So is the next step getting hired on the real or does your student teaching roll into a job at the same school by default?

I think you’ll be a good teacher btw. I feel a little guilty for railing on about it in the other discussion. Lisna is right. It can work. It’s no secret here I have sour grapes. I mean, I honestly believe I got a lot of ****ty cards right after getting hired and I have an honest beef but that doesn’t mean my experience is the only one possible and I shouldn’t spew off like it is no matter how deep my personal disappointment.

That said, try to keep an exit strategy in your pocket. And that’s really good advice for anyone anywhere.

1. No, my wife and I are moving to be closer to her fam for help after the babies come so I'm looking for jobs out that way.

2. Don't worry about it man. I know you had a ****ty experience and I get it. I don't take it personally. And frankly, I think I'll eventually go get my master's to do something like counseling because what I like the most about teaching is the student relationships and working with them to address emotional problems. But for now, I like teaching.

Certain consumer items truly are worth their weight in gold. I wonder how much money the tech repair industry has charged through the decades for fixes that involved nothing more than a couple of spritzes of CC?

They seriously don't build gear like they used to. I'm repulsed by the disposable planned obsolescence and engineered failure of the cell phone industry and similar technologies.

I have two amps that have been kickin' for 40 years. Where today can you make an investment like that?

That's why I buy only vintage whenever possible.

Well...... I don’t see it that way because I can’t bring a stereo and a hard copy of my music everywhere I go. Work, the beach, out in the woods... even at home I don’t like fumbling with my music collection. I’d love to take a vacation at your place and spend about three weeks letting you spin records for me but after that I still prefer my iPhone and Spotify. I don’t really care about the temporary nature of today’s technology because it’s still way cheaper than the brutal financial damage buying records and CDs cost me. And also, life itself is temporary. I’ve had the phone I’m on now over 5 years. That’s a nice little chunk of my life. I’m good with it. Not that you should change. Please don’t.

I understand and appreciate your perspective. The convenience factor is undeniably a powerful argument in favor of portable audio. And there are ways to get better sound from a phone if one is serious about the task - one can opt to stream lossless FLAC from their server instead of settling for garbage bitrate DRM-protected streaming services with paltry selections and abysmal organizational structures, and bypass the phone's internal DAC with an external portable headphone amp and portable DAC paired with a quality pair of semi-open professional cans. But for most people's needs, a cell phone does the job just fine.

I just take a firm position given my penchant for open source and responsible consumption to abstain from supporting corporations that engineer their devices to become bricks every 2 years or who lock down content from the end users' control.

Don't get me wrong - 90% of my listening is not my vinyl library but lossless content from my server, and I am over the moon about the incredible convenience of instantaneous access to hundreds of thousands of recordings at archival quality free of charge.

Every year or so I give Spotify a try but it has consistently failed to meet any of my needs. You can't browse by catalog number, there's no discography search parameters, you can't select between different masters of a recording, and their classical search is miserable. When I survey an artist or a label I prefer to listen to their complete catalog chronologically so I can observe the evolution of their sound, and I prefer an organized folder-based browsing structure of albums, EPs, singles, side projects, collaborations, live official and unofficial recordings, mix sessions, demos, etc. Spotify doesn't seem to offer any of that.

But I suppose that I am not most listeners.

That is so true. There’s an old cassette player that still works in my “new” car. Yesterday I put one of my old cassettes in it. Just a compilation but it’s Bach pipe organ fugues mixed with earlier music. Anyway, I mean it’s not a high fidelity setting but it hit home quickly that with classical music my record/CD collection obliterates what’s on Spotify in terms of it being the best of the best musicians on the recordings. When I look for classical music (defined here as any pre-20th C western music) on Spotify you have to wade through volumes of ****. You can also search by conductor or by pianist (or musician) but like you say it’s messy to say the least. Really good classical music record stores were a treasure. I can think of three where the staff really knew their ****. I’m sure they’re all long out of business. I don’t know if Spotify has **** musicians or labels paying to get search preference or if it’s just the algorithm but if you run something like Beethoven String Quartets it’s a ****ing nightmare. And the images of the records are so small it’s a pain to look for the logos of the labels you can trust.

For classical especially, catalog number would be really nice but the truth is those premium recordings very often are not available anyway.

Studying for my Driver's Permit. I got a 56 the first time I took the test, and learned two new pieces of information since that, or at least reviewed stuff I already knew. My sister's boyfriend says I can use his car when the time is right, but all of this seems like it is going to take too long. I am getting impatient.

The record store I go to all the time doesn't know much about classical music so they generally put it in the dollar bin and I capitalize on that.

You're older than I thought.