Grades Schmades

I was inspired to write this post tonight by a friend and former student who found herself in the difficult position of having to give a student of her own, for a number of legitimate reasons, a D on a paper. Needless to say, there were repercussions.
Grading is one of the most vexing things I have to do as a professor. I hate grades, and I generally find them to be meaningless. This is becoming more and more true in our educational system, in which grades have become irrelevant in terms of actual meaning while simultaneously becoming the only marker by which most students feel they are getting their "money's worth" out of their school experience.

I am not exaggerating when I say that I find grades "irrelevant." The syndrome known as “grade inflation” has reached the point in this country where we are in a de facto pass/fail system, with "pass" being an "A" and fail being "everything else." A justly-earned "C" is something that many students have never even seen on their transcripts; if they handed in all their work and passed their exams, they were basically guaranteed a B, and anything lower prompted a school visit by hysterical parents. As a result of this lamentable situation, the disparity in both product and effort which we professors are expected to reward with an "A" is mind-boggling. “A” no longer connotes excellence; it now means “the student has fulfilled the requirements of the class.”

I spent a long time, when I first started teaching in college, worrying that by doling out “A”s the way we now do, I am “lying” to the average students and short-changing the excellent ones. I finally let that go. The truth is this: the A meant something different to me than it means to them, and I need to be willing to recognize that I need to grade them according to the current paradigm, which at this point has been determined by consensus. If the consensus says that “A” means “I gave this my best effort, did all the work in the class, studied, spent hours on my paper, and turned everything in on time,” then the student who has done that is expecting an “A”, and will be justifiably shocked, grieved and mystified if he or she gets something lower, even if this student can’t do an ounce of critical thinking and writes at a 10th-grade level.

This is not going to change anytime soon. We are never going to go back to the day when a "C" meant "average" and an A meant "exceeds expectations." However, I would put forth that the blame for this cannot be laid completely at the feet of the educational system; in my opinion, the actual reasons for this state of affairs are driven by environmental and economic issues. Our economy is such that competition for middle- to upper-income jobs is fierce. This was true way before the recent economic downturn. Faced with 200 applicants for every one opening in higher education, law, and many kinds of business, both graduate institutions and potential employers tend to simply skim off the 3.5 and aboves. Given that, I present the following scenario: suppose I have a student who is reliable, hard-working, follows directions, and turns everything in on time, but has a reading and writing level that in my day would have been considered about right for a high-school sophomore. How can I, in good conscience, give this a earnest student a well-deserved C because he or she has non-existent critical thinking skills, has trouble making their way through a book with no pictures, and can't write their way out of a paper bag, knowing that the damage to their cumulative average will basically hamstring them when they apply for a job? (Or worse, for graduate school, which raises the very upsetting issue of the caliber of students we accept into graduate programs these days – but that’s a topic for another blogpost.)

The answer is: I can’t. So I give them the A, because they have worked hard and they have fulfilled the requirements of the class, and that is now what is meant by “A.” Does this drive me nuts? Yes. Do I think that by sticking to my guns I would contribute to changing the educational system? No. Frankly, all it would do is put the student in a state of misery and despair. It might even get me a free trip to the Dean’s Office, which I know has happened to various academic colleagues of mine.

Mind you, I’m not talking about students who blow off class, hand things in late, read Facebook in the back of class on their iPhones, and hand me bullshit papers copied verbatim from Wikipedia with one word changed in the hopes that I won’t discover it by Googling their text. Those fools can take the Cs and Ds; my only regret is that they will probably be my Congressperson some day. I’m more worried about the decent and hardworking students who simply do not possess the academic skills that an “A” used to represent back in the mists of time.

How did we get to this state? Here’s my opinion, for what it’s worth: Our educational system, particularly its grading protocol, is still based on an elitist paradigm that assumes that “not everyone is college material.” That paradigm assumed that those who weren’t “college material” would flunk out, not because they blew off class smoking weed or plagiarized their papers, but because they couldn’t hack the level of work that was expected to PASS – not to get an A, but to PASS – a college course. That paradigm is now irrelevant. Everyone needs to go to college now, not because of President Obama’s laudable initiatives, but because the first two years of college are now High School Part II. For a lot of people, the university is their last-ditch chance to receive the basic, well-rounded education that they should have gotten in high school, but which is rarely found in high-school anymore because high school teachers are more or less required to “teach to tests.” Until our cotton-brained legislators stop handing out funding according to test scores, that will continue; in the meantime, a shockingly large number of our high schools do not prepare people for the level of college work that was represented by that old elitist paradigm.

The new prevailing consensus that everyone should be able to go to college means that we will continue to have huge populations of 18-25 year-old students in need of higher education—but because of the level of education denied to them by our crippling high school testing systems, the grading criteria that came into being with the old paradigm is no longer relevant. We hold onto it like pit bulls, however, because we can’t agree on an alternative that works, especially at large institutions. I would like nothing better than to have 25 students per semester, and to write a concise and thoughtful summation of the progress of each one, with no letter grade attached. It seems to me that this would be more useful and educational to each one of them than anything else. However, this is not practical or feasible in a large university setting where classes have become so behemoth that we are reduced to “testing” them by giving them on-line multiple-choice exams, an exercise that in my opinion is only about one step away from taking a trivia quiz at a bar with those little clicker-doohickies. And we’re supposed to hand them grades based on a system that was designed for Harvard and Oxford seminar classes?

Bottom line: we need to come up with assessment systems that have something to do with reality.

Classes with 400 people doing multiple-choice exams online (and cheating like bandits) should be worth fewer credit hours for the students and higher courseload credit for the professors, for whom they are an enormous amount of work and hassle, and they should be graded pass-fail. After all, most of them are intended to provide some kind of liberal arts experience, provide an introduction to a field of study, or satisfy a requirement. Large-enrollment on-line courses with only one professor (and maybe a couple of TAs) should be assessed in the same way.

Average-sized classes and smaller on-line courses, in which the professors actually have a reasonable amount of one-on-one contact with the students, should be graded according to three parameters: the student exceeded the requirements of the class, the student successfully fulfilled the requirements of the class, or the student did not fulfill the requirements of the class and must either repeat the class or receive no credit. And, it should be understood and made clear that the second of the above assessments is the norm, which will be the grade achieved by the majority of students in the majority of their classes.

For small, seminar-style classes and comparable on-line courses in which there is a lot of interaction between the instructor and the student, the assessment should be as in (2) above, with an additional written individual assessment of each student. These could prove to be extremely useful to a student, who could attach them to a CV, where they would be a hundred times more useful to a future employer or graduate admissions office than these new on-line boilerplate letters of recommendation (“Of the twenty billion students I’ve had over the past 10 years, I would rate Mr. Whippensnappit in the top 5 per cent.”) Obviously this is more work for the professor, which is why I am only advocating this assessment method for small (under 10) seminar-style classes, which are rare in large universities and almost non-existent at the undergraduate level.

All this is pie in the sky, of course. It would take an act of Congress or possibly an alien invasion to get all the university systems in this country to agree to a new grading system. In the meantime, I will grade according to the new paradigm, no matter how much it rankles me; and when I have classes that are small enough to make it possible, I will continue to give my students very specific written assessments of their work, in the hope that they will actually get some benefit from the time they spend with me. Because in the end, that’s really all that matters.

Unraveling

I wrote this last week and never posted it, because it seemed to be a little too self-absorbed (although hell, it’s a blog, right? Isn’t the unwritten title of every blog “All About Me?”) Ever since I wrote it, I have dreamed every night of several of the characters involved, and have decided that I need to post it. Maybe it will help someone; I don’t know. Here it is, for what it’s worth.

I love modal music. For the non-musicians reading this, “modal” music that is not based on our “do-re-mi” scale, but rather on certain scales that have been around since antiquity, and can be heard by our modern ears as major or minor scales with a note altered here and there. The use of modal scales is the element that makes both folk music and Gregorian chant sound “olde” with an “e.” It’s the reason why, when we medieval music nerds say that we “play medieval music,” an occasional person will reply “Oh, I love that Celtic stuff.” They aren’t crazy – most of it is modal. So are a Whole Lotta Led Zeppelin songs. As a kid, after repeatedly playing my Bach and Bartok piano pieces until my family nearly lost their minds, my modal journey wandered through Beatles, British Invasion, Folk Revival, Tull, Zeppelin, Pentangle, assorted Renaissance dances and madrigals, the odd Dufay Mass in undergraduate Collegium, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span, Irish, Scottish and English traditional music…and then I hit the modal motherlode: western medieval music.

Now, the term “medieval music” covers a lot of ground. Sacred chant; song settings of gorgeous Latin and vernacular poetry; complex pieces in multiple meters crafted with all kind of number symbolism; energetic dances, some of which take some serious chops to play; and polyphonic part-music full of quartal harmonies and crunchy dissonances that trick undergrads into thinking they were composed last week. It is beautiful, and it is every bit as worthy of study as any other aspect of our music history. It’s ridiculous that music history classes sometimes treat it like the frozen peas you have to choke down so that you can eat your chocolate cake – “Here, dear, listen to this Gregorian chant and then you can hear some Mozart / Stravinsky, I promise.” Ridiculous – I don’t see literature professors apologizing for Dante. Medieval music shows us that western music grew from a process that involved mode and memory and improvisation and making text seem even more alive by skillfully setting it to notes – sounds like a lot of traditional and popular musics, doesn’t it? And in that regard, ironically, it’s closer to what we do now than a large chunk of the music that was created in the intervening centuries. Relevant? I’d say. Even the texts are relevant. (We haven’t changed that much, alas.)

It was not a particularly easy decision to pursue medieval music, but it felt “right,” and then one night after sobbing through an entire performance by Sequentia at Sanders Theatre in Cambridge I was convinced I was making the right choice. A year later, when I auditioned for the Early Music Institute at IU, they asked me why, after 10 years as a working musician, I wanted to go back to school. I told them I wanted to study medieval music, and that I wanted to teach at the college level and direct early music ensembles, and that I wasn’t harboring any illusions that I would become a famous super-chops early music singer at my then-age of 32. Fortunately, that made sense to them; and leave it to Tom Binkley to take a chance on a rock singer.

It was hard. I had to catch up with the others. I had to fight with my debilitating performance anxiety. I had to deal with a crazy and stressful music school with 1600 music majors. I had to learn how to be a scholar and not just a decent student, and be a performer on top of everything else.

Right after the second year, after not passing my masters’ recital hearing (long story), I took myself to Vancouver BC and enrolled myself in Sequentia’s Medieval Programme. The first day, everyone sits in a kind of informal circle and sings or plays for each other. I didn’t know this, and wasn’t prepared. Now, “Not prepared” at IU meant a large trap door would open and send you screaming into the Cracks of Doom, and these were two of my all-time musical heroes. (I refer you back to the sobbing in Sanders Theater story.) I was shaking in my boots. My turn came, and I opened my mouth and very little sound came out. It probably wasn’t as bad as I remember it, but I remember something that sounded like a cross between a squeak and a croak with some semblance of pitch added. I did eventually recover, but I had done it: my first impression was made.

I had two options. I could go hide behind the potted palms for two weeks, or I could suck it up and go talk to Barbara Thornton, tell her about my recent horrific experience and talk to her about the performance anxiety problem that was getting worse. What did I have to lose? What could get worse? Thus began my relationship with two of the most influential, dear, and profound teachers I ever was blessed to learn from.

Some of you who are reading this have heard this story: I told Barbara my tale of woe, and she listened; really listened intently to my whole story. (Barbara was a fairly intense person.) When I was finished she said she understood that I was already a professional musician, but how long had I been doing early music? I told her, just a couple of years. She said, “I hope you understand that that’s really not much time at all.” After a brief encouraging conversation, she said “Here’s the problem. Imagine you’re a sweater. You’ve decide to completely unravel yourself and knit yourself back up into a totally different sweater.” I nodded, trying not to cry. “Right now,” she said, “You are a pile of yarn on the floor.” This was simultaneously so accurate, so sad, so damned funny, and said with so much kindness that I actually laughed. “You have to be patient while you knit yourself back up.”

Several years later, at the same workshop, after several of us had acted as sort of teaching assistants for a program that ended up as a public performance, she gave each of us a little card and a small gift, which was a totem from the Native American museum there. Her card to me said “To She Who Knit Herself Back Up.”

Many years have passed since then. Ironically, I have become exactly what I described to my IU interrogators on that day back in March of 1987, teaching early music history and directing an ensemble, trying to convey to students that medieval music is actually pretty cool, and you can learn how to tell a trope from a prosula without being so bored to oblivion that you pass out in your coffee. But, here’s the rub: in those intervening 20+ years, something else happened to me, which is that I actually had the great privilege of being able to immerse myself in this music that I loved. I got to make CDs, and write and narrate nationally-syndicated radio programs. I studied with amazing performers, and I got to take the music all over creation, from Vancouver to Boston to Galway to Utrecht to Regensberg, got to hear the music ringing out in the spaces it was written for, got to play with and hang with people who love it as much as I do. I knit the sweater back up only to find that it fit damned well.

But as so often happens in life happens, I have had to make some choices. Perhaps I have not always made the right ones, but I like to think that I did the best I could with the situations and the resources with which I was presented. And now I live out on the prairie, in a place so isolated the meteorologists on the freaking Weather Channel stand in front of that part of the map. I can host a radio show, but I have no time to write a radio show any more because I’m too busy trying to juggle teaching full-time with finishing a doctorate because the administrators at a University these days are not willing to give you tenure on the basis of the concerts you played or the CDs you’ve made, the work you’ve done, your 500 radio scripts, the fact that you were inducted into the University’s Teaching Academy, or your three tracks on the freaking Norton Anthology of Recorded Music; they only want to see a certain Piece of Paper, and they want you to get that piece of paper while you’re teaching classes of 95 students, 40 of whom sort of want to be there are 55 of whom are trying to Facebook on their iPhones while you are attempting to teach them. I can’t seem to finish the book on medieval improvisation that I’m writing, necessary to finish DM and keep job on prairie, because I have to spend hours making my way through boxes of misspelled assignments, or reading and grading graduate papers so that I can help those students get the very degree that I can’t finish because my job requires me to spend hours doing things like reading and grading graduate papers, going to meetings, writing recommendations, and all the other things that a conscientious and decent professor does. And people want to know if I’ve toured much with our medieval ensemble lately?

Please don’t misunderstand me: I love teaching, and I know that I have a good life. I’m grateful that I’m employed. I love my students very much, and I’m happy that they want to learn from me. I’m glad to have been given the opportunity to come to somewhere only slightly less remote than the steppes of Mongolia and actually get some people excited about the same music that means so much to me. But sometimes I look at my early music colleagues who made the choice to live in other kinds of places, to concentrate on performing and teach “on the side” rather than the opposite way around, to create concert programs and bring joy to people who come to hear them play, and to participate in the sheer joy of making music at that level of quality and chops and integrity, and I see that sweater of mine, the one that I worked so hard to knit up, and it’s back on the floor, and in such terrible danger of becoming unraveled again…and I can’t let it unravel, I just can’t.

"This is not my beautiful blog..."

I have been finding myself thinking a lot about Choice lately. I am over a half-century old, and I still don’t know how to make good ones.

Aside from the obvious everyday events such as “whether to have the tall or the grande mocha,” we usually think of “choice” as something momentous and life changing: Choice with a capital “C.” But most seemingly momentous choices come about because of the result of a whole chain of smaller choices. In fact, the most insidious thing about the whole concept of choice is that most of us, I think, float along through life not even realizing that every day of our lives, practically everything we do or say is part of a long string of small choices.

For one thing, you got out of bed. “Oh, I have to; I have to go to work.” Well, yes, but you’re still deciding, aren’t you? You have decided to get up and go to work/school/ whatever. You could have decided not to. “No, I couldn’t; I’d lose my job.” Well, of course. That means you would have decided to risk losing your job. It’s still a choice.

Remember the Talking Heads song, “Once in a Lifetime?”

You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

What are you doing with your life? You’ve chosen it, probably one step at a time, but there it is. Been married more than 10 seconds? Choice. Finished a degree? Choice. Didn’t finish a degree? Choice. Behind in your work? Choice. Put up with a bunch of crap that drives you crazy? Choice. Sorry.

Are we consciously aware of making all these choices every day? Not really. I don’t think “I’m choosing to brush my teeth right now,” although I am. I could skip it if I wanted to. I find teaching large classes almost intolerably stressful, but I have taught at least one class of anywhere from 95 to 460 students almost every semester that I have been a full-time professor. Why? Because I love the students, I think it’s a shame that they have to be herded into these huge anonymizing classes, I want to keep my job, and this job requires me to teach huge classes so that a bunch of bureaucrats can gas off about “student contact hours” in the legislature. Choice. The Chronicle of Higher Ed is just a click away; I could look at the job listings if I wanted to. There are schools whose entire student body is smaller than the History of Rock and Roll class that I taught for a number of semesters and still oversee. Choice. I could get a different teaching job. “But I wouldn’t get anywhere, because I’m still finishing my doctorate.” Choice. “But I didn’t choose to finish it, they made me finish it or else I wouldn’t get tenure.” Bullcrap, it’s my choice. I could have told them to shove it and looked for a different job; I did not.

You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house
You may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife . .

Choice, choice, choice. I’ll have coffee instead of tea. I’ll have the scone instead of the apple. I’ll sleep another half hour instead of going for a walk. I’ll grade these papers tomorrow instead of today because I’m so stressed out…right…from the consequences of the other thirty-two stupid choices that I made in the last week.

Sometimes I feel as though there is a gremlin in my brain who is making these choices. Why am I not a full-time performer of medieval music who lives somewhere in New England so that it’s easier to fly to Europe where most of the gigs are? There’s a string of choices there long enough to make a prayer-mala (and not all of them bad). Why do I still only know 2 tunes on the button accordion I bought last summer? Why are there still things about my life, my relationships, my job, my creative life about which I feel unhappy, and why have those things been the same for decades, despite years of therapy?

You may ask yourself, am I right, am I wrong?
You may say to yourself, my god, what have I done?

The problem is that one bad choice leads to another. Here’s a mundane, everyday example: I seem to gain weight in proportion to how unhappy I am (unless it gets to the psychic or emotional emergency point, in which case I start losing again, but that’s fortunately not the norm.) As you can imagine, that starts a pretty diabolical spiral, because when it comes to assuaging the unhappiness and futility of trying to jam the Pillsbury Doughboy into size 10 jeans, nothing beats chocolate. A hundred previous rotten choices have led to another one.

What would happen if we actually became aware of every single choice we made – and by aware, I mean aware that it is a choice? What if, when the alarm goes off at some horrid hour, we consciously thought “I am choosing to hit the snooze button and remain the shape of a couch-potato,” or conversely, “I am choosing to get up and go for a walk even though I feel like warmed-over crap because I chose to go to sleep very late last night.” I suspect that if we were aware of everything we were choosing, some of our choices would suddenly appear absurd at best and intensely self-destructive at worst. And yet, I’m not sure that would solve the problem, and here’s why: because I truly believe that there is a small part of all of us, or at least those of us who experience this syndrome, that doesn’t really believe in consequence. This is a horrific problem for many of the students I deal with: “I forgot to take the midterm, I can’t help it, I spaced it, isn’t there some extra credit thing that I can do to make up for it?” I get pissed off at them, but what am I doing differently? I blew off working on my doctorate for the last month because I felt overwhelmed by my teaching duties; can I do something for extra credit so you’ll give me tenure anyhow?

I can’t help but suspect that the same brain-gremlin who at some level doesn’t really, truly believe that practicing will make her play better is, in fact, the same brain-gremlin who doesn’t believe that eating differently and exercising more would bring that LDL down. It’s as though some part of my brain has rejected the entire concept of cause and effect, while giving lots of lip-service to believing in “karma” and castigating students for being ignorant of the consequences of their ill-informed actions.

Perhaps this is the root of the difference between “disciplined” and “undisciplined” individuals. My partner is one of the most disciplined individuals I have ever met. He also seems to not only understand concept of consequences but to accept it without any fuss or resistance. Anger, maybe, if someone else’s stupidity has caused bad consequences, but he’s pretty clear on the cause and effect part of the equation. (And OK, he’s a Capricorn, but you can’t attribute all of it to astrology!) Does is come from our very different ways of being raised: the “everything is somebody else’s goddamned fault” of my family vs the “everything is your own goddamned fault” of his, neither extreme being particularly helpful or healthy? What makes one person have faith in cause and effect and another person seem to operate as though there is no such thing?

Those of you who read this blog know that one of my favorite topics is that whole zen concept of “no results.” We are terribly attached to results; the idea is to make choices and engage in action out of the conviction that it is right action and right choice, and not in order to get the “cookies” you receive from getting the results you want/expect. This is going to sound contradictory, but I think it’s possible that those of us who can’t seem to “connect” with cause and effect and the consequences of our choices are actually more attached to results than those who are more like my aforementioned partner. Is our persistent refusal to make logical or healthy choices some kind of convoluted way to avoid disappointment, or the frustration of not getting results as quickly as you want, or not getting the desired results at all? After all, at some level, if you make a lousy choice, you know damned well what the lousy result will be, and at least that’s reliable. And if those lousy results don’t happen, well, at least you won’t be disappointed.

But where does it get you?

Same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was . . .