OK. That one made me spit ginger beer on the monitor.
Our school is undergoing WASC this year, so we have all been writing mission statements and goals and ESLRs and shit. They all tend to sound like Binarydrone’s line, because Og Forbid we actually take a stand for Education instead of “lifelong learning!” :rolleyes:
(For those of you not in education, WASC is our accreditation inspection, Think ISO9000, unit inspection, visit from the Home Office, etc. It tends to make normally competent administrators turn into drooling Educratese-spouting morons.)
I personally believe that if I were allowed to shoot any three of my students at any given time during the year, at any time, for any reason, you’d see behavior problems drop to zero, overnight.
I suspect in a world where this were allowed to happen… you’d see parents spending a LOT more time working on their kids’ manners and behavior, too.
…and in a decade or two, students will have learned to associate purple with getting something wrong on a test/paper/homework assignment, and once again there will be a search for a new, non-threatening color to correct papers with…
If they get scared by purple, just switch back to red. Meanwhile, which is worse for the kids? To go fat, dumb and happy through school and not learn anything, assuring a place among the chronically unemployed, or to actually learn and be able to support themselves in a decent manner later on?
I don’t think you people realize the seriousness of what’s at stake here. This is not about education and self-esteem; this is a transnational struggle between Red and Purple. These two international conglomerates have been locked in struggle for world domination for centuries, perhaps even millennia. Choose your side carefully.
Considering almost every student has to write in either blue or black, doesn’t purple seem too close to be distinguishable from the other two? How would anyone even notice the correction?? Or is that the whole point? (So we’ll all feeeeeeeeel better :rolleyes: about our inabilities.)
If we use the Bad Color, it will attract the attention of Those We Do Not Speak Of Except During Months Whose Names Contain the Letter “R”, Months Whose Names Are Less Than Five Letters Long, or the Month of August.
I love writing rough drafts either in purple or in pink, depending on the swing of my bizarro fetish/ritual/compulsion of the moment.
When I were a TA, I would grade using red or purple or green or blue – anything with a fine point tip so I could squeeze even *more * comments about their shortcomings on the paper
Seriously, I used to write quite a lot on their papers, constructive criticism, corrections, and sometimes just comments if something they wrote made me think or was interesting.
They got accustomed to that, and I had more than one every term tell me that they appreciated that I wrote so much (if they had something wrong, I would say why).
I was known as the Toxic TA, and Dr Death, by my students.
I have never graded in red pen. In fact, I try not to use pens at all, if I can help it. I grade and write in pencil because I have terrible handwriting and letter formation, so I need to be able to erase whatever craptastically incomprehensible comments I scribbled on the paper. Basically, I’m too lacking in self-esteem to use the dreaded Red Pen of Doom, probably because some horribly mean English teacher shredded my self-worth and crushed my fragile ego…
I don’t think the concept is new, I just think it’s gotten media attention now. I can remember getting red corrections in school, but I can also remember my kindergarten teacher using blue marker to grade student’s work, and I remember my second grade teacher used several colors to correct work, each color corrected a different type of mistake. I thought it was cool. This was in the mid to late 70’s mind you.
