Britain, the Rainbow Kingdom

I corrected my students' papers in green ink for thirty years--what's the fuss?

At PhiBetaCons blog on National Review (http://phibetacons.nationalreview.com/ ):
If You're Successful on Your Own, You Can Say What You Think [George Leef]

Bill Cosby is one such person. Another is saxophone great Branford Marsalis, who here (http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2009/01/branford_marsal.html) offers some politically incorrect opinions about today's college students. (He has taught at several schools.)

It seems to be dawning on more and more people that the cultivated image of higher education (eager students working hard to develop their skills and knowledge) is sharply at odds with the reality (many are prima donnas who insist on praise and high grades no matter how little they learn).

Ah, but what is the status of a red pencil? Allowed, or not? And what will they do when the young, impressionable minds make the same association with green marks that they now make with red ones? Might this turn them against "green" causes altogether? For the sake of the environment, school work must be corrected in red!

Ink color is not offensive - but cutting remarks are. I had a seminary professor who - we were sure - went through a case of red pens every semester. But it was from here that I regained confidence that had been summarily removed by an elementary school teacher many years earlier. Red is so it can be seen. Disguising mistakes - or complements - benefits no one. I use a red pen to proof our church bulletines - so we can all see where the corrections are needed. It shortens the process and makes it easier. I am also careful to accompany the corrections and add as gentle and positive a set of comments as possible.

Larry, heh. :-)

The problem with our righteous astonishment is that these politically correct weanies have a point. When you have less real goodness in your surrounding culture sustaining you, and the only things that really matter to a society and thus the only things on which to base one's self-esteem are exam-derived numbers (SATs, IQ, GRE, GPA), then you end up judging your own worth to society (and thus your own worth, whatever the existentialists would say) significantly from those numbers.

In such a case, it makes sense that a bunch of teachers would instinctively try to de-freight the import of the grades by drawing less attention to them. It's their way of saying to the student, "Look, you suck at math, but that doesn't mean you're a bad person." The weird thing is that this almost begins to make sense in a society where so much rides on those numbers.

In my role as a college teacher of research and writing, I gave up red pens many years ago for two reasons: you can't erase red pen and there were so many red marks on the page that it was distracting. Now I use No. 2 pencils. Students still tell me my comments can sometimes be intimidating, but no one has ever said they missed seeing them on the page.

nothing new here. Schools in the Houston area in the early 1990s banned the use of red for correcting school papers because the color red was considered to traumatic for the little darlings.

I continue to use red whenever I have to correct something

I've had various people tell me that I shouldn't use red pen. I'm not going to spend a lot of time arguing with teachings who prefer to use other colors themselves. I will, however, spend plenty of time arguing with people who think that I shouldn't use red because it's insensitive or demoralizing or some other such nonsense.

I use red to indicate that something was wrong. The attachment on my part may be somewhat irrational, but throughout the world, red is the (almost) universal color to indicate a warning or a stop. Ideally, I would like to warn my students to stop answering questions in such a way as to cause me to make lots of marks on their paper.

I teach college English, and I stopped using red ink after a couple of years. It just looked too much like shouting, like I was personally irritated by their mistakes. Didn't set a good tone. In college courses, you usually don't have enough time with the students to make your toughness pay off and be felt as love. I find it more productive to signal a trusting and compassionate relationship right off the bat, without doing them the disservice of ignoring their errors.

Maybe it's not just the teachers that should be caned over this.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7374218/

"At Daniels Farm Elementary School in Trumbull, Conn., Karwoski’s teachers grade papers by giving examples of better answers for those students who make mistakes. But that approach meant the kids often found their work covered in red, the color that teachers long have used to grade work.

Parents objected. Red writing, they said, was “stressful.” The principal said teachers were just giving constructive advice and the color of ink used to convey that message should not matter. But some parents could not let it go."

When I taught at an international school in Korea I corrected in whatever was to hand-- even crayon when everything else went missing-- but red was, while not banned, something of a no-no. Asian kids, according to their cultural superstition, thought you were putting a death hex on them. Seriously. Red was the color of blood, hence violence and death. Remember, Bill, symbolism is not universal. Daniel is correct here.

Rod, you keep posting these scare stories from the british press.

Do you know why the British Conservative blogosphere hardly ever gets worked up about them?

It's because it's what the british press do. Lots of these stories aren't true, you notice the continued use of the words "hundreds of schools". It's probably one or two, this ban won't be enforceable and will be forgotten by the teachers in a few weeks when they can't find another colour but red.

Oh and by the way, this is extremely tactless; "Where are the soccer hooligans when you need them?" Next time you complain about american political correctness i'll ask "where are the KKK when you need them?" Because hey, what do we need more than violence against ethnic minorities.

I agree with that last comment about kids being meticulous scorekeepers. My daughters played Upwards Basketball, in which nobody kept score. They received awards not only for "Best Defense" but "Most Christ-like." It was a nice idea, and a good environment for small children who were just learning, but it didn't conquer basic human nature: the older kids always knew what the real score was, and (sadly) my daughter cried whenever she got "most Christ-like." Now there's an irony!