We’re super excited, because our second official session in Columbus starts today!
We’ve partnered with Boys and Girls Club Columbus again, this time at the Pheasant Run club in Reynoldsburg. I’m particularly excited about this run, because Michaela, the club director, communicated her personal passion for music education as a positive influence on at-risk youth. (In fact, she ran a similar program back in Chicago.)
This is exactly the kind of mission alignment we look for in partners, because we believe it’ll create the best possible outcomes.
I wanted to share a couple of things we are doing differently for this session. We learned a ton from our first session, and we’re implementing some changes that we believe will seriously improve the quality of programming.
- We’ve gone from 10 weeks to 14 weeks. The early days learning guitar are the hardest, but most important. Adding four weeks to the program increases our chances of getting kids to a self-sufficient level.
- We’re going to have programming twice a week, instead of one. The seven day gap between classes showed to be a challenge for the kids. We believe have one lesson and one guided practice day, per week, will increase the stickiness of the lessons.
- We revamped the curriculum. Our curriculum last session had the right content, but was not in the right order. We wound up backing into some basics that were glossed over. Lead instructors Mark and Brian rewrote a new curriculum that should have the kids playing at least 3 songs with chords by the end.
The first day you pick up a guitar is the hardest. But, for those of us who have played for years or decades, we can look back at that day as one that change our lives for the better.
Not everyone who starts today will finish the program (though we’ll do our best to make sure they do). Not everyone will play guitar for the rest of their lives. But, for some of them, we’ll be sharing that moment that changed their lives forever.
We’re really excited about that!
