Years and Years

I'm at the end of another semester. Fall 2024 is pretty much a done deal, although I still have a certain amount of scribbling and bibbling to go, mostly in the way of squaring away the grades. For that most part that's a simple matter of calculating the final data from the accumulated grades for weekly sightsinging performances and music theory workbook assignments. Attendance and tardiness must be taken into account as well. Finally, some executive decisions. They're my students, not the gradebook's. I, and I alone, will determine the final and proper grade.

Which gets me thinking about how long I've been doing this, and just how many times I have given a grade to a student for something.

Let's begin with sightsinging performances. As a rule, my students perform between 2 - 3 assigned selections for me; most are solfège, others are rhythm. Let's take the conservative route and make it 2 assigned selections per week, to which I assign letter grades that I convert into percentages for the gradebook.

I teach three eartraining classes per week, thus that's 6 graded exercises. Each class has an average of 12 students. Thus that's 36 students * 6 graded exercises: 216 grades per week.

Very good. Now there are 30 weeks in your basic school year: 216 * 30 = 6480 times in an academic year that I hear people sing assignments and give those a grade.

That's a lot. But now consider that this is year 47 in the saddle: 6480 * 47 = 304,560 times over the course of my career that I've heard a student sing either a solfège melody or perform a rhythm and for which I've given a grade.

304,560 times. More or less 1/3 of a million times. Sheesh.

Perhaps it's understandable that I have a great deal of confidence in the accuracy of my marks. If I can't make an honest evaluation of a student's performance after 300,000+ tries at it, then I'm barking up the wrong tree and then some. But I do make honest evaluations. I'm generous because I'm fundamentally on their side and because they generally do very well. It's a Conservatory, after all, and not Billy Bob's Academy of Fine Arts over there in the strip mall between Francisco's Pizza and the dental surgeon's office. Most of the time I'm doling out As and Bs with a clear conscience. Even Cs are relatively rare, Ds and Fs even rarer.

47 years. 304,560 graded solfège assignments. How many voice-leading and part-writing errors have I marked? How much advice have I given about practice technique? How many times have I suggested this approach or that approach, or helped a student through a rhythmic passage, or gone over intonation or tone production? How many music theory lectures have I given? How many Schenkerian analysis charts have I read through and critiqued? For that matter, how many pieces have I charted myself for class use? How many LaRue charts of sonata form? How many tabulated outline-style breakdowns of the phrase structures in song forms, rondos, and the like?

I don't know. But it's a lot. Everything's a lot. I have written about 1000 program notes, all recorded in a handy-dandy database. To be sure, some are duplicates that I've been able to re-use hither & yon, but even the duplicates may be rewritten or revised. I have made hundreds upon hundreds of animated charts for my various lectures at Fromm or UC Berkeley. Some are technical affairs and some are more inspirational. How many? I'm not even sure I want to know. I started a database of those to match my program-note database. I just haven't gotten very far with it.

A long life accumulates a lot of memories, and a long career a lot of stuff. And it isn't over yet. As far as I know, I'm still good for at least another decade if not longer. So all those numbers are just going to grow. Oh, I won't make it to a million sightsinging grades. But 500,000 ... ? A possibility.