On the Subject of Grading

On the Subject of Grading

The Subject of Grading is always a complicated subject in music. One of the wonderful dynamic things about music is that quality of music playing can be heard and often intrinsically felt. While this can make our work subjective I prefer that risk to that of sticking to standardized tests. While working in public schools in both Massachusetts and Connecticut, I have seen the tyranny of standardized tests. 

         In one sixth grade class I was covering, I gave the students a several definitions of the word sophisticated and the students were upset with me because I gave them more information than their English book gave them. The English book said that it meant learned. That, I was informed by the more advanced students in the class was all they wanted to know for the test. Never mind that this word would be used in numerous ways in every day speech, magazines and newspapers to mean such things as worldly or socially polished. One can be learned through a life of books without being culturally sophisticated through experiencing multiple and various social and business contacts.

         As a former English major, I decry the loss of the nuances of language and the playfulness of using ideas without worrying about how someone will grade you. I am sure that many SAT test graders would grade a sample of a young Ernest Hemingway’s spartan language poorly in compared with the florid language of a young Henry James. The use of a large vocabulary does not mean that the ideas represented are any more sophisticated than those represented in a spare manner. I for one prefer Hemingway to Henry James as I think that Hemingway has more to say than Henry James. ( I will take any passage from the Old Man and the Sea to one of Henry James long boring passages about a piece of furniture or the stitching on a ladies handkerchief any day of the week!)

          After having read Alfie Kohn’s article on rubrics, I have to say that I agree with him. By living and dying by standardized tests we are shutting down children’s sense of play with ideas especially in writing. Many of my fellow teachers who specialize in teaching English have also had braces put on their brains. Their ability to tailor a reading sample to the interests of the local students is often outweighed by the reading material supplied by a national company that has scientifically designed reading materials to make students vocabulary scores higher. I have a relative who teaches English to struggling learners. Many of them love baseball in her class, and while an article about a local team might motivate her students to read outside of class on their own, she cannot justify it for bringing immediate results in higher test scores as compared with what the national company has designed in its textbooks and software.

         There clearly are areas of performance that should be listened to and evaluated during grading. I have seen rubrics that give teachers 1-5 scale for various skills including, pitch matching, sight reading, rhythm in performance of a passage, breathing, expression, articulation. This can be helpful for basic information about the nuts and bolts of performance. Other systems of standardized tests include evaluation of artistic interpretation during an actual piece of music, the ability to hold ones own part while performing with people performing other disparate parts. This can be useful to in getting students and parents to recognize the legitimacy of your grades. I do think that music is too fluid for any one system to be the be all and end all of grading.

         I actually shudder to think of standardized tests and standardized materials invading my profession of teaching music. While students do need to have a sense of appropriate advancement in their work to decide whether or not they need extra help or put more hours in on their own, the best grading must come from within. Some of the best ways to test students is to teach them how to reflect on their own artistic and technical product and solicit opinions about how the groups performance sounds during rehearsal from its members. I have also seen students as young as the first grade required to give themselves a grade on their behavior in music class and admonished if they are not truthful according to how the teacher has observed them. I really feel that even this type of simple self reflection is helpful in maintaining good behavioral standards. I have seen students visibly contemplating their answer to the self assessment question and reflecting on the feedback from their teacher. 

            I really believe that the best grading comes from teaching students to have good taste in music who have been trained to seriously self reflect on their musical output and to take these considerations not as the end of the world that every assessment or perceived failure means the end of opportunities for themselves but as a way to open doors for themselves as these assessments from me and from themselves will help them to improve their work.