Berklee Contemporary Writing and Production student teaching Music Production to all levels.

Alex has been a close friend to me for years. she has come through for me on countless occasions and has been a guiding force for the person I am today.

Alex taught me how to play the flute. She is an incredible teacher because she delights in seeing her students' improvements. She loves music and she really wants to share that joy with her students no matter who they are or why they want to learn. Her approach is always positive and encouraging. She is committed to the idea that music should be fun and never puts down her students or insults them for not getting something right away. She makes her students feel comfortable and wants them to love music as much as she does. One of her biggest strengths is her emotional intelligence. She is accommodating to students with disabilities. I am dyslexic and autistic and she makes sure to teach her lessons in a way that is accessible. In the past, I’ve had teachers who discouraged me from learning an instrument because of my difficulty reading music (I believe this discouragement was unintentional, but it still caused me to stop playing), but she helped me to unlearn the negative messages I’d learned as a kid. I had thought I was too old to begin learning an instrument (I am in my 20s and most people I know learned when they were kids) but she does not believe anyone is too old as long as they enjoy making music. She always has patience with me when I learn difficult materials and she teaches me new ways to break down a difficult piece of music to practice it and make it less overwhelming. She tells me I shouldn’t say my performance is bad and instead say “it needs work” because most of the things I can’t do well, I just can’t do well YET and I will get there if I work at it. Perhaps this is obvious to some musicians, but this focus on improvement makes for a very positive learning environment. Whenever she teaches, she keeps in mind her student’s reason for wanting to learn and taylors her lessons to the student’s goals. I wanted to learn because I enjoy music, I wanted to learn more theory, and I wanted to improve my reading. She focuses on the skills and music that her students are actually interested in rather than insisting on classically training them because she wants her students to love the music they create and she got me to love playing the flute!