Grading on a Curve

It's been an angsty holiday season.

The big news has been that after the entire semester was over, even four days after the grading input system was supposed to be online, we were informed that the university was going to grade all classes on a curve. The university previously graded classes of 20 students or more on a curve, and the rest were absolute grading. Overtime there has been grade inflation, and the Ministry of Education has decided to link stats on the universities to the apportioning of spots for college freshmen (as fewer kids are born each year, there are too many universities compared to the number of students, and to make the process somewhat fairer, instead of just letting survival of the fittest proceed, the government has decided to reduce the number of admitted students based on the university's performance in key areas.)

I am against curves on principle because I see them as discouraging students who self-evaluate themselves as less competitive for a limited number of As. They also benefit anyone who had more advantages due to previous investment in education--including time overseas, and attending the best cram schools. Curves don't reward the most improvement. They keep the elite on top, and keep the rest down below, enforcing a larger gap between the elite and the rest than in truth exists.

But right now what I think is really bad is changing the rules of the game after the match has been played. My classes are actually extremely rigorous with many grading points, and I can turn those grading points into a curve. However, the class was not designed to make the curve fair: for example in the Korean Folklore class, the one with the videos, I had the following grading points:

• Attendance (10%)
• Participation (20%)
• A paper on Goseong Ogwangdae worth 10% of the grade. The prompt was to compare in class reading (we read it aloud in two groups) of the dialogue and watching the performance to explain what you could learn from the performance that you could not learn from just reading. It was basically a paper to make students realize the importance of getting actual experience. 
• Two videos (50% combined including the information on the web pages and the Youtube video page to direct anyone to learn more from our other videos and clarifying their sources). 
• A paper reflecting on their position as modern people and their experiences with tradition-- the prompt was "How is an ancient culture and a modern world reconciled in your own life?" This was also 10% 

The class was very successful. The students who finished all the work on time ALL scored 90 and above. But now I have to give 30% of the students a C or lower, and those who didn't finish the work does not exceed 30%. This means the student with 90% becomes, suddenly, a C student. That is not right. 

Now I could have used a couple quizzes during this class, made one video, and so on, in order to make the spread of grades wider. But when I had already designed the syllabus as above, and my students made such uniformly good videos, what am I supposed to do? The two papers, only worth 20% of their grades, were also quite good. Of course there was variation-- but the variation was not great. 

My other three classes were a little simpler to grade, but there is always someone who is really losing out in this system, like the woman with a 90 who has to get a C+. 

I have attended two meetings on the issue, and spoken publicly in opposition to the policy (and now wonder if I will pass my next review). I also sent a passionate letter to the president. But it seems that nothing is going to change, very discouraging.

Photo from the Second Meeting

Music Education

Although I am not (strictly speaking) an ethnomusicologist or scholar of music, I think about music education often as it is so closely tied to other types of education in performance practice. My dissertation (the official title is Transmission and Performance: Memory, Heritage, and Authenticity in Korean Mask Dance Dramas) foregrounds my interest in how performing traditions are learned (really, it's not just the title that starts with transmission, the bulk of the dissertation is about pedagogical transmission of performing arts knowledge.)

Last weekend at the conference one of the papers dealt with the use of marimbas for educating youngsters in American classrooms (and her research was specific to Washington State, although apparently Portland has a thriving marimba scene). Lopez School also uses marimbas, although happily without some of the problems the young UW graduate student Jocelyn Moon mentioned in her talk. Other conference papers also touched on the issue of music education, particularly in light of the education at the UW (because the conference was celebrating the history of the program). Group ensembles and private lessons were discussed.

Right now I'm reviewing [edit: I finished and sent off the review!] a book on music education, Wind Bands and Cultural Identity in Japanese Schools, written by David G. Hebert. Because Hebert's writing is well organized and in most chapters almost entirely a distillation of his ethnographic research, the reading has gone pretty fast. In fact Hebert has done an admirable job setting down in meticulous detail how the students are learning-- in large part they learn from their peers. When I consider the performances of middle school wind bands in Japan (Hebert's research site was a middle school-- see the video below or search some out on YouTube), and then add my knowledge gained from Hebert's book that

• most instruments are new to the students when they join the band
• they do not take the instruments home (and couldn't play them at home anyway as they're mostly from middle/lower income families who live in thin-walled apartments) 
• their music teacher has no expert knowledge of their instruments or training in how to lead a band before she was hired for her first job
• as I mentioned above, essentially middle school 3rd year students teach the 1st year students...

Well, it's sort of mind-blowing how well they play. The largest annual competition in Japan has 700,000 participants a year. 700,000 people who can play this well-- many middle schoolers!

It made me think a lot about my own experience in band and with music education as a junior high school student. Our music teacher went crazy. Starting perhaps in sixth grade, maybe fifth grade. But the school district couldn't fire her, there was tenure involved. Yet she was completely incapable of teaching us. Lopez is (was) a small school and she'd had me since third grade (how often did we have music class? did we really not start until third grade?). But by seventh grade she couldn't remember my name. Or what she was doing. When we entered junior high we could leave band, and most students did since the teacher was obviously losing it, but I stayed because I loved music. I was not very good. And I was bored. I played french horn because the instrument was so cool, but in most pieces of music the french horn really plays a bunch of long whole notes. Or maybe half notes. It is not a melody instrument (most of the time and my lack of skill did not warrant a solo or new music selection). So I clung to my cool instrument but daydreamed through practice, or improvised the melody along with Diana (clarinet?), who was three years older and had had more training before our teacher lost it. And because our teacher was losing any grip on reality, she didn't understand that most of us needed a lot more help. We had no leader, and she'd often be gone, or be mentally gone during practice. 

One of the most embarrassing moments of my entire life (and I have a lot to choose from) was a concert (perhaps for Christmas?) at the Legion Hall. I believe the concert was trying to prove to the school that she was still the music teacher and still training students who could make the school proud by showing their talent in the community. I don't even think we knew what we were supposed to play. My memory of the affair has around 8 people on stage looking at each other nervously, then she barks at us to play a piece. As I remember we didn't all have the right music. And half of us didn't know our parts. That was the end of the band. Around the time I left high school they finally hired a new music teacher. 

Teaching Gugak to Elementary School Students

May 11^th, 2011

I actually had an incredibly full day. I got up early (peeling my eyeballs open) and took a bus to 안성 Anseong, a city a little south of Seoul, where I met my friend 박연식 Bak Yeonshik from my 봉산탈춤 Bongsan Talchum class. Yeonshik is a professional supplementary teacher for Korean traditional music, as I mentioned in this blog when I first found out. On Wednesday I actually went along and watched him teach class. The school we went to is a tiny school of only 16 students for all six grades of elementary school. Since it's so small the students are two grades to a classroom and Yeonshik and I started with the 3^rd and 4^th graders. It was his eighth meeting with these students, but as I found out, classes are much longer than 40 minutes, we were in the classroom more than an hour and a half, although there was a break so that they could hit the can if needed.

Yeonshik had a 단소 danso and the students had brought their own instruments too (it's sort of like a recorder, a vertical bamboo (or cheaper plastic) flute). They began with Yeonshik writing out the notes in the 구음 gueum (the vocal representation of the notes) for the song they were playing (오나리 from 대장금) on the board. The students prompted him as he wrote 황태태 태황무 임무무무 황태태 태중태 태황태태 and so on. Then they all reviewed the fingering for the notes together, with emphasis on breath support and the particularly high and low notes. The students spent a few minutes practicing high 중 and low 중 and then everyone played together. As they played first one 3^rd grader and then near the end another 3^rd grader (there were 5 students, 3 in 3^rd grade and 2 in 4^th) gave up. As I continued to observe class it was obvious the one girl just had problems concentrating or had no sense for music though she was interested. After they went through it Yeonshik reminded them to not breath between each note, first they played a section of notes before breathing (as written above a section would be the series before each space) and then after they'd done that they practiced playing two sections before a breath. Everyone was really enjoying the class except the one girl with concentration issues, but I think she was having fun, too. She didn't seem frustrated that she couldn't play. Yeonshik used chocolate as a motivator. He gave it as a reward for doing things, but never actually denied it to anyone who hadn't, he just praised the ones who had managed to play through with the breathing right, for example. He particularly praised the one third grader who was doing well, as this student had never been exposed before the beginning of the term and yet was playing better than the fourth graders. The student took this very seriously. Yeonshik told him he could go to university for gugak (traditional music) and the little boy asked him very sincerely "but can you make a good living from gugak?" an answer that Yeonshik kept trying to side-step and the little boy kept asking. Yeonshik had each student play one by one, and praised each and critiqued them lightly (you need to concentrate on your breathing, it won't sound right until you take a breath at the right place and not other times) and gave them chocolate. When it was the turn of the girl who really couldn't play (last in the order Yeonshik had picked) he sent the students to recycle their milk cartons and then asked her to play, she was still having trouble getting sound to come out (it's not easy to blow like a recorder, it's vertical but like a flute you need to be positioned correctly relative to the hole or it's not going to produce a sound).

After about twenty minutes on the danso they opened their textbooks (they opened the textbook for fourth grade music not third) and they switched to playing 장구 janggu on the desk with their hands while speaking the 입장단 ipjangdan. Interestingly the notation they used was the traditional notation of circle, line and circle with a line in it (at Imshil Pilbong Nongak all the college kids read the notation that is just the ipjangdan written out 덩덩쿵딱). They practiced together beating the desks (one little third grader pulled out some cloth to shield her hand from the desk). Each time they went through the rhythm three times before stopping and trying again or getting feedback. First they did 자진모리, then 세마치, then 굿거리 and last 중중모리. Honestly they were quite good and they traded off having Yeonshik sing while they played (desk slapped and vocalized the sounds) and having them sing while he played to see if they were keeping the rhythm right. Actually I think they only sang two songs, but he sang with each of the rhythms. Because they knew the songs, this was how they checked themselves to see if they were correct because if the rhythm was wrong it was going to screw up the song. These songs were in the textbook next to the rhythms, they must have practiced the songs in a previous class.

After a break we went on to 강강술래 ganggangsullae (a folk song with a dance but they didn't do the dance). Yeonshik was even asking them questions like "what are the special characteristics of Namdo Minyo" and they (or at least one of them who answered first) could answer! Really really cool. And they were having so much fun. The girl with the concentration issues remained a little spacey but she had fun with the desk slapping and with the singing. They were quizzed on the details to the origin of ganggangsullae (sort of a myth) and they'd obviously learned it in a previous class.

After class but before we left Yeonshik was praising the one little 3^rd grader again and he told him that if he practiced for a year or two he'd be good enough to start performing. The little boy had tons of questions, he was so into it! And all the kids decided they needed my autograph (it's this weird thing in Korea where they do that, and I've experienced it before many a time so it didn't phase me too much). So I was writing these little sentences like (dang these don't translate well) "Your joy at practicing gugak looked very good (to me)" and then signing my name and the last two were like "just sign, only sign, really big" and gave me these huge sheets of like sketch book paper (I felt so guilty to use it). Apparently my sentiments were not needed, only my foreigner handwriting.

Next we went to the 5^th and 6^th grade classroom which was only three students (one of the two fifth graders was slightly retarded). The two girls played danso even better than the younger kids, but the boy had none and just sort of hummed along off-tune. He still got chocolate. They discussed vibration as a special element in Korean music and practiced for 25 minutes, then switched to 민요 minyo folk songs. I didn't get to see the names of the songs written down, the first one sounded like 당기둥기 might be the name and the second could be called 떡떡대기야. The two girls sang quite well and the boy was having fun in his own way. The latter song might be one they've known less time, because Yeonshik did call and repeat, but it sounded good that way, so it might just be how that song is normally sung. Part of Yeonshik's job is to teach Korean thought/consciousness (의식) and after the break they talked about 한글 (the Korean alphabet).

Yeonshik took me to see the huge facility that Namsadang has constructed in Anseong and then we had a great lunch and a long conversation followed by coffee and more conversation before I went back to Seoul.