short takes

[cellio]

Funny: Only in... $location.

Overheard in the office: "Should that be on fire?"

From the whiners-with-too-much-time-on-their-hands department, a new education fad: some parents (and students) object to grading in red ink. Red is "stressful", some say, and teachers should be using more "positive" colors like blue. Sheesh. Some people will read negativity into anything. It's just a color, people! And for the record, I much prefer mark-up in red as opposed to blue or the fluffy alternatives like turquoise (which is too light to be able to see easily). Red has the best contrast with the black ink on the white page; if you want me to see your little squiggle, don't use lime green!

Comments

[jeannegrrl.livejournal.com]

re: red ink

One of my teachers in college was famous for her green pen of death. One day I asked her why she used green instead of red, and she said something along the lines of "she thought it would be less stressful" to the students. I guarantee you, when you get an essay returned to you with green writing all over it, it's JUST AS STRESSFUL as if it were in red! :-)

Sheesh!

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

I use whatever bottle of fountain pen ink I have handy: red, blue, black, turquoise, brown, green, ...

[indigodove.livejournal.com]

I grade my third graders' papers in purple or green. Some parents have said they like that. Heck, if it makes them happy, it's no big deal to me...and I like purple anyway :-)

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

I used purple because it was ideosyncratic. ;-)

And I bet those teachers aren't using gel pens, either, which are forbidden in our school systems. (Please don't ask why.)

[yorkshirelad.livejournal.com]

Right on. This was one of the topics of discussion at lunch today. We all agree that this is DUMB. All my co-workers and I had stuff graded in red ink and are no worse for it. If kids are they soft today then I fear for the future.

[akitrom.livejournal.com]

I heard about this some years back. A teacher wrote, in response, that red is the color of blood, of drama, of passion. She waved a red pen over her students papers like a bright red alarm, a summons to arms against mediocre thoughts and ill-formed language.

[sekhmets-song.livejournal.com]

I think that we are worrying way too much about stressing kids out. If the kids stressed studying a little more, most of them would see fewer marks of any color. Let them be stressed out. Let them learn that it is better to avoid the stress by striving to do better on schoolwork.
I do worry when the school systems are more concerned about keeping the kids happy at every possible moment that about educating them to be thoughtful, skillful, capable adults.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear!

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

I went through a phase in high school in which I wrote in red because I thought it was an individualistic thing to do, and because red pens could be had more cheaply than pink or purple.

None of the teachers cared except for Mlle. Spaulding, who asked me repeatedly to please not do my French homework in red because she used red for grading and it would be harder to see her comments if I persisted in writing in red.

(Stupid-teenage-stubbornness note: I did not heed her requests, or her warnings that she wouldn't accept red anymore, until she gave me a zero on a homework because it was in red. And then I switched back to blue)

[tangerinpenguin.livejournal.com]

The tech writer for my first job (cellio may remember Trish) used green as well, just to be different. And I can agree that we learned to dread the "vulcan blood of typographic death" that all but dripped from our drafts just as much, or more, than red...

[anniemal.livejournal.com]

My teachers graded in whatever colour they felt like. I didn't care as long as I could spot their comments as different from my paper. I was more interested in/worried about what they had to say.

My 10th grade English teacher made me stop using a pencil for a pen because my writing isn't terribly legible, and it bothered his eyes. We compromised on a cartridge fountain pen. I still don't like ball points, though I'm not as fussy now as then. There's a certain feel to writing with something that transmits a sense of the paper... I dunno. Bic stic and its ilk have never had it far as I know. Hand me a bottle of Higgins and a Speedball.

[lrstrobel.livejournal.com]

People have too much time on their hands an need a ****ing life. Life is hard, wear a helmet.

[goljerp]

I'm somewhat colorblind, and I still have no problem with teachers grading in red ink. When I was writing by hand, my color of choice was blue (blue erasermate... ah, those were the days). When I switched to a computer, it was very easy to tell the difference between my dot matrix printer and the grader's scrawl.

The nice thing about grading in red is that it's obvious what remarks are the teacher's, and what the student's. The reasons don't seem sufficient to me to change the general standard, although of course if individual people choose to use other colors for their own reasons, fine.

[cellio]

Purple isn't so bad -- it's (usually) saturated enough for people with vision problems to see, and it's different enough in hue from black to stand out. I remember receiving papers back that were marked up in pink, lime green, pale blue, and other wacky colors, and sometimes I had to go back to the teacher/professor and ask for something legible. Fortunately, most used red, which still has the best contrast.

If individual teachers want to use other colors that's up to them (so long as those lime-green users respond to students' needs :-) ), but I'd sure hate to see a ban on the most useful color out there.

[cellio]

Ok, I won't ask why since you said not to (though I'm curious), but what's a gel pen?

[cellio]

Good for that teacher! Students are there to learn, not be coddled.

[cellio]

Damn straight! Our society is way too worried about coddling people and enabling undesirable behavior for fear of offense. It's not mean to challenge people, and we are not doing anyone a favor by catering to these whims.

When I was in grade school I read a story -- details long since forgotten -- about a blind kid who was walking indoors somewhere and smacked his shin on the corner of a coffee table (or some such). He said "someone should put padding on that" and the response he got was "life is full of unpadded corners; you need to learn to deal with them". These days someone would likely charge discrimination against the person who put the table there, even though it was not at all willful. Sad.

[cellio]

Yes. When did the content become secondary to the mechanics?

I want to be able to see the markup. If it's a scrawled comment just about anything works; if it's, say, a circle around an incorrect piece of punctuation, and it's black or maybe even blue, I can easily miss it. That doesn't happen with red.

My 10th grade English teacher made me stop using a pencil for a pen because my writing isn't terribly legible, and it bothered his eyes.

Pencils also smear, especially in blue books (facing pages, cheap paper). I had some trouble with that when I was a grader in college. (This is, obviously, for in-class exams -- otherwise the stuff came off a printer.)

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Well, you can see them here at Staples. You've probably used them already -- the ink is gel instead of liquid. They're banned at schools because 1) they come in lots of weird colors, and kids are only allowed to write in black or blue, and 2) when they break and get all over things they are pretty messy. But Mostly, I think, because it's easier to ban them from school property than to have to cope with "Well, I'm writing in Gold and flourescent green because it's recess, and not in class!" by banning all of them from the school and making a color requirement for classes, i.e., blue and black.

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

I said don't ask why because it's one of the 1010 stupid rules that they have at school.

Hilary of Serendip once said to me, about SCA issues that people insisted went to the Board first, instead of being worked out locally first. She said something that has stuck with me for a long time. "If you make the Board make a decision, it won't fit any of the Kingdoms, or especially the group with the problem."

I feel that way about schools and school boards. To solve tiny problems, like kids being fascinated with the new gel pens, they make huge onerous rules, and they try to take all possible conflict out of the schools.

When Jen was ready for preschool, all the schools I investigated were currently going with the "no sharp edges, no conflicts" philosophy. I found a private home daycare for her, and public schools for K-12. I think these teachers must have been educated in the type of place I didn't send her to.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

Okay, that fitness center photo is amusing.

[profane-stencil.livejournal.com]

I do worry when the school systems are more concerned about keeping the kids happy at every possible moment than about educating them to be thoughtful, skillful, capable adults.

The former probably seems easier to do. And they have to take tests to prove the latter.

[cellio]

The mess argument makes sense (especially for younger kids), but ballpoints also come in weird colors so I'm not sure how color matters. But it's bureacracy; it doesn't have to make sense. :-)

[cellio]

To solve tiny problems, like kids being fascinated with the new gel pens, they make huge onerous rules, and they try to take all possible conflict out of the schools.

Yup. For any given problem there is an appropriate level at which to resolve it. For this one, that level is the classroom. Teachers can set any rules they want about the work students will turn in; that should cover this.

[cellio]

I liked the Texas one too. I've seen that! Didn't have a camera at the time, alas.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

The cow wash and 24hr Fitness photos are hilarious.

The no red ink business is pretty silly. If you care about your school work, a page marked up full of errors in rainbow sparkly pen is just as stressful as a page marked up full of errors in red pen (maybe more so-- red is a neutral markup color to me, but I have some unpleasant memories of a couple of teachers who were outwardly perky and friendly but actually quite vindictive if they didn't like you), and if you don't care then no color is going to make a difference. But just to play devil's advocate, suppose that there is some credibility to the notion that red markup is stressful and discouraging for students, but other colors or markup are not. Which is more important-- that students absorb the corrections and learn from them, period, or that they see the corrections in red markup and perhaps learn from them less?

[dr-zrfq.livejournal.com]

Yeah sister! I read that article, and saw red ;->

The point is, red has the highest contrast with almost ANY color ink on the (white/yellow/pale-green) page. (Am I showing my age that I remember "Eye-Ease" paper?) Anthropological studies show that the first name for a color beyond "white/light" and "black/dark" is "red" of some sort, in pretty much every language.

When I was in school, the rule was we weren't allowed to use any color that was deemed too close to red (any other color was fair game), so that both student and teacher could distinguish comments from the submitted text. And that's how it was explained to the students -- as early as first grade! I suppose they had a higher opinion of student intelligence then. If red markup is more stressful, it is because the culture has made it that way. (See also prior comments on this post, on how other colors can be just as stress-inducing.)

The important thing here is that the mechanics be useful to the learning process. Being able to distinguish text from commentary is Very Important. The exact mechanism used to ensure that this happens is less important, but you gotta have *something* in place to ensure it.