"Needs to Improve"

In my Grade 6 Progress Report from Adams Elementary School in Wichita, Kansas, these are the summary comments from my teachers (June 2, 1961):

“Good year!! Mr. Compton” (Physical Education)

“J.L. has done good work this year. – B. Huey” (Music (Vocal))

“J.L. has made good progress in all areas. A very satisfactory year.” (Lindel Silvertooth, Teacher)

And the check-list matrix of skills in the report mostly follows through on these positive assessments, with all abilities, save one, receiving a mark of “Progressing Satisfactorily.” The one glaring deficiency is the “Needs to Improve” mark in the Music (Vocal) area “Is developing good tone quality.” (“Progressing Satisfactorily” and “Needs to Improve” were the only options, essentially a Pass/Fail system, and I failed at developing good tone quality.) As either the reason for this mark or the result of it, for our school’s concert that Spring, Miss Huey instructed me to just mouth the words to the songs and not allow my faulty tone quality to pollute the performance. A couple of weeks later, Miss Huey asked me to volunteer as an usher and hand out programs at our annual three-school combined district concert.

I don’t recall being particularly upset at these apparent slights. But in retrospect I realize this assessment shadowed me through at least my teen years as I pursued a brief run in several rock-and-roll bands and a couple of folk groups. Probably because we didn’t have enough money in my first band for more than two microphones, I wasn’t in a situation to sing, even backup (I played drums, in the back, not front). But I’m sure in the initial discussions I demurred, having only a few years earlier been officially assessed as being wanting. I started doing a bit of backup singing in my first folk group (playing guitar by then), though we had two microphones for the two of us, and singing folk music allows for some deviation in “good tone quality” (I wonder what Bob Dylan’s tone quality assessment was when he was in 6^th grade?). By the last year of my folk group days, I was actually singing lead on several songs, though primarily Dylan and The Band, not Simon and Garfield or Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

I’m not sure what to make of this reflection, although I have to wonder how my rock-and-roll or folk career might have been different if my elementary school skills had not been assessed simply summatively (“This is how good [or bad] you are; live with it”) but rather formatively (“This is where you are, this is where you need to go, and here’s some instruction in how to get there”). Whether a better folk singer or not, at the least, I’d probably feel much more confident singing “Happy Birthday” to my granddaughter rather than just mouthing the words or handing out programs.