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

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

*raises hand*

I read an article about it being stopped to not hurt self-esteem in Reader's Digest, ma'am.

>.>

[kddreams.livejournal.com]

This may sound simple, but if you change the color of the pen, then that's the new color that's going to be associated with the whole bad grades things, and it will continue to lower the self-esteeem of children. Purple could become the new red.

[actonthat.livejournal.com]

That's exactly what I was thinking. O.o; There's no way to solve it except mke up fancy ways to tell kids they're not in fact wrong... I had a teacher who did that, once. But that's life-- sometimes you'll be wrong shockhorror.

[farla.livejournal.com]

Reader's Digest is...not really the most reliable source. They tend not to care about original sources, to rely on anecdotal evidence and 'they say' opinion stuff, and their statistics are often manipulated. That's why it's always good to check sources. I think I found the article. The Perfect Childhood: Why It's Bad for Kids (http://www.rd.com/content/openContent.do?contentId=16347&pageIndex=2)? It's the only one I could find. And they didn't cite where the information came from well. They said schools were abandoning the color, and had one teacher quoted from a completely different area who said she used a different color of ink.

And it didn't say it was being banned because of self-esteem. Reader's Digest certainly implied as much in the context of the article, but the one teacher herself just said it was 'less harsh' and the schools listed (again, from a completely different area) did not have any mention of their actual policies.

It's less a matter of pampering and more a shift in how things are done. In earlier years, rote memorization was a major part and even essays were graded pretty mechanically. Red was used to mark things that were wrong, things that deducted from your grade. As times changed teachers started writing in notes to the kids that were just commentary, and doing that more and more often. If you looked at a work from the fifties, you'd probably see it being graded completely differently. A paper covered in red had a lot of mistakes, and one mostly clear would have few. It's no longer meant as 'look! you made a mistake! fix it next time!' so teachers are voluntarily using different inks that don't send the message to, in the case of that teacher, first-graders. First graders whose parents are probably more obsessed with them getting good grades than parents from earlier times, I might add.

Even the way people connect banning red ink to not being critical shows that's how we view it.

[farla.livejournal.com]

To my understanding, red was originally chosen because it was associated with being wrong, the association didn't arise from its use. Red in our culture means STOP, BAD, SHAME, and occasionally DEATH. (I suppose this wouldn't be such a problem in China?)

That, and the issue here is that they're using red ink to write comments on papers a lot that often aren't meant critically, but kids feel nervous seeing the red comments.

My English teacher occasionally lost her red pens and used blue or black. She wasn't a harsh grader, I didn't particularly care, and mostly she was using her commentary to just talk to us, but I remember that I didn't have that split-second 'OMG I'M DEAD' reaction when she used other colors. With red, I'd assume it was negative until I could make out the writing. It was totally irrational and I knew this, but it's a color that's shorthand for being wrong.

Incidentally, it's not such a problem for ticking off actual mistakes. I remember that it was the commentary I could barely read that was always stressful, and from my google search, it seems that's a reoccuring theme - teachers say they're avoiding using it for writing comments, especially teachers who write a lot of comments on kids' papers.

[farla.livejournal.com]

See! You think red = wrong. The teachers were saying they avoid writing long commentary in it because it sends exactly that message. One principal was saying that because red is viewed so negatively, using it to say things like "Great job!" was coming off the wrong way (and if you've ever spent five minutes trying to make out your teacher's handwriting until you realize that's what it said, you can understand this) and along those lines things that are meant neutrally are going to be taken as being more critical, (and the school parents were complaining about - I can't think of a better way to freak kids out than having teachers rewrite their answers so they're 'better' when they're first and second graders who can barely write to start.)

[negrek.livejournal.com]

See, but at least at my school that's what they did. Send out a memo about how teachers were no longer supposed to use red pens, that is. And they did actually say that the reason was that they didn't want to lower our self-esteem. A couple of my teachers ranted about it for a while, really. I can't speak for it being widespread or for that being the reason that schools are either encouraging or enforcing that rule, but it does happen. And this is so totally not elementary but high school, too.

I'll agree that red is an emotionally charged color and that, yes, everybody freaks out a bit over seeing a paper come back looking like it's started to bleed, but in my experience changing the color is only a temporary solution to that. My sixth-grade science/lang arts teacher only ever used green pens, and while initially I didn't get that sort of "OMFG no!" response when I got papers back dripping green instead of red, by the end of the year I had begun to equate the color, at least in her class, with something just as negative.

[farla.livejournal.com]

I wonder if this worked out like the the gel bracelets? Because that'd probably be the final proof that principals are the new middle management.

Sounds like your school missed the point of the original ones then, which was that red is not a good color for things that are meant as comments or praise. That, or your principal picked up a book on color therapy and thought people would be happier with other colors.

::shrug:: It wasn't your post that prompted annoyance so much as the preceding one. And that none of the opinion pieces on the web bother linking back to anything credible, but all reference either nothing or elementary schools.

[negrek.livejournal.com]

Meh, yeah, I understand. My district is just stupid... I'd hate to think there were actually more like us out there. They're into all the new teaching trends, even if they don't really understand what's going on with them.

One more year w00t!

[myrgourrza.livejournal.com]

People are arguing about the pen colours teachers use to mark children's books?
*looks incredulous*

[farla.livejournal.com]

Oh, of course not. That would be ridiculous.

Here, I'm arguing that people who are on the internet have the resources to investigate any subject, so they don't have to rely on 'I think I once heard someone mention they'd read an article that said...' in forum discussion, and that the red pen issue is exaggerated, as well as understandable in the original context.

In rebuttal, others argue that the original reasons for getting rid of red pens are foolish and/or overly sensitive, while I argue back that there actually is a point to their claims about it being overly stressful without that coinciding with the end of criticism. Negrek also uses personal anecdote to contradict my point about elementary schools in the starting post.

And outside this corner of the web, people write long impassioned editorials about this issue.

But no one argues about the pen colors themselves. Like I said, that'd just be ridiculous.

[myrgourrza.livejournal.com]

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