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April 05, 2005
Please, No, Not the Red Pen!
Read this recent AP article about the new trend of teachers grading with purple or other various colors, rather than red.
The only problem is that the AP is about eight months late to the story, and by continuing to go on and on about it news organizations are making a mountain out of molehill.
What is the big hubbub? The whole point of using a pen that’s a different color than the students’ work is to make the grading marks stand out. The use of other isn’t indicative of the fall of society any more than using red is “derogatory or demeaning.”
"The color is everything," said [Joseph Foriska, principal of Thaddeus Stevens Elementary in Pittsburgh], an educator for 31 years.
He’s wrong. Color is nothing but an easy way to distinguish the teachers marks from the students’ work.
At Daniels Farm Elementary School in Trumbull, Connecticut, 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.
I see. We’re letting a few hysterical parents create huge deals out of nothing and dictate school policy. Well that's nothing new.
Thank goodness for this breath of reality at the end of the article.
"I don't think changing to purple or green will make a huge difference if the teaching doesn't go along with it," [teacher Janet] Jones said. "If you're just looking at avoiding the color red, the students might not be as frightened, but they won't be better writers."
Amen. If we don't put a rest to this idiocy, we’re going to start seeing reports of prisoner abuse because the interrogator was writing in the wrong color ink.
Updates:The Education Wonks and Devil's Advocate also seem to be baffled by the parents' behavior.
Michael Williams has a post relating this story to the emphasis on self-esteem. I agree with that, but he also seems to think that the emphasis on self-esteem is because of the "feminization of education at the primary and secondary levels." I'm not so sure I agree with that. Women have dominated the primary and secondary educational sector for hundreds of years, but this self-esteem thing is relatively new.
I actually wouldn't be surprised if more of the parents who complained were female. However, the problem isn't necessarily that people are complaining about stupid stuff; they do that all the time. The problem is that someone is listening to them, and I see that as more of a cultural thing. The principle in the story is male and so is the guy who wrote the news story. School administration and news organizations definitely do not tend to be dominated by females.
Posted by illuminaria at April 5, 2005 12:51 PM