After graduating, I was a math instructor at George Mason University and American University from 2011 to 2015. By that same summer in 2010, I was climbing and biking again and finished my master’s in math in August 2011. When I came back to DC, I went back to graduate school for the spring semester twice a week in my wheelchair. Anyway, I was hospitalized for three months and convalesced for another two months at my brother, Jason Little’s house in Warner Robins, Georgia. I wanted to help people struggling with math and make learning math fun.
Master reboot piano full#
Weeks before this accident, I had decided to take a break from teaching and attend graduate school full time to get my master’s degree in mathematics. Then in September 2009, I had a catastrophic rock-climbing accident in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, in which I fell 40 feet. Since I no longer had a piano to play or to teach others to play, I became very involved in dance and poetry communities to fill my artistic needs. Over five years, I ended up teaching kindergarten and 1st grade and being a math coach in Prince George’s County, Maryland and Northeast DC schools. When I moved in 2004, I had every intention of having my piano moved to Washington DC with me so that I could continue teaching piano there, but that never came to fruition. The transition was needed because I had to complete student teaching, I was a math small group facilitator and tutor in the CSU-Pueblo Math Learning Center, and I was preparing to move to Washington DC. Once my undergraduate career started coming to a close, I had to pull back on teaching piano lessons and began sending many of my students to my former piano teacher.
Over a period of ten years, I ended up teaching 20 students, with word of mouth as my only source of advertising. At one point I had a father and his two daughters as students, I had a mother-son duo as students, and I even ended up teaching two children who regularly attended my Barnes and Noble story times. Once I started attending Colorado State University-Pueblo, to pursue my bachelor’s degree in mathematics and earn my elementary teaching certification, I moved myself and my piano from Falcon, Colorado to an apartment in Colorado Springs and continued teaching piano. I guess it must have started coming up in conversation at my school and places of work that I taught piano lessons and word started to get out.
I became very busy working and taking classes, so I stopped taking my own piano lessons but continued to learn and challenge my piano skills by buying piano music books and sheet music. Eventually, I started attending Pikes Peak Community College, doing work-study in their child development center, and working at Barnes and Noble and conducting their weekly story times. I started building up a client base, but also continued taking lessons from my piano teacher until my very early 20s. I guess word started spreading in my church that I was teaching piano and that my rates were low (I felt like a novice, so I didn’t feel like I had the right to charge average rates). The girls were aged five, ten, and eleven. Shortly after turning 19 years old, a mother in my church congregation asked me if I would be willing to teach her three daughters piano lessons.
Once I finished with high school, I started working at a child development center in Colorado Springs and paid for my lessons myself. So, my mom, who had a business of her own as an interior decorator and seamstress, bartered her services with our church’s piano player for lessons that I took for a couple of years. My parents couldn’t afford formal lessons for me. Although I began playing the piano by ear at the age of four years old, I didn’t take formal lessons until I was 15 years old. My mama and daddy, Jacquie and Willie Little, were always singing, dancing around the house, and playing Motown music, songs from musicals, or religious music on records and cassettes. Growing up in my household, there was always music, so I had an ear for music and singing. Miss Vanessa’s Piano Studio really began as a side hustle when I was in my late teens living in Falcon, Colorado. Vanessa, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story. Today we’d like to introduce you to Vanessa Little.
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