be sharing with them the feelings expressed in this thread as well as the Songwriting thread, the Spancil Hill thread, and on and on. I will, of course, introduce them to the Mudcat and the DigiTrad. Their homework, of course, will be practice--and a journal, and research and songwriting and forming duets and trios and quartets and preparing for recitals...

Another thread that comes to mind right now is the "Somebody Cheer Me Up, PLEASE" one, started to someone who had just lost her job and was told by various Mudcateers that it could be the best thing that ever happened to her, because I retired last June without much idea of what to do with my time and how to make up for the sudden 40% drop in my salary, and I was invited to teach photography in the independent studies program, and now I have this dream class starting up as well and my creative juices are not merely still flowing, they are gushing... --seed