Within the teaching field, I take my philosophy as a whole to be one of my goals; students using music as a way of self expression. Music is something that is more crucial to a person’s life than you think. Growing up at least, I believed that music was an interesting concept that brought attention to me. As I got older, I realized that music helped me cope with a lot of things going on within my life, since I unfortunately did not have the best childhood. Music was something that I learned that I could use to express myself through many emotions, anger, happiness, sadness, all types of emotions. During this period in my life, I realized that music was benefitting my mental health because of the fact my mind was occupied with something that I loved doing and loved expressing myself with. With this in mind, as a music educator, I want to strive to give students that same feeling as I did by creating a positive and welcoming classroom environment that encourages self and emotional expression.