In contrast to my normal 1000 word blog entries, today’s is one of my “quick – make a list of all things I want to blog about” pieces. Last week (for the first time) I joined in a twitter conversation held every Tuesday at 11am Australian Eastern Daylight Savings Time called #musedchat. It’s an hour of thought-exchange between music educators, most of whom are working in classroom contexts, most of those it seems working with high school aged students. Last week’s topic looked at ways of assessing musical understanding, and I loved each of the 60 minutes spent involved in that conversation. Most music assessment looks at a student’s ability to do something, usually performing a technical feat, or recognising a musical occurrence, being able to label something appropriately, and so forth – many things which are not necessarily measuring a student’s understanding. Which raises the question, how much music education is directed to increasing or deepening understanding? I spent
Education
What Does an Exam Result MEAN?!
What does the result a student gets in an AMEB exam actually mean? It’s a letter (sometimes with a + attached) and it’s easy to think that this result relates to the A/B/C/fail system we know from general education. But is it so? Just this last week my mum, Anita, and I were organising entries of our piano students for AMEB exams. Not all our students sit exams, and not all the students who sit exams do so every year; the decision to take an exam is not one made on automatic pilot. It’s not just about whether the student is ready for the next grade, it’s about how an exam will impact on their other (pianistic, musical, educational, experiential) goals and plans for the year. One of the considerations we take into account is the likelihood of a pleasant to exciting experience and an excellent result in the assessment. This seems somewhat obvious, and one would think that any
Spells trouble
So here in Australia, thanks to Senator Fielding, we now know that ‘fiscal’ has neither 3 syllables (as in physical) nor a K. Turns out that Fielding has trouble with language thanks to a form of dyslexia that resulted in his achieving only 29 in his final high school English exams. His other marks were exceptional (all in the 90s) so this is not an issue of intellect, but rather of a specific aptitude that Fielding lacks in regard to language skills. Fielding was addressing a media contingent a few days ago, and after he had referring several times to ‘physical policy’ one intrepid reporter inquired if he didn’t mean ‘fiscal policy’. Fielding replied “fiscal – F-I-S-K-A-L” to the collective surprise (and then delight) of everyone in the media who knew that’s not how you spell fiscal. So now we have people coming to Fielding’s defence, saying “leave the poor bloke alone, he can’t help it if he can’t spell”.
Elissa Milne 