Tangents and Media Distortion

[farla]

Okay.

Where I live is the sort of place that triggers articles about permissive liberal issue-of-the-day. For example, I had actual sex ed. Ever since finding out someone in the (general) area was being referenced among fundy jackasses as encouraging kids to have gay sex in deviant ways, I started to become a bit more suspicious of those sort of reports.

Then there's US New and World Report, which has had a page about the examples of liberal PC stupidity for about as long as I could read. Once you figure out that the guy writing the article is a lying partisan jerk, and that a lot of the stuff he references is either a fluke or else has more to it, you start to understand that the horror stories in the media are often falsified.

And more recently we have the crap about the War on (Insert Christian Holiday) that's totally made up.

So between being amused by the other antics on the recent Serebii thread, I started to wonder about the red pen bit.

Now, if you google a string like 'no red pens schools', you get a bunch of editorials and rants about the subject that allude to some news report. An AP report.

(If you've been following the state of the media and how 'journalism' works, alarm bells go off in your head about right now, but you probably haven't. Also, Timor.)

So I google the AP report.

It says some schools suggest using purple or other ink colors, especially because some teachers tend to use red for mistakes while others use it for all comments, so students getting back papers sometimes see all the red and feel nervous.

And I took a moment and thought about it. When I got an essay back covered in semi-legible red scribbles, I'd get a rush of nervousness for the next thirty seconds until I made out the words. Red isn't a neutral color and it's in heavy use by math teachers and such to mark pure mistakes, not comments. It's not a huge deal or anything, but then, I get the impression that most of the people in the article didn't MEAN it was a huge deal. They just thought purple was better. And you know, they're right. When you see red, you assume it's telling you you screwed up until you read the words. You don't have the same sudden reaction for any other color. Being older, none of us on the internet panic over it now, but it's still true.

Then I went back and read more closely. And I realized they're talking about elementary schools. They're talking about six and seven year olds.

It's a bit hard to tell. The term 'school' is used pretty much exclusively, but all the examples are of elementary schools, with the exception of one sixth-grade teacher who voluntarily is using purple because she wants to. With the exception of the first school listed, none are doing it because parents force them to (the title of the article) and none are banning the use of the color. Nor are they doing it because they think kids will be devastated - one uses other colors just for variety. Statistics are notably lacking from the article, suggesting that the reporter is only interviewing the handful of people who do this rather than this being a real trend.

Of the few schools mentioned in the article, the first is the elementary school where parents objected. And you know, does no one remember elementary school? Some first graders are already nervous wrecks. The parents probably overreacted, but I remember my little brother coming home sobbing because his teacher had said they were behaving like third graders when he was in fourth. He was upset for a week.

Yes, my little brother has issues. But the kids involved here might have had issues to, might have been younger, and might have legitimately had problems, and their parents were probably addressing that. (And the teachers' grading style of 'writing down better answers', once I stop to think about it, does seem nerve wracking. Imagine some little kid struggling to put down an answer when they can barely write, and getting back something perfectly phrased and effortless that's how they should have done it.) None of them were saying 'Don't criticize my kid's work'. They were saying their kid was coming home upset over something that could easily be changed.

It's a few schools doing things slightly differently that got blown out of proportion and then used as a fake example of what's wrong with schools. Stop ranting about how schools everywhere are banning all red pens because they believe it destroys kids' self esteem to be corrected. It didn't happen.

YOU ARE ON THE DAMN INTERNET. CHECK YOUR SOURCES.

Comments

[myrgourrza.livejournal.com]

Ah, well at least that's comforting to know.