CJ Brown

MUED271

Rachel Grimsby

12/8/23

Final Reflection

This year has been a lot of fun and I have really enjoyed the class. I feel like the workload

was perfect for how many classes music education majors have to take, as we had an assignment

or two every week but they were never overwhelming and they never felt like busy work. I really

appreciated how throughout the year the course content continued to build on itself and was

usually related in some way to the prior unit. One huge thing for me in a professor is their

responsiveness to emails, so I really appreciated how quickly Dr. Grimsby responds to emails

and how every response was beneficial and clearly answered my question. I really feel like I

have learned a lot through this class on the preparation and work that teachers have to do every

day outside of the classroom. The grading system for this class is also extremely well-done

because even if someone may not understand a topic very well yet, as long as they put their best

effort into the assignment they will get full credit, as well as an in-depth comment from Dr.

Grimsby giving advice and explaining what they need to work on. This system allows for me to

actually enjoy learning the material without feeling the pressure of making sure I memorize

every small detail for some giant assignment or test. I do wish this class was able to have more

in-class time or meet more often as sometimes the lessons felt rushed due to us only meeting

once a week for 50 minutes, but Dr. Grimsby did a great job of keeping everyone on task and

covering the majority of the material. One criticism I have is that I wish some of the material we

covered was presented in a way that made it a little more obvious as to how it can be applied into
a band classroom because I still struggle with seeing how some of the activities can be utilized in

that kind of environment. This ironically also leads to a positive comment, because I and a few

other students mentioned this to her and Dr. Grimsby was extremely open to hearing us out and

made sure from that point forward to ask us as a class to brainstorm how the activities we do in

class could be applied to a band room, and used more examples revolving around a band

classroom. Overall, while there were points where I felt a little rushed and could not understand

the relevance to the band environment, this class was probably my favorite class I took this

semester and I feel like I have learned a lot! (THANK YOU DR. GRIMSBY!!!!)