Elements of Grading. Douglas Reeves

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      My favorite lesson in fairness came from Mr. Freeman French, my junior high school orchestra conductor, who had students audition from behind a curtain. Neither students nor the teacher knew the gender, identity, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status of the player. We could only hear the music. While Mr. French’s commitment to fairness may seem extreme, it represents a commitment to principle that seems elusive in the context of bias that ranges from Olympic skating to World Cup soccer in which, to put it mildly, fairness is not always the primary value on display. Certainly the blind audition approach of Mr. French had its limits—he ultimately had to look at his performers and give them feedback face to face, but the tone of fairness that he set in his classes conveyed the fact, as well as the impression, that our screeching strings—sharp and flat, too fast or too slow—elicited his feedback solely based on our work and not our appearance.