Creative Writing Rubrics

Henry Threadgill at Ars Nova show

The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) was formed in 1965 to nurture jazz's most progressive improvisationalists under the rubric of "Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future." Few have lived up to that motto with such theatricality as Henry Threadgill. As composer, saxophonist, and flutist, he has transcended many boundaries, writing and playing what he calls "mutable music," including threads of circus marches, classical, world beat, and ragtime. On Sunday night at the Christ Church Neighborhood House, Threadgill and the members of his Zooid ensemble never stopped mutating.

The show was the second of the Ars Nova Workshop "AACM/Great Black Music" festival, which continues Saturday with saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and Monday with Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker (for details: www.arsnovaworkshop.org ).

From the quiet opener, "So Pleased, No Clue," Threadgill and company went out but never too far out. His compositional acumen called for decorum in every odd timbre, coolly expressive passage, and bold counterpoint. In "So Pleased," each member dotted Threadgill's blank canvas (a twitch of Liberty Ellman's acoustic electric guitar here, a restrained honk of Jose Davila's tuba there) until the dots connected.

All the while, Threadgill played his alto sax slow and low, with but a few high squeaks slipping by. During "A Day Off," a slight bossa nova element entered drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee's cymbal rides, followed by Christopher Hoffman's hard-bowed cello and Threadgill's layered, circular sax line. A closing maelstrom brought together each musical element at once. Certainly, Threadgill's usual leanings into circus-inspired melody and skewed Latin music (the Spanish-flavored flutterings of Stomu Takeishi's oversized acoustic bass, for example) were in evidence, occasionally sudden and brash. But his bearing called for implosion rather than explosion, and every manic expression was pulled gloriously inward.

By the time the sextet hit the softly unwound "It Never Moved," everything had moved, but subtly. Ellman showed he was a plucky jazz guitarist of Johnny Smith-like punctuation, and Threadgill threaded himself with passion, tenderness, and grace through the calm interplay.

My Lips to Yours!: Rubrics

Well, gentle reader, the school year is winding down for teachers and students alike and that got me thinking about education in general so I decided to share with you some of my thoughts on the subject by way of a paper I wrote for one of my education courses. I realize this is not my usual, entertaining subject matter, but there are just some days when you can't think of a good poop joke. It's on a topic that really bugs me being that it's an educational standard that I feel is doing a disservice to students. So if you care to, read on, and as always, my lips to yours. One of the most useful tools in assessment in any discipline, a new teacher is often told, is a well-structured rubric. Rubrics make the job and the life of the teacher easier by saving time in grading, offering clearly defined objectives for students, and removing subjectivity from the assessment process. As author Maja Wilson (2006) notes, rubrics are widely hailed as a “best practice” in education (p. The main problem with the idea of rubrics is that their value is placed in standardizing student writing or more accurately, in the act of standardizing itself. Alfie Kohn (2006) notes that standardizing is admirable in the realm of manufactured goods such as electronics, but does little or nothing to assess a student's comprehension of ideas. Rubrics, he argues, standardize not only student output in writing but also teacher assessment of writing assignments. By removing the inherent human subjectivity in assessing writing, teachers are turned into “grading machines,” not taking into account the overall quality of a writing assignment, but rather only the sum of its parts. Students, therefore, tend not to produce their most innovative material in writing assignments, ensuring, rather, that the checklists of the rubric, which often place as much or more emphasis on objective portions (spelling, grammar, formatting, etc.) than they do the quality of ideas presented, are met. Kohn cites a work by Linda Mabry whose research concluded that as a result, students who adhered to rubrics achieved higher scores, yet produced “more vacuous writing” (as cited in Kohn, 2006). The obvious inference here is that educators are now placing more emphasis on giving students as large of a probability of achieving a good grade as possible, without regard to the actual quality of the written work. So if student writing has less quality when following the guidelines of a rubric, why then do educators hold them so dearly as useful educational tools? Wilson suggests that rubrics are alluring because they simplify and objectify that which is complex and subjective. Any English teacher has been though the messy debate of how to assign a grade to something that another teacher could read and grade quite differently, which therefore makes a subjective assignment much more difficult. Rubrics help to solve this issue. In addition, they neaten, for students, the messy task of writing and give organized guidelines to help them through it (2006). Kohn believes them to be a handy tool in justifying grades to parents (2006).