Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:00]:

Today on episode number 510 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, the practice of grading for growth with Robert Talbert.

Robert Talbert [00:00:10]:

Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:00:19]:

Welcome to this episode of Teaching in Higher Ed. I’m Bonni Stachowiak, and this is the space where we explore the art and science of being more effective at facilitating learning. We also share ways to improve our productivity approaches, so we can have more peace in our lives, students. I am thrilled to Dave back on the show Dave, Robert Talbert. He is a professor in the mathematics department and senior faculty fellow for learning futures at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan in the United States. As a faculty member, he teaches courses for computer scientists and engineers. And as a fellow, he coordinates large scale teaching innovation projects. And today, Robert will be sharing about his book, coauthored with David Clark, grading for growth, a guide to alternative grading practices that promote authentic learning and student engagement in higher education.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:29]:

Robert Talbert, welcome back to Teaching in Higher Ed.

Robert Talbert [00:01:33]:

Thanks, Bonni. Thanks for having me back again. It’s been a while, but it’s good to be back.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:01:36]:

Yes. When you shared with me how long it had been, it certainly doesn’t feel that long because of this wonderful book that you and your coauthor Dave Clark have written that we’ll be speaking a lot about today, a guide to alternative grading practices that promote authentic learning and student engagement in higher education. And it also just feels like we talk all the time because you have a wonderful substack, your your newsletter, your collaboration, not just with David, but you invite other authors in to talk about grading for growth, and that’s been a wonderful voice set of voices that has spoken into my teaching and, really my values a lot. So I’ve invited you here today, Robert, to talk about your feelings, about your emotions, your deepest emotions. And I was thinking about this.

Robert Talbert [00:02:24]:

Good morning.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:02:24]:

I know we’re in trouble now. I was thinking about this because I’m rereading the classic book, difficult conversations. They came out with a new edition recently, and I love that book. I loved it when I was reading it, getting my masters, and I love it all these years later. And they’re talking about getting people to talk about their feelings and the tendency that we have to say, well, I feel like this happened, and that’s why we’re having a conflict. And it’s like, that’s not a feeling. That’s your that’s your script or that’s your As a student, where you experienced a grade or a set of grades, and it evoked some type of strong emotion.

Robert Talbert [00:03:13]:

Yeah. Well well, you know, first of all, I really appreciate the question because grades and our sense of self worth are, like, so intertwined with each other. And, really, that’s a that’s a red flag for me. I mean, why why is it this way, and how can we help? Thinking back about my own journey as a student, I always had pretty good grades. Pretty good, not great grades in, in high school and and elementary school and so forth. When I got to college, you know, I was I was learn I had felt like I had learned to play the college game pretty well. I mean, I had a decent GPA. It was like magnetic and loudy material at Sumo, but, you know and and I I get we got to this but I got to this course, I think it was my senior year or yeah.

Robert Talbert [00:03:56]:

It was my senior year. So, like, you’re trying to graduate. Like, your graduation is in sight. Right? But there’s this required course called advanced calculus and it’s a year long sequence. Okay? I mean, the just the very name of it, advanced calculus, should sounds like it should strike fear. And I had a teacher for that class. This is not really about a grade, but it is about feedback. And I think that those two grades and feedback are oddly disconnected from each other, it seems like.

Robert Talbert [00:04:26]:

But here, I was it involved a lot of presentation of mathematical proofs at the chalkboard. Back in the day, it was only chalkboards. And I was struggling with this class, and I had no idea why I was struggling. I didn’t expect not to struggle, but I had no idea what I did know. I just could not figure out where I needed to work and how I could get better at this stuff. It seemed like everybody else in the class was doing okay except me. And I remember very, very clearly. My teacher was not sensitive to this.

Robert Talbert [00:04:56]:

And I remember very clearly, I was sitting out in the hallway just waiting for the room to open up for me to go into the end of the class. And my professor, Doctor. Briggs, I remember her name very clearly, came up and said she said, like, well, what are you working on, Robert? I said, well, I’m trying to work through this mathematical induction proof. And I just I I don’t know. I’m I’m really struggling with it. She’s and she looked at me, and I will remember this to the to my grave. She looked at me and said, Well, Robert, the good students in the class aren’t struggling with this. And and right there, the emotion that that evoked in me was confusion.

Robert Talbert [00:05:33]:

I mean, it was like, well, what do you mean? I I mean, I didn’t I I was so shocked like this that I had no idea what to say back. Anyway, she just walked Bonni past me and went to the room anyhow. Like, was I a good student? I mean, am I a good student? Or does what even is a good student? I mean, and this doesn’t really help either. Then the confusion gave way to just I was just mad. I mean, I was like, how how dare you tell me I’m not a good student? I mean, I don’t maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m not a good student. Okay? I’m willing to willing to stipulate that. But the thing to do when you encounter somebody who’s struggling is to tell them that is not to tell them that they’re a bad student.

Robert Talbert [00:06:07]:

The thing that isn’t it is it not your job to help me figure out why I’m not good and help me eliminate those barrier? And it and that that kinda set me on a path that I I still think about that from time to time, especially, you know, in my worst moments as a as a professor. You know, we can all be a little a little callous sometimes, you know, on a bad Dave. And we can start writing feedback and just, like, get really irritated with students. And this comes to mind. I think, like, I’m not Bonni be like that person that one day. And I I have thought about that ever since. Like, this is exactly how feedback and grades should not work. And I feel like that’s how they do work in a traditional setting.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:06:45]:

Your story is making me think about a couple of books I read from Donna Hicks. She writes and researches about dignity and just the idea because I I wanna leave room and space for it to make sense. I’m I’m I’m muddling together the reading of difficult conversations with the reading of these books about dignity, where why would an educator have that kind of response? We can kinda, like, set it off of, like, that maybe I’m gonna overthink this, but perhaps there is a world in which doctor Briggs, it bumped up against her sense of dignity, like like, maybe possibly feeling insecure about her own teaching and wishing that she knew ways to be able to help struggling students, but that it kinda was taken up of, like, if this student isn’t figuring it out, that’s somehow bumping up against prior dignity violations for her that go right to the root of her own sense of identity. As I mean, it’s just so hard, like you say, because the grades and self worth. And in this case, the feedback piece also being intertwined with that sense of self worth is such a powerful story.

Robert Talbert [00:08:01]:

Well, yeah, and it’s an interesting spin you put on that too, Bonni. I mean, I’m thinking, you know, I’ve never actually tried to, like, understand it from her point of view, but certainly, you’re right. I mean, this was in the eighties at an engineering school. And being a female math professor at an engineering school in the eighties was not the easiest thing in the world to do. Perhaps you have to sort of project a upper image of yourself than you would choose ordinarily if you’re in that case. And that was certainly the case, you know, at the university when it’s super male dominated, STEM oriented, you know, and you kinda can’t look soft, I guess, where soft equals human. You know? I don’t know.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:08:39]:

Yeah. All these kind of mixed up beliefs that we can have about how do you foster learning, how do you foster growth. And it’s so easy to ascribe intent to students where it does not belong and so easy to ascribe things that are not not really believing that students could be trusted, not really believing that students are there to want to learn. Well, we could keep going, but let’s, go to our second story I’d love to have you share. Would you talk about a strong emotion you can recall being evoked as the person doing the grading?

Robert Talbert [00:09:14]:

Sure. And there’s a that’s that’s much more recent for me, obviously, than being a student itself. I I tell one of these stories in the book about a calculus student that I had that was very, very bright, but kind of like on a 10 day delay. Like, would she just need a little bit more runway than most people did. But once you clear the runway, she’s hitting higher altitudes than anybody. And in the book, I tell the story about how she progressively but of course, the exams being one and done assessments in a traditional setting as I was using at the time. She crashed and burned on the first exam and was eliminated from getting an A in the class in one shot, no A. Second exam, same thing.

Robert Talbert [00:09:56]:

In one shot, she can’t get a B in the class. And I sat there and just watched her sense of self worth and her excitement in the class just decay away right before my eyes. And then there was nothing I could do about this, no matter how I would try to encourage her in the class or any of this, any such thing. It was just the grade, the grade, the grade was just grinding her into pieces slowly. And maybe about mid semester, we were having behavioral issues. Like, she was acting out in class because of all these things. And she was literally losing her mental health day by day by day every day she walked into my class, because it was just a constant reminder of what was going on. And eventually she dropped the class and I’ve never heard from her since.

Robert Talbert [00:10:40]:

I don’t even I could go back in maybe 5 people often ask me when they read the books, have you ever checked out on the students? I hadn’t no, I feel like that would be a little bit intrusive and I wouldn’t even know how to begin them without doing that ethically. But I’ve recently also had a similar student, same kind of thing, and she had trouble with test anxiety Dave very, very bright students, super bright student, one of my favorite students I’ve ever had, to be honest. And she had trouble with test anxiety and was really struggling. She didn’t get a grade that really accurately represented what she was capable of knowing or did know because of this test anxiety issue, because everything was done with test. Because that’s how else were are you to teach a class? Right? That’s a math class. And I remember pulling her having a conversation with her in the office. And I said, have you ever actually gone to see, like, a medical professional about any of this? And she was like, no. I don’t know if I ever wanna do that.

Robert Talbert [00:11:33]:

Anyway, I got a LinkedIn message from her just last week that said, I finally went and saw a this was, like, almost 10 years ago. And she she sent me out of the blue, out of nowhere, say, hey. You know, I just wanna update you 10 years later, that, you know, I finally saw a doctor. And I have, like, lots of ADHD and anxiety. I’ve been diagnosed. I’m on meds now. And she has a great career and a great profession going on. And she was and I I told her about the book and about all the because all that stuff that I’ve we’ve I’ve done that result in the book has happened since she was in my class.

Robert Talbert [00:12:05]:

I have to believe she was probably an instigator of all that. And I said, you were probably a cause of this entire movement that’s happening that’s tied into this book. So you should, you know, all’s well that ends well. But it’s more it’s more evidence to me that, and I don’t know what her I think her emotion was just incredible frustration. Like, she knows she’s good at the stuff. I know she’s good at the stuff. But the instruments we’re using and the means by which I am trying to assess her learning are just not getting it done, but we had nothing else. That’s really frustrating.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:12:36]:

Let’s talk more about that then. Why is grading so broken?

Robert Talbert [00:12:41]:

Well, for there there are many, many reasons why you can point to about the, the serious, serious issues that traditional grading by which we mean like grading that’s done through sort of one and done assessments, very little in the way of feedback loops that take place. You turn something in, it gets a grade, that’s it. You move on to the next thing. And then these these items accumulate with point values, typically, and the point values are fed into a formula. The formula spits out a percentage. The percentage is mapped to a letter. The letter is sent to the registrar’s office, which is then mapped back to a number. So it’s this crazy sort of group Goldberg setup we have for grades.

Robert Talbert [00:13:22]:

What’s where do you really begin? You can begin with the history of grading, honestly. And if you we trace this through the book. And it’s a much more interesting subject than it sounds like. It turns out that grading as we know it, points based, percentage based, ABCDF letters, 4 400 GPA, is only about 120 years old compared to the roughly 1000 year history of higher education that we have now. It’s a relative newcomer to higher education. And it it happened basically because of a bunch of crazy faculty meetings, at various elite institutions. And these various elite institutions were throwing things at the wall, and one thing stuck and nobody knows why. It wasn’t by research.

Robert Talbert [00:14:06]:

It wasn’t by, like, iterative practices. And, and because it was a lead institution, that’s what we have now, because that’s how people just copied each other back in those days. So, I mean, first of all, there’s no real basis for any of this, that we do. It’s just somebody else’s experiment that didn’t even necessarily work. It was just done. And somebody said, well, you know, Yale’s doing it. Maybe we should do it. Or University of Michigan is doing this.

Robert Talbert [00:14:33]:

We should do this. When you look at apart from the history, I mean, when you look at grades as we often use them in a traditional setting, they are much of what we do is under the guise of object what we think is objectivity. We pin a number on something. And suddenly, we think it becomes an objective like almost scientific measurement. But in fact, if I go through a student’s paper and I’m grading an exam, exam, for example, it has, you know, let’s say, 5 20 point questions on it, and I put a 14 out of 20 on one of those student’s problems, that is not a measurement. That is a judgment call. That is me looking at the students’ work and making a judgment and attaching a label to that work that happens to be a number between 20, but it is not numerical data in any sense. I did not hook a student up to an EEG or some kind of brainwave machine that measures how much of that problem they actually understood.

Robert Talbert [00:15:35]:

Okay? This is not like taking somebody’s temperature or their pulse ox or something like that. It is it is a judgment call that results in a label. So that’s not even grades. Points that we use for grading are not even numerical forms of data. They are categorical forms of data. They’re just like putting the words excellent, pretty good, okay, not good, which is kind of what we do, except we do it in reverse via rubrics. We Dave verbal descriptions of what should result in certain point values, and then we stick to point values on it. Well, why even bother with the point values? I mean, is my my way of thinking.

Robert Talbert [00:16:13]:

Like, just cut out the middleman. You’re saving yourself a lot of work. Just put a word on it. And just say, like, this was really good, or this was okay, but it wasn’t great, or this was not good enough. It did not meet our content standard or something like that. And so we we attach points to things that are not numerical data, but then we go off and do statistics on these things as if they were numerical data. So one of the examples we roll out in the book is, like, if you took ZIP codes, like, if you took all the ZIP codes in the state of Michigan, okay, those are numbers. And if you average those together, you get this 5 digit number.

Robert Talbert [00:16:49]:

It’s like 43. I don’t know what it is, but it’s like it looks like a ZIP code. But the problem is there’s nothing there. There is no location in our state that has the ZIP code. So you can you can do the averages and the standard deviations and the whole 9 yards all you want, but you are not making sense because you’re doing numerical operations on things that aren’t really truly numbers in the scientific sense. And so we have these categorical data that we perform noncategorical stats on, and that’s crazy and wrong. And then we use the results of that to attach another label to the student’s course grade. And everything is going off the rails at this point, statistically speaking.

Robert Talbert [00:17:31]:

And, nobody wants to fess up to this because it’s just too easy to put points on things. Okay? It’s it’s just easier to stick a 14 out of 20 and just say, like, have a nice day than it is to say, this was good enough, or I would like you to redo this, and then let people redo it. And that’s the set that’s the maybe the biggest thing that’s broken about grades is that the traditional grading is completely disconnected from the notion of a feedback loop, which is where, you know, it sounds like it is what it sounds like. You try something, it’s and you have some picture in your brain about what a successful try of that thing would look like. I’m sitting here in my, office home office, which is also my music practice space, and I’ve got guitars all over the wall. And when I’m trying to learn a song for my band, I, have an idea of what it’s supposed to sound like because it’s a we’re a cover Bonni, so we know what the song sounds like. And I’ll sit down and plug in and I’ll play. And probably the first time that I play it, it’s Bonni sound terrible.

Robert Talbert [00:18:27]:

It’s like and that’s okay that because this is only the first time I’m doing this of 100, possibly. And so I I get feedback from my own ears or I record myself or I let somebody else listen to it. And I try to make sense of the feedback, and then I incorporate So that that’s a feedback loop. And that’s how we learn anything of significance as human beings is through feedback loops. The degree to which a feedback loop is not present is like how insignificant that thing is. If I tell you, my birthday is July 10th, it’s like, okay, you didn’t need a feedback loop for that. But that is really it’s not a really life changing thing to learn either. If you’re trying to learn a song, then that’s significantly more important for a number of people and for you, yourself.

Robert Talbert [00:19:17]:

And so you need feedback with some of these things. And this is precisely what we don’t get in traditional grading. You do a paper, you do a test, you do an exam, you do a quiz or whatever, and that’s it. And if you do poorly on it, what you’re supposed to do is do better on the next one, which will, quote, unquote, average. And there’s the problem with statistics again. Average out the first one even though those two things may be on completely different sets of content. So we’re saying, like, if I make a 0 on a quiz that covers the first 3 weeks of a course and then I make a make a 100 on the rest of the course, then that’s Bonni be around a 75 percent when it’s all done. So I have, like, a c average.

Robert Talbert [00:20:01]:

Well, no. I don’t. Because I don’t know. I haven’t proven. I don’t know anything about the 1st 3 weeks of the course yet. I mean, this is a false positive when we get this. So the absence of feedback loops treats the learning experience in a course utterly unlike any significant learning experience anybody ever has elsewhere in life. And it also makes it not fun because feedback is fun.

Robert Talbert [00:20:23]:

Okay? When you play a game, most of the fun of a game comes from the feedback loop that you engage with. I play Wordle, that word game from the New York Times every morning. And what makes that game fun is you try a word, and it’s virtually impossible to get it right the first time. It’s like someone’s done the stats on this. It’s like it’s it’s like getting struck by liking twice in the same day or something like that. And then you act on the feedback. And the action on the feedback is what makes that game engaging. Imagine that game, if you didn’t get the feedback.

Robert Talbert [00:20:51]:

You’re just supposed to guess a 5 letter word once. And it says, yes, you got it or no, you didn’t, or gives you a grade on it. That would be the most boring game ever. And so I could I could keep going on this, but this is only a 20 minute podcast. So I don’t know if I can’t, you gotta read the book for the rest of it. This is this is only getting started about why traditional grading is busted.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:13]:

I have to say quickly because the rage is still so deep within me. I play Wordle as well and use the same initial word every single time.

Robert Talbert [00:21:22]:

Mhmm.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:22]:

And it broke a friendship. I’m not sure I can remain friends with our friend because he literally told me that day was my initial word. And and, like, what’s the so so speaking of statistics, it would have been very unlikely that it was my word on that exact day, but it’s never gonna be that again, Robert. And I feel like he ruined my initial word, and I haven’t found another good word to replace it with, but it was so sad. It was so sad. And and on a lot of Dave, speaking of those feelings. Well, the podcast is not 20 minutes. But, yes, but, yes, we should.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:21:54]:

I mean, it’s it’s in total usually around 35, but we gotta keep time for the for the recommendation segment. So let’s have you share a little bit about if we were going to build something that helped to mitigate some of the challenges with grades, what would be your say I’ll just make this number up. Four things

Robert Talbert [00:22:16]:

that you would you would most all of them out there.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:22:19]:

I mean, I’m just totally picking this out of the sky here. That you and most

Robert Talbert [00:22:23]:

It’s it’s not out there, of course. I mean, when when David, Clark, and I wrote our book, Work All Ready for Growth, we, interviewed or David actually did all the work on this. He interviewed several I think I wanna say, like, 35, 40, 50 faculty members who we, solicited for help who are using something like an alternative grading. We didn’t ask exactly what. We just want if it’s not traditional, you know, give us a call. We want to talk to you about this. And so we looked at all these actual real life faculty who are in all kinds of different situations, big school, small school, big classes, small classes, STEM, non STEM, the whole thing, and just sort of looked at what they were doing. Not so much like who’s doing ungrading, who’s doing specs grading, who’s doing standard.

Robert Talbert [00:23:06]:

But what we found was that Bonni doing one thing, first of all. Like, everybody’s just sort of remixing and recombining and being really creative about making things work. But we isolated, like, 4 threads that were common to every what seemed to be functioning alternative, grading system. And we distilled those into what we call the 4 pillars of alternative grading model. And the 4 pillars are let’s see if I can remember these because I wrote the I read the book. For the first one is clear content standards. First of all, you have to be very clear with your students about what it is they’re learning and what it is they need to do to demonstrate that they’ve learned it. Okay? So unlike traditional braiding where we sort of just sort of teach and we have a syllabus and then we give a test and it’s like, surprise.

Robert Talbert [00:23:53]:

You’re Bonni have to do all this. Guess what you get to do today on this stuff? We try to avoid the surprises. Okay? We make it really clear to students. You need to know how to how to do these things or you’d be able to do the following things, and we’re gonna ask you to do these things to demonstrate your learning It’s all driven back to learning, so clear content standards The second thing is helpful feedback I mentioned feedback loops a second ago It’s really easy to give feedback. I mean, my calculus professor gave me feedback. Okay? But giving helpful feedback, one that doesn’t, like, humiliate the student that, affirms their basic dignity as a human being. And I it highlights what went well. It kind of also highlights what could use some work and invites them to collaborate with you to make it better.

Robert Talbert [00:24:36]:

Helpful feedback in any form whatsoever is an essential part of what we need to upgrade our grading system. We also found that giving what we call marks that indicate progress, is important. So a mark is just sort of like another word for a grade. The word grade has like a lot of ambiguous uses to it. So mark is just whatever it is you put on a piece of student’s work to indicate, like, a summative report to them. And maybe it’s nothing. I mean, in ungrading, for example, you don’t put marks on student work. You just give them feedback.

Robert Talbert [00:25:10]:

There is no mark put on it. But if you’re Bonni put a mark on student work, make it something that is informative to the student, like, not a 14 out of 20, but, like, excellent, progressing, good, okay, not okay, or whatever it is that whatever system you can think of. For me, I give 2 marks on all my students’ work. It’s either success or retry. Okay. I agree. It’s not pass fail because there’s not really a fail, I guess. But we have content standards because we have clear content standards, and I have to make it really clear to students what a successful attempt on an assignment looks like.

Robert Talbert [00:25:45]:

And if they meet it, they get a word that says success. So it’s in it helps you know where you are. It’s wayfinding. And if it’s retry, well, that also helps you know where you are. It’s it’s a it’s a verb. It’s a complete sentence. K? Retry. K.

Robert Talbert [00:25:58]:

Retry the thing in front of you. And then finally, speaking of retry, maybe the thing that makes us all work is having reattempts on work without penalty. Reattempts without penalty, that’s the closing of the feedback loop. Once you get the feedback and you have the mark that indicates the progress and you have the helpful feedback, you gotta have the ability to incorporate all that stuff into another round through the cycle. Otherwise, we’re disconnected from that feedback loop again, and we’re not really much better off than if we were just putting points on things and letting it live. So, yeah, clear content standards, helpful feedback, marks that indicate progress, and re attempts without penalty. Those four things are kind of like the that’s the backbone, the skeletal system of alternative grading.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:26:43]:

Yeah. Alright. Well, this is the time in the show where we each get to share our recommendations, and I have 2 of them. The first one is I would recommend that you live the one plug large monitor lifestyle. And there are enough colleagues who didn’t know that such a life could exist, that it’s possible there’s people listening to the show that don’t know that this life exists. So I Dave, no matter if I’m in our home podcasting studio like I am now, or I do have a home office that is also in our home, or if I’m at my work office, I have a single plug, a single plug that I plug in, and it connects to everything. So it connects to my monitor, to sound, to, in this case, the the switch that is needed in order to, get the audio right. It connects to everything, and it’s the Dave.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:27:34]:

No matter where I go, it is a one plug lifestyle, and I you might be thinking, but I work just fine on my laptop. So I’m reminded of the book by Annie Murphy Paul, the extended mind, the power of thinking outside the brain, and she has a whole section in there that talks about the benefits of having an external monitor and literally being able to spread those possibilities out. It’s just really cool. So I’m gonna I’m gonna recommend in my case, I have purchased the CalDigit Hub. There are various versions of a CalDigit hub that that vary in price range. I will just say if it feels a little bit too expensive, but you can swing it, living the one plug lifestyle is incredible. It’s just so simple. It just works.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:20]:

You plug it in. You’re connected. I love it. CalDigit makes makes some nice products. And then, secondly, I would like to recommend a blog post that Robert Talbert wrote, the person I’m speaking with right now. And he talks about in this, does alternative grading make students more likely to cheat? I love this about your work in general, Robert. You’re so good about taking these meta analyses, different kinds of research. I’m really breaking it down for us in very conversational, understandable ways.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:28:50]:

And in this case, you were talking about 3 questions that students will ask themselves when they’re considering whether to cheat. What’s my purpose? What are my goals in doing this task? Do I just want a good grade? Am I really trying to learn the material? Am I trying not to look stupid? Am I trying to be at the top of my class? And then the second question, can I do this? So things like, do I have the necessary skills to do the task or the kinds of ways in which our self efficacy can affect things. And then the final question is, what are the costs? Like, if I were caught, what what are the ramifications that are going to be present there? So I could talk We could do 3 episodes just about this one, article, but I wanna hear what Robert has to recommend as well. I’m just gonna say go subscribe to grading for growth if you haven’t already. Specifically look at this article, get yourself a calDigit hub, and get the book grading for growth. And, Robert, I’m gonna pass it over to you for your recommendations.

Robert Talbert [00:29:47]:

Great. And those are all great recommendations. Sorry. I really appreciate it. I’m gonna check out that book and that, CalDigit Hub. It looks really interesting. So, yeah, a couple of recommendations for you. Once at one point during our conversation today, I mentioned something about creativity, about recombining things and remixing things to be really creative.

Robert Talbert [00:30:05]:

This is something as a musician I’m a I’m a musician. I’m a bass guitar player. I’ve been playing bass for 30 years. And over the last couple of years, I’ve really reinvested myself and and really gotten into to playing much more often than I used to. And so creativity has been something that’s on my mind quite a bit. And one of the most creative things I have ever seen, and this is like a perfect example of what combinatorial creativity looks like, is the YouTube channel of a gentleman named Bill McClintock. So this is not going to be everybody’s cup of tea, but you got to check this out. So Bill McClintock makes mashups, which is where you take 2 songs and somehow put them together so that they fit together and work together.

Robert Talbert [00:30:46]:

Okay? And Bill McClintock’s specialty is taking 2 songs that there is no way that these songs should work together. But they do. And his specialty is fusing together heavy metal music with sixties seventies soul Motown tunes. And you would not expect this to work, but and it’s incredible that it does. So you just go to his channel. And among the many gems that he has done over Christmas, for example, he did a mashup where he took, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, the Brenda Lee classic, and just extracted the vocals and inserted the vocals from Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap by ACDC. And there is no way this is supposed to work, but it does. And he didn’t even he did not even sometimes people do this.

Robert Talbert [00:31:33]:

There’s tons of mashup channels on YouTube, and the people who make them will use software to adjust the speed or the pitch or whatever. This is nothing. This is just 2 raw song and raw vocals mixed in. And, like, there’s I remember just being stunned when I finished listening to this because there’s no way that should work. But because of the way, like, the music theory behind those two songs works, one is in a, I think, in c major and the other is in a minor, so the the relative major minor keys fit together. And as a as a soloist, you you learn to do things like this. Or he, has Dave, James Brown with Rage Against the Machine. He’s done Marvin Gaye with Rat on top of it.

Robert Talbert [00:32:14]:

He’s he’s incredible things. And so heavy metal may not be your cup of tea. It’s not really mine. But I’m a huge, huge fan of 60s soul and Motown music. And just to see that how creative a person can be, like, how do you even come up with the idea of putting these 2 songs together? Like, you’re just sitting around your house. It’s like, hey, you know what? 2 songs are going really well. Nope. Nobody thinks this.

Robert Talbert [00:32:34]:

So anyway, if you’re interested in, like, seeing some of the upper extremities of weird creativity in the music world, check out Bill McClintock’s, YouTube channel, and you will have hours of fun. I want to recommend also, speaking of creativity, a book that I think is pretty well known in some circles, but I had not read it until just recently. And it’s called The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. The War of Art. Not The Art of War, but The War of Art. And so it’s about writing. Stephen Pressfield is a novelist, but he writes these books that are about writing, which are really about creativity writ large. In The War of Art, the war that he’s speaking of is between you and what he calls resistance.

Robert Talbert [00:33:17]:

Like when you sit down to write, you feel resistance. What is it? How do you how do you deal with it? How do you honor what you’re feeling in the moment? How do you get past it? And that book, I read it in an afternoon, and it literally changed my life and how I think about music, about writing, on my blog post, about teaching. Because, I mean, teaching is nothing if not a precombinatorial creative activity, is it not? It’s kind of hard to come up with anything brand new as a teacher, but you’re constantly that’s what we’re doing right now is we’re pulling in ideas from all these other people and making it our own. So The War of Arc, I see even Pressfield, is an absolute must read for anybody who considers himself to be a smart creative, quote, unquote, which I believe all faculty should consider themselves in that way. It’s a it’s a real quick read, and it will really rock your world. I I think it did mine for sure. Well, thank

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:05]:

you so much. I’ve had that book on my list of things I wanna read for such a long time, but I never had anyone explain what it was all about. You’re making me wanna go read it right now.

Robert Talbert [00:34:14]:

Right.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:15]:

Oh, that’s wonderful. Well, thank you so much for not just today’s conversation, but thank you for just all the ways that you’ve spoken to my life and into so many people’s lives out there. And I’m surprised that it didn’t come up in our conversation today, just the ways in which your life has been shaped through struggles and health challenges and the life and joy that you bring to the work you do. It’s always felt so intentional to me, but just with a renewed sense of the importance of what you do and your generosity in doing it. So I’m so appreciative of you and looking forward to talking to David soon and getting to share more about this book.

Robert Talbert [00:34:49]:

I’m grateful for that, Bonni, and David’s gonna be a great guest for you. He’s a he’s a brilliant guy, great writer, amazing teacher, and has a lot to say.

Bonni Stachowiak [00:34:59]:

It was wonderful to get another opportunity to talk with Robert Talbert today. Today’s episode was produced by me, Bonni Stachowiak. It was edited by the ever talented Andrew Kroeger. Podcast production support was provided by the amazing Sierra Priest. 

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