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Matthew Valnes MUSC436 Expecting an A florm 05/22/2022	Valnes was a nice guy and an easy grader, but the structure of this class wasn't great. He'd assign a pretty long reading and some recordings to listen to before each class, but then relied more or less completely on us to lead the discussions. We'd usually first listen to one of the recordings together, then break up into small groups to talk about it and the reading, and then discuss as a class. I wish he had actually taught us more, because he's clearly very interested and excited about the material. That way, class probably wouldn't have been as boring as it was. Participation was 15% of the grade, but the syllabus didn't establish clear guidelines on how it would be graded. Fortunately he was pretty lenient with it, so even if you rarely spoke you wouldn't lose that many points. There were only a handful of other assignments, including three album reviews, two exams, and a final project (with a proposal and brief presentation for it). The exams were online and partially take-home. You had to show up for the listening portion where he'd play 5 songs (he gave us a list of potential options ahead of time) and then you'd identify the title, artist, and style of jazz. After that, you could just go home to finish the rest of the exam over the next couple days, which consisted of a few short answer questions and one longer essay. Some parts did require you to reference specific readings, but none of it was hard. The final project could be either a research paper about basically any topic in jazz relevant to the class, or an annotated discography where you'd come up some theme and write liner notes for 8-10 songs that relate to it. Almost everyone chose the latter option.