Nicholas J. Shea

A long-form review of The Practice of Popular Music by Trevor de Clercq (2025)

It's Spring Break, which means catching up on grading. In my previous post I mentioned that I'm still trying to feel out student ability....

Experiencing a bit of insomnia, so I thought I'd get started on what I planned to be a series of short posts on my experiences using The...

Hi, all! I had a few folks come up to me at SMT and tell me they enjoyed reading my blog posts about specifications grading (as dated as...

My son Oscar was born in late November. Since then we visited the NICU for a total of 73 days and now, thankfully, he's home and doing...

Before diving into the features of specifications grading, I think I should clarify that the "grading" part is a bit of a misnomer. Does...

This semester I taught taught Theory 4 for our popular-music majors for the first time. We recently implemented a modular curriculum at...