Thank you tdn for those inspiring words of wisdom, so eloquently presented. Most people here seemed to recognize that the color of the pen does not mean a damn thing if Johhny Can’t Read. No one was calling for paddles and beatings, or public humiliation of the terminally stupid. As for self esteem, this may be hard to believe, but I was not good at everything in school (gasp). Most things yes, one class, no. In short, I had no clue. However, I paid attention, asked questions, and went from almost failing to a solid pass. I got a little pin for “most improved” student in that class. Guess what - I was more proud of that than I was of all the other classes where I was acing all the tests. Why? I felt I had DONE something. THAT is self esteem. It is a feeling of accomplishment for something difficult that was EARNED. That teacher was using a red pen, which (believe it or not) made it easier for me to find my screwups quickly - it stood out. You don’t give someone self esteem, they give it to themselves. A red or purple pen has nothing to do with “self worth” or “self esteem”. If Junior is stone cold stupid, a purple pen will not save him.
“… America… get the fuck over it…asswipe” etc etc etc. You remind me of an asshole I have the misfortune to work with. “You have a right to my opinion (or I’ll kick your ass)”, and “In America, everyone is free, but only if they are exactly like me”. You sir are a moron. I wish the Great Ham upon you and all your ilk.
tdn, I had this post planned out that was full of contempt and sarcasm for your rant, however, I think that I will try a more productive approach. There are a couple of things that I think are worth addressing.
First, consider the fact that making these small steps to ensure a less hostile learning environment is actually a step in the wrong direction. For one thing, I am not convinced that red ink is inherently “hostile”, but more importantly an environment of just positive reinforcement is not the most effective way to teach. You should not be afraid to negatively reinforce bad behavior (i.e. Not studying, goofing around and so forth) as well. If the stated goal is to produce well behaved adults capable of functioning in the world via our education system, we should be using all of the tools at our disposal.
You say that those of us that are poking fun at this issue are “mired” in the dark ages. I don’t know if that is true or not, but it seems to me that students are more ignorant now than ever before. I don’t know if there is a one to one relationship between that and the increasing attention to not hurting their feelings, but I can tell you that what we are doing now is working less well than what we used to do. Perhaps it is time to stop doing it.
Second, I am not sure what your free market hijack has to do with anythin
A bit strongly worded, but one of the few rational posts I’ve seen on this topic.
hijack/
This will ruin the fun for employees of teachers’ retirement plans. Back in the day, one of our favorite things was to be able to take our red pens and circle all of the mistakes on a teacher’s retirement application and return it with along with a blank application–no corrections allowed on the applications.
The first thing on the application was the ever popular: Please read all instructions before completing the application. We would circle this in red ink and then move through the application circling all of the errors they had made or directions they had missed. It was awesome!
Now retirement plan employees will have to find out the teacher’s correction color of choice before “grading” the application in order to perform effectively. 
It’s explaining the point of the article. The article is not about some government mandate or sweeping educational reform that requires teachers to correct papers in purple ink (which, given the way some people are talking about this, you’d think is the case). Instead, the article is about businesses — pen markers and office supply retailers — ramping up production of different colored ink pens to meet market demand. It’s the teachers driving the demand, not anyone else.
The article further goes on to examine the reasons for the increased demand, but it’s primarily a business story.
Anytime. You have but to ask.
You’ll notice that I didn’t use such hyperbole. But Dio’s comment “Fuck their self-esteems” says plenty. That attitude is prevelant throughout this thread, and many past threads on this subject. There is a definite feeling of “kids don’t deserve touchy-feely emotions, they need to be beaten down” on this board and out in the world. One genius doper even once said that giving kids self-esteem was immoral.
Sure. I’m not saying that kids deserve false praise. That’s quite the opposite of what I’m saying. And people who think that way are just as misguided as those who think self-esteem is damaging.
The point is to say to kids “You are OK, but your spelling needs help”, and not “You are a bad person because you suck at spelling.” Nor is it to say “Your spelling is perfect” when it is not. People on both sides of the fence seem not to get this.
Do purple pens actually increase learning? I don’t know. Probably not. But there is certainly no harm in finding out, and there is certainly no need to go off on a “Fuck their self-esteems” rant.
Sure enough. But sometimes kids are ill-equipped for the task. They don’t always have the tools to do that. Sometimes they need a little push in the right direction. Same with adults, more often than not.
Agreed. Neither will calling him stone cold stupid.
I never said everyone had to be exactly me. But I was a little over the top. But hey, 1) this is the Pit, get the fuck over it you slime-weasel, and 2) this topic often has me seeing red.
I propose red.
Well, it sure isn’t my kid’s fault if she has eleven words marked wrong out of ten. 
Thanks for being more level-headed than I was. My first post to this thread was more emotive than factual. Perhaps I should explain my vitriol.
I have had self-esteem problems my whole life. And it made me miserable. It made people hate me, which made me hate myself even more, and into the viscious cycle I went. It got to the point where I was considering suicide on a nearly daily basis. At the time I didn’t know it was a self-esteem issue, I just knew that my life was horrible.
Then one day I had a “fuck this” moment. It was on December 31, 1991, around 10PM. I resolved to do something about it. So the next day (or maybe the day after, sans hangover) I hit the bookstores. I scoured the self help section. I bought a king’s ransom worth of books, and studied each one carefully. I was diligent in seperating the valuable advice from the crap. And I worked on my self-esteem like I’d never worked on anything before.
And you know what? I’m a happy person now. Other than the occasional (read: very rare) bouts with the blues, I’ve been happy and well-adjusted for twelve years now. Self-esteem literally saved my life.
So you can see how when people devalue it as useless or even harmful, I can get pretty pissy, and I’ll be first in line to argue that attitude down.
Sure, I’ll consider it, but probably not for long. It makes little sense to me. For me, at least, love of learning beats fear of not learning hands down. I refuse to believe I’m the only person like that.
I can agree with you here but only to the smallest extent possible. Educators have been working for years to find out how people work best. If it turns out that a positive environment is more effective than a negative one, which I understand to be true, then we be doing that. If it turns out that a hostile environment works best, then we have to evaluate at what cost to children’s well-being education is, and decide what sorts of compromises we are willing to accept.
Is a purple pen better than a red one? Hell of I know, but if a teacher discovers that by using a purple pen, students’ grades go up, then I’m not going to go on the war path about how PC we’ve become. I say good on the teacher.
No matter what color those tools are?
Probably a bit harsh of me, but take away the hyperbole, and you can see where I’m coming from. “It was good enough for my dad, so it’s good enough for your little punk” is not what I’d consider a wise philosophy.
I couldn’t agree more. We need to find out why kids are failing. (Or passing without learning.) I don’t think we can honestly say it’s because they feel too good about themselves, however. I’ll say it again – lying to children about how well they did, or passing them to the next grade without requiring them to learn, is hardly conducive to their self-esteem.
I was counting the name.
I think the point is that if we’re giving so much consideration to self-esteem that we’re going to the frankly ridiculous extreme of worrying about which colour we mark in, we’re going a bit too far. As has been pointed out, any colour associated with being wrong will take on a negative hue (ha ha etc). Everything is a balance. More than that, though, I think this sort of consideration is counter-productive, as in the example later.
There’s nothing intrinsically threatening about the colour red; the potentially threatening thing is getting something wrong (and it needn’t be threatening at all). My brother went undiagnosed with quite severe dyslexia for years because his teachers were deliberately marking things right that he had got wrong so he wouldn’t feel bad. When my parents discovered this and got him proper tuition, lo and behold! all of a sudden no-one needed to pretend he was getting good marks, because he could. If making a mistake is such a threat to a child’s self-esteem, then that child needs help learning how to use their mistakes for their own benefit. They do not need to have them effaced and in fact it’s highly damaging to do so, IMO. I can’t tell you how much greater my brother’s self-esteem was once he could read at the level of his peers, rather than simply being lied to that he could.
I know that the pen thing is a milder version of what happened with my brother, but I believe that it’s in the same vein; fostering the impression that mistakes aren’t something that need to be fixed. If we’re worried about self-esteem, then a far more productive measure in my mind would be to make sure to indicate what the student has done well in addition to marking the mistakes. All my best teachers did this.
[size=0]And of course I realise that the original
Thanks for explaining this far better than I could have.
Dead Badger] I agree with everything you said.
I guess all I’m trying to say is let’s not throw out the self-esteem baby with the red ink bathwater.
“And we were GRATEFUL!”
tdn,
Your own story belies what you are espousing. Self esteem is forged through adversity. It can’t be given and it can’t even be nurtured all that much beyond the common sense aproach of not gratuitiously insulting and hurting kids on purpose. Self esteem comes when a person overcomes adversity and learns that he or she CAN overcome adversity successfully(as in your case, there was something wrong in your life and you went out and attacked the problem and solved it-I’d be willing to bet that the majority of your self esteem comes not from what was written in some silly self-help books, but from how you used that information.) Telling kids that they are wrong when they ARE wrong gives them the starting point to learn what is correct. While you may be correct in the abstract when you say that nobody is advocating passing kids who don’t deserve it or holding the kids feelings more important than his correct schoolwork, in practice that is what it all too often boild down to. It’s like Communism: A good idea in theory, but a disaster IRL.
Self-esteem is all well and good, but not when it’s used to artificially inflate one’s self-worth.
In that media-writing course I took last semester, every student got an A. As are nice for one’s GPA and one’s ego, but when these kids go on to take their professional-emphasis writing course next semester, they’re going to be in for a shock. These professors care a lot about writing and grade according to professional-level standards. At least one professor is rather frightened at the prospect of having to re-teach the basic skills that the media-writing course was supposed to teach. Having a classful of students who piss and whine because they’re not getting an A in his class isn’t his idea of a good time.
And, FTR, this guy grades his students’ papers in pencil.
Robin
I think that the problem with that term is that it has become somewhat charged and associated with fuzzy-headed faddish trends in education that, quite frankly, need to be discarded. In a lot of ways, it can be seen in the same light as the business buzzwords that plague us today.
Consider the difference in these two statements:
[ol]
[li]Teachers should do what they can to not make students feel bad about themselves, while still correcting the mistakes that they make.[/li][li]Teachers should strive to create a learning space in which self-esteem is fostered while guiding the student in the learning process in an environment free of emotional toxicity.[/li][/ol]
Now, obviously the second example is over the top (although not as far as I would wish!) but you see what I am getting at, I hope.
I appreciate you sharing some of your personal experiences with me. Allow me to do the same. For the early part of my education, I attended a Montessori school. This was in the 70s and the basic idea is that I would be in a learning space free of grades and judgment and that my natural curiosity and drive to learn would lead me to explore the materials around me and I would become educated. Well, I am sure that this works for some kids but the result in my case is that I basically wandered around all day either reading or drawing.
Then came the fateful day when we moved and I had to go to a traditional school. I was fucked and had a lot of catching up to do. I guess that this is why, for me, nontraditional theories of education are somewhat of a hot button. I would be better off even today if I had adults around me that had been more concerned with kicking me in the ass and making sure that I had the tools I needed.
That was me, not Airman.
Robin
- Scrubs brain to get image of baby’s red bathwater out of head… scrubs some more *
That’s not entirely true. As you say, insulting kids can have a devastating effect on them, but parents and teachers, while not “giving” self-esteem, can give kids the tools to develop it on their own.
How come it took me so long to develop mine? Because no one ever told me I could. I thought it was my lot in life to be sad. Imagine if someone had told me what was in my own power 10 years earlier!
Overcoming adversity can help solidify self-esteem, but it is not, in itself, self-esteem. This is partly at the heart of my complaint – contrary to what many people say around here, self-esteem is not a prize bestowed upon only those who have accomplished things. Everybody deserves it.
Let’s say Sally and Suzy are finger painting. Sally paints something so good it’s hung in the Louvre. Does Sally deserve to feel good about herself? Yes, and she probably does. Suzy, on the other hand, spills the paint and makes a mess. Do you lie to her and tell her that her spill is as good as Sally’s painting? No. Do you tell her that she is less of a person than Sally? Also, no. Suzy is just as worthy and lovable as Sally. Being less of a painter doesn’t make her less of a person. And Suzy needs to know that. In our accomplishment driven, competitive society, it’s easy to forget that.
Telling kids they they are wrong when their actions are wrong is the starting point to self-destructive behavior. Keeping the self seperate from the actions is vital.
Like any good idea, it can be mishandled, sure.