A quick one...

Thanks to all who came out to my bday celebration at Hank's last night. Friday and Saturday were like one glorious musical moment and I will make sure to get some details up later in the week. But now: grades.

I have been incredibly hard-nosed about making sure my class is taken seriously for as long as I have been a teacher. While my first full-time gig out of college was a very old skool...uuh...school with the "music is fun" mentality firmly entrenched, there was little more I could do than to give out the requisite A, B, or (for the little kids) S on their quarterly report cards. When I got to NYC, however, and it looked like my friend Don and I would build a program from the ground up, I decided that would be my opportunity to give grades that more accurately represented the work we did in class. I remember trying to give homework to kids who weren't even accustomed to doing as much for their all-important english and math classes. I remember spending nearly a week meticulously preparing my report card grades and additional commentary only to have the principal chide me for attempting to make my class, which was, again, supposed to be "fun", into such a serious task. That was, quite frankly, the first and last time I tried so hard at that school. Unfortunately, over the course of 3 years, said school continually unraveled itself, taking student achievement, teacher morale, and administrative accountability along with it. Needless to say, once again, my grades, and the methodology by which I determined those grades was little more than dead reckoning. The fact that I had only ONE parent complain about a grade in my three years at that school says an awful lot about parental involvement and/or my lack of ethics concerning grades.

When I was hired to work at my current school before the 2005-2006 school year, I decided that I would, once again, make every attempt to make sure that my grading policy was as rigorous as the curriculum I intended to implement in this already academically "serious" school. It's now my fourth year at that school, and I am proud to report that I have held myself to a pretty high standard when it comes to grading practices. I am often surprised that I have more "data" to back up my students' final averages than some of the "real" (read: NOT music, art, etc.) teachers do. It's really a pain in the ass - especially when report card time rolls around - but, seeing as I seem to command a decent amount of professional respect and my class is generally regarded as one of the highlights of our larger curriculum - in no small part due to the seriousness that my, by music teacher standards, stringent and unorthodox grading methods - I think it's all worth while.

But I gotta be honest: It ain't easy on a day like today. It's 60 degrees out, the sun is shining, and I spent the last two nights doing one of the few things I might like more than teaching. The school is placing more and more of an emphasis on bullshit-standardized testing and tracking students based on the scores of said tests, so I could probably give out whatever grades I want without so much as whisper of concern from anyone around me. I am sore and sleepy and would rather watch M*A*S*H all day and drink coffee. But I owe more to the kids than that. They bust their humps every time they set foot in my class or set down to do a homework assignment. Without even realizing it, their hard work, even more than my preaching, posturing, and "serious" grading, is what legitimizes what I do and places a more palpable value in my class amongst those who would sooner let music be one of the "fun", "extra", or "special" subjects. While some of them will fail for not having done any of the work, or for not having made any music at all, I must do the right thing: Ignore the sun. Bite the bullet. Do the fucking grades.