Halfway Point

• Do you agree with the idea of staying out of assessment when a child's creativity is at stake?
• Would you ever want or need to assess a child's creative ability? How?
• How do you define musical creativity? Is creativity important to your philosophy of music education?

• Which would you be most comfortable teaching and/or assessing: Composition, improvisation, or arrangement?

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A teacher is an enabler; a facilitator and a guide. Once the student leaves the side of the parent at the age of 6, a connection needs to be made with a teacher from a guardian's standpoint. Without this sense of monitorization, I feel the child gets lost, bored, and unfocused. As music educators, connection can come from a variety of angles. 1.) Every student has their own particular form of interpretation or expression. This form of expression keeps the student involved in what's happening at all times. 2.) Enabling the students to be involved with activity from the getgo allows the students a freedom from everyday boredom within the classroom. They're allowed to express themselves how they like artistically. 3.) Music creates a sense of focus that makes every kid try harder and generally focus more. When the monitor becomes lost or tied up with another idea, the students rapidly lose focus or interest.
Creativity could be assigned. Maybe to older children through projects on their own or group work within the classroom. Creativity does not have to be hand fed to the students, but I do believe that the teacher needs to foster a constructive path for students to follow. For instance, I once knew a 3rd grade teacher that had students write poems. One child wrote about daisies, another about a cartoon character. The last child wrote about killing another teacher in the building. Creativity NEEDS a limit for situations like this. (p.s. the child is being allowed to go back to school and the threatened teacher has nothing to do but pray)
I would feel most comfortable teaching improvisation. The summer before my senior year of high school I had the opportunity to attend the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts. The camp featured an hour morning session of free improvisation using the the instrument you came with. At the beginning of the five weeks, the vocalists all looked at each other like (how are we supposed to get creative using bee bops and do doo's??) Little did everyone know that improv was secretly all about being comfortable about exploring limits and understanding the theme. It was an extremely fun time that I would LOVE to share with others.

Numero Cinco

Technology, as great as it is becoming, should be a muted tool for musical assessment. Rhythmical ideas can be assessed without being heard. Choreographed danced moves can be assessed without being heard. Pitches issues can lead to discrepancies and discrepancies lead to inaccurate measures of assessment. Or disaster like this:
I was in a situation in my junior year where I was auditioning for a spot in the Pennsylvania Music Educator Association's Region IV Chorus. At the audition for District Chorus, I had placed 6th. The top 10 advance to Regionals, so I wasn't that worried. Until I got to the audition room. northeastern and central PA do things a little differently in the audition. You need to memorize pretty much have each of the 10 distributed pieces memorized; pitch for pitch, rhythm for rhythm, dynamic for dynamic, etc. Mind you, one has NO idea what song will be selected for the audition. All you know is that of the 10 pieces, you will be asked to sing your voice part on two of the songs. The first 5 students are recorded and at the end of the 8th or 10th student, the judges make sure that they are accurately grading/rating all of the student's performance. For this specific audition, I had the luxury of going 5th (they choose order of audition at random). As the last student being taped, I walked into the room confident in what I knew would be the pieces. I was correct with both of my guesses, so now I felt REALLY confident. The judges (1 male, 2 female) were not familiar to me. They have their backs toward you so that the judging is "objective". No teachers can obviously be on the same voice part in the judging area as the students. Once the pitch is given (yes, a choral audition is given a cappella without any hint of the other voices) (Vygotsky would have a field day...) the assigned teacher sings back the pitch. But what if the teacher has vocal issues? Do you take the teacher's pitch or the one from the pitch pipe? I motioned for the teacher to give the pitch once again. Each student is guided into the room by a not-so-helpful door person, who could be a teacher or a parent from the band or whomever seems responsible enough at the time. I immediately turned to my door person who just happened to be a music teacher and left the room. I begged her to have another teacher give me the pitch, even if it was at another octave because I could not decipher between the teacher's pitch and the pipe and which to take. My claim was overruled and I was told to just go with it. YOU DON'T TELL A FRUSTRATED KID TO JUST GO WITH IT WHEN YOU'VE BEEN PREPARING FOR 4 MONTHS (ROUGHLY 120 DAYS) FOR A STUPID AUDITION! Afterwards, I rallied around several other gentlemen from my voicepart, and before I even got to them, they informed ME that there was an issue with pitches. Apparently, this one teacher is a smoker. But luckily for the first 5 people, the auditions were taped. I begged my teacher to find out what was on the tape, but unfortunately, the head of District chorus (who also had members of his group nearly missing the cut to regional chorus) discarded the tapes and said that they were fine. No one will ever know how valuable those tapes could have been.
I just feel the ear can find discrepancies on its own without the help of an audio device. Taping does nothing to help the performer other than point out flaws and maybe even add to them. Or in my case, enable the listener to ignore the problem and cheat.
P.S. I placed 9th in the audition and made it to regionals. Yet, I placed 6th in the state auditions when combined with ten of the best kids from an opposing district. Stupid ass greedy teachers.