Professional Reflection

My name is Max Verdugo and I am a Music Education student at JMU and I have
learned a lot throughout my years here. JMU hsa helped me become a better musician, person,
educator, listener, and friend. Throughout my time here I have studied many kinds of music,
theoretical concepts, instruments, scores, conducting patterns, and so much more
encompassing music education. Something that is very important to me is my personal teaching
philosophy and how I can go about expanding upon that and shaping it into something I can use
in my future classroom. The faculty at JMU has helped me understand what I want and how to
achieve and go about it.
It is difficult to ask someone fresh out of high school what they want to do for the rest of
their life. There are endless possibilities but I thought I had it figured out. When I first came to
JMU I was hard set on teaching high school band and nothing else, that's what I wanted to do.
However, after countless lessons and classes on how to teach things I believed I would be
better suited for middle school. I am not opposed to a highschool position, I just don’t want to
direct a marching band. The evolution of my knowledge has contributed to this conclusion
because the curriculum I have taken in my undergraduate degree is how to teach instruments at
a beginner level, mostly implying middle school which worked for me. A lot of our technical
application classes, where my cohort learned to play new instruments and also how to teach
people how to play them, was not only exciting, but humbling. I believe that musicians
sometimes have a complex that they are better than others because they can do something the
other person can’t. This is prevalent in a lot of band cultures, but it is truly humbling to be
handed something that someone else is very good at, and to be a novice at it.
I have also grown a lot as an educator in my time at JMU. It has occurred to me
throughout my experiences here that this is truly something I am passionate about and am in
love with and am so excited and grateful that it is the career path I get to pursue for my future.
Through finding this within myself, I have become better at planning along with being more
responsible. Becoming an adult is terrifying for everyone, but sharing experiences with people
makes it so much better, and I am fortunate enough to have those people in my life, a lot of
them being from JMU. Lesson planning has become a simpler task for me because of the sheer
amount of times that I have done it now, and I will just get better at it with time, like all things. I
also have had plenty of opportunities to teach among my peers and watch them conduct
lessons and have the ability to learn from them and myself. The growth I have seen in not just
my colleagues, but myself has been a wonderful journey that reflects on the passions of the
future educators of America.
Within the last three years I have become more confident, more knowledgeable, more
passionate, more compassionate, willing to take more risks, and overall a better human being.
As I round the corner of my second to last year at JMU, I get more and more of a taste of what I
am truly passionate about and how honored I am to be in the position I am in.