A Rank Test, And Thoughts on Bias
Aug. 27th, 2006 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
revenaWe had a rank test yesterday, in which several of my favorite students tested for their next belts up. One of them was Jameson, who was testing for his blue belt.
He and I showed up early, and I set up chairs and a bench in the front of the room for the black belts to use, and then went to change into my uniform. By the time I came back, Master Hwang was there, and she pulled me aside and asked me if I’d like to try running the test. There’s not much to it – she was basically just asking me if I’d announce what sections come next, give instructions to the instructors and graders, and call people’s names for various sections at the right times – but I’d never done it before, and hadn’t anticipated that she would ask me.
Nonetheless, I sucked up my nervousness and said that yes, I would like to do it. I very much want to have my own school someday, and it seems to me that any time Master Hwang offers me an opportunity for a new teaching or school management experience, I should take it.
Perhaps fortunately for my ego, I wasn’t the only one doing something new on Saturday. Ms. Moser, one of our assistant instructors, had been asked to lead warm-ups and basic movements for the testing students. She rose ably to the task, but I could see that she was a little nervous, and that helped me to be very calm and clear in my instructions to her. I find that if I’m feeling protective of my assistants, it helps me to be just that much more centered.
So, warm-ups and basic movements went fine. I didn’t screw up at all, in fact, until we had the second group of testing students up for their forms. The first group had all been testing for yellow belt, but the second group had three students at three different levels, with three different sets of forms to do. Predictably, I mixed two of them up.
Which probably would have been fine, except that one of the people I gave wrong instructions to was Jameson, and he got discombobulated enough to forget the opening techniques of one of his forms. Which, you know, happens to everyone, at some test or another. But it’s comparatively rare for the person who has just forgotten their form to be dating the person who is in charge of the test.
In the past, Master Hwang has been really careful to make sure that I never grade Jameson at his rank tests, which I think is reasonable. I feel confident that I could make an unbiased assessment of his skills, but there’s no reason that I should when we’ve got other black belts who can just as easily mark his grades. I do teach him a lot, but I’ve never been in a position of having to help him through the much more stressful rank test process, before.
So I hesitated a little. If he had been a little kid, I would have quietly called out the first technique right away, but since he’s not, I thought I’d give him a minute to see if he could remember on his own. Adults usually do, if they have a moment to reflect. But he still looked blank, and I was just about to intervene when Dad did so, first.
Of course, he called out the opening techniques of the wrong form. So Jameson just looked more confused, and I tried to remember what the right techniques were, and then the other two students were finishing up their forms, anyway, so I called gohman.
We paused between forms, and sorted out the issue, and I asked Jameson if he felt confident and ready to proceed, and he said yes, and we tried it again. No problems.
But afterwards, Master Hwang came up to me and said that she thought I was maybe being too hard on him because I didn’t want to accidentally show favoritism. Which, I think I can fairly say, isn’t quite what was going on – I think the problem was really that I wasn’t quite prepared for a student to forget his or her form, since reminding people of their forms during a rank test hasn’t been one of my duties, before.
But I’ve been thinking about favoritism and other teaching biases since, and so now I’m going to write a little bit about them, and hopefully you won’t all find it terribly boring.
I’ve got a young student – he’s seven – who has all of the attention span of a butterfly. He has extremely sloppy technique, and he never seems to know his forms, no matter how often they’re drilled. But because he started when he was very young, and has, consequently, been training for a few years, Master Hwang has allowed him to be promoted up to yellow belt – even though he hadn’t really learned all of the yellow belt requirements by the time of his test.
A couple of months ago, I had him working with my assistant, Sam, and Sam was very vocal afterwards about the many ways in which this student is failing to perform at the level we’d expect of someone his rank. He expressed some irritation that the student has been allowed to progress to yellow belt without knowing the requirements, and asked (in a way that reminded me strongly of myself at Sam’s age) what the point of ranks was, if we weren’t going to hold people to the requirements.
I did my best to calm him down, and explain what I believe Master Hwang’s motivations to be regarding that particular student and the choice to allow him to progress to yellow belt, and so on. It was not a hugely productive conversation. Sam is himself at that intersection of youth and experience as a martial artist that allows him to perform at a really high level, while still being cognizant of ways in which he could improve. And he does strive to improve, and seeing other people not striving is very frustrating for him. I can absolutely sympathize with that. I would probably have been very pissed off about this particular student when I was sixteen, too – but a few more years of teaching experience have mellowed me out a bit.
Anyway, about a week after that, I asked Sam to work with the same student again, and something about the way he responded threw up a red flag for me. I don’t remember if it was a tone of voice thing, or if he rolled his eyes slightly, or what, but I quickly grabbed his arm and said something like:
“I want you to guard yourself carefully against developing a bias against ___. You’re approaching that edge.”
Which, predictably, horrified him. Sam is a good person! He doesn’t have biases! How could I think that he was prejudiced against a student? OMG!
I didn’t have time right then to discuss it with him, so I didn’t – we just went on with the class. But later that day, during the upper belt class, Sam and I had an opportunity to work together on tightening ways, and we talked then.
I think (I hope!) that I managed to make it clear that what I had meant was that I was worried he was developing a serious bias, and not that I think he already has one. More, I hope that he understood by the time we finished talking that I wouldn’t think he was a worse person for it if I did detect strong bias.
The reason I had brought it up at all is that I could see it happening so easily. Bias in teaching is, I think, natural. And it can cut both ways, and neither of them is good for the student.
I have another young student – a little girl, aged six-going-on-seven – who has quite astonishing focus and dedication. She is more capable than many students twice her age, and also happens to be quite charming. Because of that, there’s a natural sort of tendency to expect more of her. Would we ask other six-year-olds to do dive rolls, even though we know that they’re afraid of rolling? Possibly not.
It’s not fair to go into every interaction with a student expecting him to fail, and poised to be annoyed with him when he does. It is no more fair to expect a talented student to excel in every area, all the time, and to continually push her harder and harder and never let her behave like other members of her peer group.
But I think it’s very natural to do both of those things. We work with these students many times a week, and we know their capabilities quite well – strengths and weaknesses, both. How can we approach every teaching experience without that background? I don’t think we can.
But I do think that it’s important, as an instructor, to recognize that you have biases regarding certain students, that you will develop more, and that you need to know what they are so that you can try your damnedest to get rid of them before every teaching session – or at least shove them out of the way so that they don’t occlude your vision.
He and I showed up early, and I set up chairs and a bench in the front of the room for the black belts to use, and then went to change into my uniform. By the time I came back, Master Hwang was there, and she pulled me aside and asked me if I’d like to try running the test. There’s not much to it – she was basically just asking me if I’d announce what sections come next, give instructions to the instructors and graders, and call people’s names for various sections at the right times – but I’d never done it before, and hadn’t anticipated that she would ask me.
Nonetheless, I sucked up my nervousness and said that yes, I would like to do it. I very much want to have my own school someday, and it seems to me that any time Master Hwang offers me an opportunity for a new teaching or school management experience, I should take it.
Perhaps fortunately for my ego, I wasn’t the only one doing something new on Saturday. Ms. Moser, one of our assistant instructors, had been asked to lead warm-ups and basic movements for the testing students. She rose ably to the task, but I could see that she was a little nervous, and that helped me to be very calm and clear in my instructions to her. I find that if I’m feeling protective of my assistants, it helps me to be just that much more centered.
So, warm-ups and basic movements went fine. I didn’t screw up at all, in fact, until we had the second group of testing students up for their forms. The first group had all been testing for yellow belt, but the second group had three students at three different levels, with three different sets of forms to do. Predictably, I mixed two of them up.
Which probably would have been fine, except that one of the people I gave wrong instructions to was Jameson, and he got discombobulated enough to forget the opening techniques of one of his forms. Which, you know, happens to everyone, at some test or another. But it’s comparatively rare for the person who has just forgotten their form to be dating the person who is in charge of the test.
In the past, Master Hwang has been really careful to make sure that I never grade Jameson at his rank tests, which I think is reasonable. I feel confident that I could make an unbiased assessment of his skills, but there’s no reason that I should when we’ve got other black belts who can just as easily mark his grades. I do teach him a lot, but I’ve never been in a position of having to help him through the much more stressful rank test process, before.
So I hesitated a little. If he had been a little kid, I would have quietly called out the first technique right away, but since he’s not, I thought I’d give him a minute to see if he could remember on his own. Adults usually do, if they have a moment to reflect. But he still looked blank, and I was just about to intervene when Dad did so, first.
Of course, he called out the opening techniques of the wrong form. So Jameson just looked more confused, and I tried to remember what the right techniques were, and then the other two students were finishing up their forms, anyway, so I called gohman.
We paused between forms, and sorted out the issue, and I asked Jameson if he felt confident and ready to proceed, and he said yes, and we tried it again. No problems.
But afterwards, Master Hwang came up to me and said that she thought I was maybe being too hard on him because I didn’t want to accidentally show favoritism. Which, I think I can fairly say, isn’t quite what was going on – I think the problem was really that I wasn’t quite prepared for a student to forget his or her form, since reminding people of their forms during a rank test hasn’t been one of my duties, before.
But I’ve been thinking about favoritism and other teaching biases since, and so now I’m going to write a little bit about them, and hopefully you won’t all find it terribly boring.
I’ve got a young student – he’s seven – who has all of the attention span of a butterfly. He has extremely sloppy technique, and he never seems to know his forms, no matter how often they’re drilled. But because he started when he was very young, and has, consequently, been training for a few years, Master Hwang has allowed him to be promoted up to yellow belt – even though he hadn’t really learned all of the yellow belt requirements by the time of his test.
A couple of months ago, I had him working with my assistant, Sam, and Sam was very vocal afterwards about the many ways in which this student is failing to perform at the level we’d expect of someone his rank. He expressed some irritation that the student has been allowed to progress to yellow belt without knowing the requirements, and asked (in a way that reminded me strongly of myself at Sam’s age) what the point of ranks was, if we weren’t going to hold people to the requirements.
I did my best to calm him down, and explain what I believe Master Hwang’s motivations to be regarding that particular student and the choice to allow him to progress to yellow belt, and so on. It was not a hugely productive conversation. Sam is himself at that intersection of youth and experience as a martial artist that allows him to perform at a really high level, while still being cognizant of ways in which he could improve. And he does strive to improve, and seeing other people not striving is very frustrating for him. I can absolutely sympathize with that. I would probably have been very pissed off about this particular student when I was sixteen, too – but a few more years of teaching experience have mellowed me out a bit.
Anyway, about a week after that, I asked Sam to work with the same student again, and something about the way he responded threw up a red flag for me. I don’t remember if it was a tone of voice thing, or if he rolled his eyes slightly, or what, but I quickly grabbed his arm and said something like:
“I want you to guard yourself carefully against developing a bias against ___. You’re approaching that edge.”
Which, predictably, horrified him. Sam is a good person! He doesn’t have biases! How could I think that he was prejudiced against a student? OMG!
I didn’t have time right then to discuss it with him, so I didn’t – we just went on with the class. But later that day, during the upper belt class, Sam and I had an opportunity to work together on tightening ways, and we talked then.
I think (I hope!) that I managed to make it clear that what I had meant was that I was worried he was developing a serious bias, and not that I think he already has one. More, I hope that he understood by the time we finished talking that I wouldn’t think he was a worse person for it if I did detect strong bias.
The reason I had brought it up at all is that I could see it happening so easily. Bias in teaching is, I think, natural. And it can cut both ways, and neither of them is good for the student.
I have another young student – a little girl, aged six-going-on-seven – who has quite astonishing focus and dedication. She is more capable than many students twice her age, and also happens to be quite charming. Because of that, there’s a natural sort of tendency to expect more of her. Would we ask other six-year-olds to do dive rolls, even though we know that they’re afraid of rolling? Possibly not.
It’s not fair to go into every interaction with a student expecting him to fail, and poised to be annoyed with him when he does. It is no more fair to expect a talented student to excel in every area, all the time, and to continually push her harder and harder and never let her behave like other members of her peer group.
But I think it’s very natural to do both of those things. We work with these students many times a week, and we know their capabilities quite well – strengths and weaknesses, both. How can we approach every teaching experience without that background? I don’t think we can.
But I do think that it’s important, as an instructor, to recognize that you have biases regarding certain students, that you will develop more, and that you need to know what they are so that you can try your damnedest to get rid of them before every teaching session – or at least shove them out of the way so that they don’t occlude your vision.
