No more red ink!

[Zoe]

FinnAgain, how much time have you spent teaching in public schools?

How in heaven’s name do you think that a public school teacher can base a grade on anything so inexact as “teacher evaluation” when parents are choosing the color of ink that we use when we grade papers?

[FinnAgain]

@Zoe

How in heaven’s name do you think that a public school teacher can base a grade on anything so inexact as “teacher evaluation” when parents are choosing the color of ink that we use when we grade papers?

Obviously parents shouldn’t get to choose that.
It’s simply a small change, and a change of lesser importance, which can be made by teachers. As I said, there are other things to focus on first, in any case.
But, yes, a written assesment of a student by their teachers would be much more effective an indicator than most standardized tests.

@Excalibre

On the other hand, parents demanded this. It was not the result of educational research.

Good point, and one I neglected. I don’t think parents should be able to dictate policy to such a degree

@Excalibre

Most professions involve at least some writing, and people really should be able to do it, and moreso they should know the basic grammar and orthographic conventions underlying formal writing. That sort of thing is not generally effectively learned through osmosis…

Of course, societal literacy is ideal… for certain people. Even most people. But the functionally literate are not illiterate. But yes, my job isn’t to make merely functionally literate kids. I guess that’s a tangent and I apologize for bringing it up.

@Excalibre

Excessive focus on “not criticizing” misses the boat - children should be made to understand that a criticism of a writing assignment (especially a minor grammatical point) isn’t a judgment of them personally

Agreed, I just think that manner of criticism is important.

@Excalibre

“Red is a hot color” is not the result of current research, dear

I beg to differ. Darling.

@Excalibre

Further, children ought to be fluent in the standard dialect, both in spoken and written forms. As I’ve explained, writing lacks the same wiring in the brain, so it must be trained deliberately, and probably with correction along the way. Either way, though, children ought to leave school capable of applying the principles of prescriptive grammar (to a point. We can abandon the nonsense about splitting infinitives and so forth.) The standard dialect is the language of success, and a student’s entry into the professional, middle-class world depends in part upon the ability to speak in the language of that world. It’s doing children a grave disservice not to teach them how to write, and write properly.

I’d agree. However, you never have to teach a child a perscriptive grammar at all as long as you teach good writing. It sounds backwards, but as long as you attend to flow and coherence, with an added bit on craft, you don’t really need to have explicit lessons in grammar. But boy oh boy is this a tangential hijack.

@Excalibre

That doesn’t mean that a college graduate shouldn’t know when to use which.

Of course, but word usage wasn’t one of the most common mistakes.

@Excalibre

One only need note the different cultural values attached to red to see that it is indeed a psychological issue, not an inherent hardware issue. Off the top of my head, in China, red is the color of luck, of success - it is the most auspicious color, thus its prominence in homes and businesses. Clearly it’s a matter of our learned reactions to the colors. Thus, if teachers all switched to sea-foam, students would have negative reactions to that. (If, indeed, it’s true that students are somehow psychologically conditioned to associate colors and grades.)

Yeep. Seems fairly likely that it’d vary culture to culture.

@Excalibre

Oh dear, just what the humanities need: something else to give across the notion that they’re not “real” classes.

Abandoning arbitrary and innacurate representations of a student’s skill for personalized evaluations from those who’ve been around them most… seems good to me. No?

@Excalibre

ay, in the end, I think the only thing sillier than parents fussing about the color ink is used to give their children overinflated grades is people fussing about the parents’ fussing. (So then with my fussing over people’s fussing over these parents’ fussing . . . )

Boy you’re fussy.

In any case, I never meant to get into this heated a discussion, and I guess all I have to say is that parents should set the guidelines, but it does seem to be a minor change that’s worth making, in my estimation (keeping in mind how ineffective top-down changes are in the majority of teachers).

[Excalibre]

@FinnAgain

Obviously parents shouldn’t get to choose that.
It’s simply a small change, and a change of lesser importance, which can be made by teachers. As I said, there are other things to focus on first, in any case.
But, yes, a written assesment of a student by their teachers would be much more effective an indicator than most standardized tests.

You won’t catch me defending standardized tests. I have some odd (probably Satanic in origin) ability with the things, but I’ve seen folks as smart as me or smarter do so vastly worse that I just have no trust in them.

@FinnAgain

Good point, and one I neglected. I don’t think parents should be able to dictate policy to such a degree

The eternal problem in public education, or so I’m beginning to think. It’s excellent having local control, at least in principle. But it starts to suck when parents decide they make better teachers than the teachers do (incidentally, I’m not fond of the concept of homeschooling for that reason.)

@FinnAgain

Of course, societal literacy is ideal… for certain people. Even most people. But the functionally literate are not illiterate. But yes, my job isn’t to make merely functionally literate kids. I guess that’s a tangent and I apologize for bringing it up.

Well, it’s important even if an individual kid won’t ever use the skill - I mean, if he ends up a day laborer, it’s not gonna do him much good to know when to use an apostrophe. But it can create such a strong impediment when it’s missing that not to teach it is serious negligence. Not to have mastery of both spoken and written forms of the standard dialect means opportunities lost later in life, and schools are supposed to be ensuring that none of their students miss those opportunities.

@FinnAgain

I beg to differ. Darling.

Ahh, thank you, my love. I wish I had time to look at them now, but I’m busy procrastinating on my Chinese homework. They look quite fascinating, though.

@FinnAgain

I’d agree. However, you never have to teach a child a perscriptive grammar at all as long as you teach good writing. It sounds backwards, but as long as you attend to flow and coherence, with an added bit on craft, you don’t really need to have explicit lessons in grammar. But boy oh boy is this a tangential hijack.

I don’t actually think that’s true. I’ve seen bad style and straight-up bad grammar (as in, a failure to apply the orthographic conventions of written English. Grammar is inherent, don’t oppress linguistic minorities, yadda yadda yadda . . . ) in fellow students lots of times. It’s one reason to hate group projects. I always appoint myself editor of the final paper. And I see so many confusions with apostrophes, and homophones, and so on that it really depresses me. At the same time, I see the sort of horrendous sentence structure and ambiguity that could definitely be corrected through better education in writing style and a stronger focus on inculcating that flow and coherence you mention. I definitely think that’s lacking - it certainly wasn’t there in my high school classes (no explicit composition class at all, sadly, and just no discussion of it, period, in English classes) which makes me think that absent skills in the area could probably be fixed with some explicit attention to it in class. But still, I see such things as misapplied punctuation and confusion between “fewer” and “less” all the damn time. (Plus, I’m apparently the only person in the world who understands how to actually formally cite my sources in papers. Last group paper I ended up spending hours tracking down other people’s sources because they cited them so badly.)

@FinnAgain

Abandoning arbitrary and innacurate representations of a student’s skill for personalized evaluations from those who’ve been around them most… seems good to me. No?

Well, in elementary school our grades actually had both, and the teachers’ discussion was definitely the more relevant part. I think that’s a fine idea at a young age, but I think that evaluations that are as objective and clear as can be managed are necessary beyond, say, elementary or middle school.

@FinnAgain

In any case, I never meant to get into this heated a discussion, and I guess all I have to say is that parents should set the guidelines, but it does seem to be a minor change that’s worth making, in my estimation (keeping in mind how ineffective top-down changes are in the majority of teachers).

I can’t actually think of any time I’ve gotten a paper back with red pen. My high school teachers almost all used other colors (mostly green and purple), though that was only a few years back (I know that in a conversation, at least one of them said that her decision not to use red was deliberate, comparing red ink to “bleeding wounds”. For the life of me, I can’t remember who that was.) My profs, nowadays, draw little scribbles in the margins in pencil, which may or may not reflect some reaction to the paper. I wouldn’t know, as I can’t ever decipher them.

[The_King_of_Soup]

I’m apparently in deeper academic waters than I can safely navigate. But I’d like to discuss the red-is-bad-for-grading theory a little from the safety of the wading pool.

Thanks, FinnAgain, for the citations. I went through them, and here are my thoughts:

Unfortunately I couldn’t find Wilson’s “Massacre by Red Ink.” The Journal of Experiential Education is doubtless a respected and authoritative publication but it’s not exactly crowding *Car & Driver * off the racks down here. I did call the local U., and their library doesn’t carry it. This is a shame because I suspect that this very article may be what the fuss is all about, and discussing this topic without having read it is bound to be less productive than it should be. As for the rest of what you provided:

1st Link - Abstract of S. Bratcher “Evaluating Children’s Writing.” All this tells me is that Bratcher includes a chapter called “Transcending the Red Ink.” I don’t know if she’s actually talking about color or just uses “Red Ink” as a metaphor for negative grading;

2nd Link - PSU’s “Tips on Grading” contains the following: “Don’t Use Red Ink. Enough Said?” Well, no, actually. But it raises the red ink issue from “weird fad” status to “something some academics (or at least their administrators) take seriously” status;

3rd Link - Gilles/Goetz untitled essay talks about the disadvantages of over-correction in teaching foreign languages (L2?). They mention the term “red ink” once, but as far as I can tell it’s merely a metaphor for any corrections at all;

4th Link - Abstract of Gadell “Helping Adult Students with Test Anxiety.” You represented this scrupulously, but you’re right: it really doesn’t address the issue. It does mention using colors other than red for grading, though;

5th Link - San Diego Union Tribune article, “Color May Lower Kids’ Confidence.” This is a survey of a few local elementary teachers and their principals and, hilariously, a spokeswoman for Staples’ Office Supply stores. Several educators like purple ink, because they think it’s easier on the children.

I poked around the internet myself a bit, too, but I could not find anything resembling actual research on the question of how and how much ink color used in grading affects students. There are many newspaper stories, all of them eerily similar in format (proving that editors read the out-of-town papers and aren’t too dumb to recognize a ready-made story when they see one), and the tiredly predictable columnists’ follow-ups, but not even the authorities they quote (if they bother to interview any) mention an original source. That source may be Wilson, and his may be the seminal work, but nobody, even those sources interviewed, ever mentions him or anybody else who may have done similar work. Also strangely missing from these articles: any child who would confirm the attitudes toward red ink ascribed to them.

Absent Wilson (and I admit this may be a huge gap), there doesn’t seem to be any more to the red-ink theory than anecdote. I’m sure there are many teachers who use other colors, for the reasons given, and many of those have likely been doing it for some time before Wilson. But right now it still sounds like an idea that spreads largely on the strength of “sounds good, costs nothing, can’t really do any harm, and gets the Parents’ Committee off our backs.”

The few color scientists (by courtesy) I looked at do say red is a warm and aggressive color, as opposed to the cool calming blues and greens. Nobody that I read translates this into trauma induced by red ink on homework. Nobody says that negative feelings induced by color can’t easily be overcome in an otherwise supportive environment. Nobody says that the negative feelings associated with one color can’t be tranferred to another if the experience remains the same. The people who have done the most real work on color and attitude are still the marketing and advertising wonks, and guess what? Red is very popular for packaging and advertising. Excuse me while I go have a Coke and a Marlboro.

[Dancer_Flight]

@FinnAgain

Gotta take issue with this… although to be fair I’m not sure what rules, exactly, you’re talking about. Let’s take, for example, splitting an infinitive. Under the Rules of Grammar [sup]tm[/sup], you’re not allowed to say something like, oh… “To boldy go…” And yet, it’s pefectly clear and coherent. The reason we’re not allowed to is because you physically can’t split an infinitive in Latin. This seems like a piss poor reason to restrict the English language, however.

I’ll throw a cite at you here, this rule hasn’t been a hard and fast one since the 14th century:

@Stunk and White

Split Infinitive. There is precedent from the fourteenth century down for interposing an adverb between to and the infinitive it governs, but the construction should be avoided unless the writer wishes to place unusual stress on the adverb.

This little book is generally the one I consult when I’m generating my own compositions, and while they prescribe a standard grammar, they also recommend reading the material out load to test for flow. I generally have more respect for writers that deliberately break rules so that the work is clear and pleasing to the ear, than hacks who stumble about with no map to follow.

@FinnAgain

@Dancer_Flight

Originally Posted by Dancer_Flight
The memo an employee sends to his or her boss is likely not going to be corrected for style and content and returned to the employee for revision. Hopefully, the memo is the final product, not an intermediate stage in the process of producing a memo.

True, but virtually any text ever created can still be edited, made tighter, snappier, etc… there comes a point where you need to stop the process and declare that it’s finished.

Now I’m going to drag out a dusty bit of trivia at you: the word “but” is often taken to negate all that comes before it. Thus, to me, your response looks like:
“False, virtually any text ever created can still be edited, made tighter, snappier, etc… there comes a point where you need to stop the process and declare that it’s finished.” I think the “but” needs to go, as it appears we’re in tepid agreement that at some point, before that memo becomes a cherished-by-academics-and-loathed-by-school-children-down through the centuries scope Shakespearean Sonnet, the work will be declared that is finished.
If your job was to teach English rather than science, you’d have to evaluate not just the final product, but how a student got there. You’d also have to help them get to a final product. If my job was to teach english, I would, by Og, be ensuring that my classroom had several copies of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style. I would then go on to teach Shakespeare and Steinbeck as the curriculum (at least when I was a lad) has no place for grammar lessons. If, on the other hand, I was teaching english composition I would very much be interested in evaluating the process of writing and ensuring that I got to see and correct at least two rough drafts before evaluating the final paper.

@FinnAgain

@Dancer_Flight

I do not understand what you mean by “[some] grammatical errors … are nearly impossible to change.”

In a large percent of freshman comp students, even with training and revision, they could not remove comma splices or fused sentences, for example.

So the original phrase could be rewritten as: “Some habitual grammatical errors are too ingrained to be changed at the college freshman level.” I think I understand you now.

@FinnAgain

There’s a difference. All kids can learn, and are able to acquire the semantic reactions of ‘geniuses’. That’s not in debate. But if I assume my students can, for instance, learn all about quantum mechanics in a week or decipher Finnegans Wake in a weekend… well… I’ll be pushing them too hard. Yes, optimism does great things, but it’s not a panacea.

Ah, my turn at not being clear: What I should have said is the following. We know that it is possible to have the vast majority of highschool graduates meet certain minimum standards of literacy. It has been demonstrated in the past. Is it too much to expect the same degree of success today. If we are not acheiving that particular production goal, how can we correct it? How was it acheived in the past. McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers might be a good place to start.

@FinnAgain

This is, I believe, more because teaching down to children limits them. And teachign to them as if they’re brilliant allows them to be challenged and stimulated.

Actually many times the moral of this type of study is that if the teacher believes (s)he’s teaching brilliant kids and the kids aren’t understanding a concept, then the teacher tries a different track because it is “obvious” that it isn’t the kids’ fault. The added projected belief that the students can and will do well is also a very good thing.

@FinnaAgain

@Dancer_Flight

I want standardized testing to happen before the kids are sent out into the world.

Ugh.
There is no causal relationship and not even a good degree or correlation between test scores and academic achievement. Tests only test how good you are at taking that particular test. In most circumstances at least. One of the absolute worst things you can do for children is high stakes testing. All the recent research on the NCLBA confirms this.

Ah Hell. I don’t care if you have the students write a sample 3 page essay based on a 15 page reading assignment and have that marked by an independant evaluator, or if you plonk the child down and have it read an essay and discuss it with you. I want to know that the child can read english text of a certain difficulty. I want to know that the child can put his or her thoughts on paper and have those thoughts understood by someone not directly involved in teaching that child. I want these things to happen so that if the child cannot do that, they can have another shot at learning how before being sent into the world. I know that some students don’t do well in test environments, so make it as non-highstakes as possible. Do this in grade ten or eleven so they have a year to take a class to get the basics straightened out. Don’t put the results on a transcript. I don’t care if the student had to take bonehead english in high school, I want to know if it reads and can write now.

@FinnAgain

@Dancer_Flight

I don’t think everyone is academically inclined or apt.

I don’t know exactly what you mean by that, but I do believe that all children can learn, and indeed have a natural affinity for learning.

Of course all children can learn, and up to a given age they are designed to do that. That being said, not everyone is willing to put in the time to master things like calculus, or deconstruction of English Literature, and would quite frankly not enjoy going to college or university. They do not want to pursue an academic degree, why force them into training for that as a default?

@FinnAgain

There is a huge problem with assigning things to ‘grade level’. Take, for instance, “readability formulas”. They list the NY Times at around, oh, fourth grade IIRC. However, they leave out the fact that tremendous background knowledge is required. There’s no real need to rank students in competition with each other, as long as you can tell their parents if individuals students are working up to potential.

My point was simply that comments like “continues to improve”, “a joy to have in the classroom” simply are not diagnostic to her family who want to know how she is doing in relation to what she should be able to do by the end of the grade, as prescribed by the curriculum. Back in the Day, the letter grades A-F, or the E,G,S,I system showed that relatively concisely. Neither my parents nor I cared how I was doing with respect to the other kids. We just wanted to know if I was meeting the goals set by the curriculum. Hell, if we are talking about working to potential, I should have come out of highschool with an undergraduate equivalent (I know how hard I worked relative to what I could have done).

@FinnAgain

@Dancer_Flight

We had no idea whether she was on track to have the necessary skill set to succeed later, what areas she could use more help with at home.

But you could have gotten that information without knowing a lick about what her classmates could do.

I don’t care what her specific classmates can do. I care that she is meeting the goals set by the curriculum. A curriculum I assume is not set by watching monkeys playing with a Ouija Board, but is based on what an average student can do at that time in their lives.

@FinnAgain

Sure. Teachers would work on improving students’ writing and grade on improvement, rather than ultimate quality of the final product. High stakes testing would be done away with in favor of individual evaluations performed for every student by their teachers. There are other differences as well, but my specialty is in curriculum and instruction, not curriculum design. I’ll ask a buddy of mine what other areas I’m overlooking.

Thank you for the explanation. I have a few quibbles with that model, but I apreciate the direction. My main issues have to do with standards and what to do with the exceptional students one way or the other. What do you do when you have a student who “reads at a university level, (e.g. reads university level texts)” at the start of the year. Is it really feasible or likely that the student will improve as much as one who has been struggling but gets that “A-Ha!” moment where things fall into place. The former shows little improvement, while the second shows a vast and commendable one. At the end of it all, how do you ensure that the person you’re releasing into the world has the requisite skills to succeed relative to their peers (not assuming a zero sum game here).

@FinnAgain

I don’t grok the spatial metaphor.
My point was that it’s not a parent’s job to set the tone in my classroom, it’s my job. Although of course I can’t function as effectively without parental involvement.

Perpendicular = crossways. The remark did not appear to address/contradict my point. And it appears that we are in violent agreement here.

@FinnAgain

Perhaps I was unclear. A strengh based paradigm looks at what a student can do and nurtures that, rather than writing them off as a failure based on what they cannot do.

This is better, it is jargon free. I don’t think anyone is advocating writing anyone off as a failure.

@FinnAgain

Actually, you get even faster results if you say “This is good because of X, Y, Z, and that doesn’t work because of A, B, C…” but I admit that’s a somewhat minor quibble. I’d also point out, it’s quite possible to rephrase the “I don’t like …” into something positive “I see what you’re trying to do with A, B, C, and I like where it’s going, but I think there’s a problem with it getting there. How can we approach this problem from a different angle?”

Ah yes, I’m responding from the level of a marker in college. We don’t quite coddle them that much here. Our comments tend to be rather more succint.

[Quote=FinnAgain]

Or you (and your parents) have completely failed the system. This is another problem with the factory paradigm. Sometimes, no matter how talented, dedicated, passionate a teacher is, their students will not meet them half way.

[Quote]

Ah, but the parents are part of the System… A Fact that too many of the parents in my society and yours seem to have ignored. I hope that most teachers do want the parents to participate in the education of their children. I would not be where I am today without to active participation of my parents in at least the early portions of my education. I read voraciously because of their example and instruction (sure I had phonics at school, but my parents helped me practice by supplying books, and encouragement). Even without this direct support, I’ve never met a child who did not have an innate curiosity and need to learn. Any child without that has had it trained out of them. So if you graduate without being able to read Harry Potter then the system has well and truly failed you.

-DF

(Wow, this has certainly drifted far from the topic of red ink…)

[Excalibre]

@Dancer_Flight

Ah, my turn at not being clear: What I should have said is the following. We know that it is possible to have the vast majority of highschool graduates meet certain minimum standards of literacy. It has been demonstrated in the past. Is it too much to expect the same degree of success today. If we are not acheiving that particular production goal, how can we correct it? How was it acheived in the past. McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers might be a good place to start.

This has struck me for some time as one of those common beliefs without any real justification. How much evidence is there that the curriculum of schools a century ago was really significantly different? And how much evidence do we have of students’ achievement under that curriculum?

Keep in mind, the standard is different nowadays. Virtually everyone receives 12 years of education. A high school-level education is taken as something that should be universally available (and with good reason, I think), but a hundred years ago, the students who had that much schooling were an exception - they mostly came from wealthier families and they were definitely among the better students, since a kid who didn’t demonstrate aptitude in school would have been pulled out long before they got to that point.

I just think “our schools are failing us!” has become conventional wisdom without any evidence at all. Nostalgia’s popular, and people like to believe that the world’s getting worse. I just don’t see how we can prove it.

[FisherQueen]

I don’t think the school should have banned red ink, and I don’t think this is going to become common, for schools to micromanage to the extent of saying what colors teachers can grade in.

However, I’ve been teaching for almost a decade, and I’ve very rarely graded in red, for many of the reasons stated already. Red is strongly associated with blood, danger, ‘stop,’ and so forth. It is just as easy for me to give my comments in a color that’s a little less emotionally loaded.

I’ve become something of a fetishist about my grading pens. I buy them in bulk and always use the same kind- that way, I can tell immediately when kids have tried to alter their grades with their own not-quite-matching pens. At the beginning of my career, I used purple Jelly Rolls. They started getting tough to find, and now I order big boxes of green Pilot G2s, the best grading pen in the universe. I love my green G2s.

I don’t think it really matters that much what color I choose to grade in, and the only problem I have with the story is that it’s the teacher’s choice, not the parents, and not the principal’s.

[Hunter_Hawk]

FWIW, when I was a writing TA a dozen years ago, I graded papers using purple ink because I just happened to like purple. And no, it didn’t stop the students from whining about their papers. (These were sophomores and juniors for the most part.)

[Lockseer]

Another perspective…and I skimmed the responses above, and didn’t see mention of this. Forgive me if I am repeating…

I taught a junior/senior level class at Michigan State for four semesters, with, on average, two Asian students in each class of 40. My mentor told me, as I went into the first round of grading some assignments, not to use a red pen. Not because it was stressful…but because in some Asian cultures, it is considered, culturally, a color of bad luck/death.

She had heard this from a fellow graduate student who was Asian (I want to say Korean) who was shocked the prof had written on a returned paper in red. Apparently, writing the name of someone in red ink is akin to wishing death upon them. I brought this up with a Korean student in my cohort, and she verified it as “Oh, yes…you never do that. Bad luck.”

So, I used green ink. Or random colored pencils. For all I know, I proposed to several of our international students.

[dearissues]

When I was younger and granted the privelige to help the teacher grade papers, I always used red ink. Red ink to me was the “grading” color. I didn’t see any negative connotation to it. We weren’t allowed to write any of our papers in red because that was what the teacher would be using (in fact, we weren’t allowed to use ink until high school).

This is malarky.

[dearissues]

@Excalibre

This has struck me for some time as one of those common beliefs without any real justification. How much evidence is there that the curriculum of schools a century ago was really significantly different? And how much evidence do we have of students’ achievement under that curriculum?

Keep in mind, the standard is different nowadays. Virtually everyone receives 12 years of education. A high school-level education is taken as something that should be universally available (and with good reason, I think), but a hundred years ago, the students who had that much schooling were an exception - they mostly came from wealthier families and they were definitely among the better students, since a kid who didn’t demonstrate aptitude in school would have been pulled out long before they got to that point.

I just think “our schools are failing us!” has become conventional wisdom without any evidence at all. Nostalgia’s popular, and people like to believe that the world’s getting worse. I just don’t see how we can prove it.

I always believed that anyone who made it through the 8th grade should be able to read/write/spell at a decent level… because if they couldn’t do those things, how did they pass on to the next grade? However, I met up with a friend that I went to elementary school with. I switched school systems and lost touch with him. We were talking in the bar and he ran out of money and proceeded to pull out his checkbook. He says to me, “Will you write this check out to {the bar} for $20 so I just have to sign my name?” I laughed a little and told him I was surprised his wife hadn’t shown him how to write a check yet. He then said to me, “No, I can’t spell twenty.” :eek: