My many faces of teaching

This has been a really cool day as a teacher of all levels! First, in my Quantitative Design class we made introductions and it was really cool to hear/see how many young people are pursuing PhDs. I realize I'm fairly young, but for some reason in my head people with PhDs are usually older and have years and years of experience in their field. Instead it seems more and more of us are realizing the good we can do by working in higher ed and are jumping on the chance to pursue that early in our careers. How cool!

Later in the day I had one of my private students, a 9th grader, come onto campus to give a "sample audition" before his real audition in 2 weeks. The judges who came to help were 3 undergrad music ed majors, all seniors that I have worked with extensively. They're all very bright, talented girls who are going to be awesome teachers. It was so cool to be between these stages of student: my K-12 student and my undergrad students. And they were all *my* students! I spent time, obviously, teaching the 9th grader about his audition and how to be ready for it. But I also spent time teaching my undergrads about how to use the scoring rubric, how to be good judges, and what to expect in class tomorrow. It was just a powerful moment of seeing myself balance the roles of K-12 teacher and higher ed teacher. I could get used to this. :-)