Quantifying our art

School is about to start. That means syllabus revision, which isn’t easy. Each of my courses comes around only once every two years, and so I re-discover, re-assess, and re-vamp the subject matter each cycle. While I’m tweaking course content this time around, I’m also revising syllabi to reflect the latest university policies and academic trends and buzzphrases.

Hiding behind the syllabus and the exams and the juries is an increasing amount of number-crunching designed to measure student progress and, therefore, program success. In the arts, such quantification is neither easy nor readily embraced by my colleagues and former teachers. How do you assign a number to a student’s development in the fine art of communicating without words?

We’ve been teaching for years. But we have reached a point in “the system,” whatever that is, where we now must define what we teach, how we teach it, how we measure it, and how we will improve it if the measurements don’t measure up. Most of it boils down to the biggest buzzword I have seen hit academia: “Assessment.” Just this past semester, I had to show on paper how my applied music instruction for graduate students is actually more advanced than that of the undergraduate.

The age of platitudes is over. It is no longer sufficient to say, “Music is a way of expressing yourself, and I’m here to encourage that.” That is no longer considered informative. Other examples of statements that have become commonplace yet uninformative:

“Pay more attention to phrasing.”
“Have this memorized by next week.”
“Music is a tool we use to help us worship God.”
“I want to be part of the next step forward here.”
“Stop that crying, or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
“The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, the public debt should be reduced, and the arrogance of public officials should be controlled.” [Former U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot.]

Search committees and accreditation agencies now want to know how you’re going to do something, what tools you will use to do it, what the student or choir will actually learn in the process, and how you’re going to Assess the success of it all. But then there is another level to work through, because additional platitudes had been employed up until now to answer those questions:

How will you do or teach something? “I’ll give them a lesson each week.” Or, “We will have rehearsal every Wednesday night.” No longer good enough. Exactly what will you do in these wonderful lessons or rehearsals?

What will they learn? “They will learn how to play the organ well.” Well, how do you know? And how will you know that it worked, when the time comes? And who defines 'well?'

How will you Assess their progress? “Well, they’re going to play a jury each semester to determine if they learned anything.” But how will you determine that consistently from semester to semester? And how will you display that data so that the non-musical accreditation entity understands it and appreciates its value?

The profession has changed. Wake up and smell the coffee. But know that the coffee doesn’t smell that bad, after all. We can handle this.