Red Pens Did Me Good |
My second-grade teacher, Sister Mary, would be shocked that I turned out to be a writer.
Please allow me to explain.
In recent years, many schools within the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia have barred teachers from marking student papers in red.
Their thinking is that correcting young students with red pens is too confrontational and upsetting for the children. Many teachers prefer to grade in more soothing colors, such as green, blue, pink and yellow.
Red ink surely wasn’t banned at St. Germaine Catholic School in the ’70s. That school was all business, and the wonderful sisters who taught there were too busy ramming knowledge and values into us to worry about our sensitive little egos.
It’s true that the sisters were more favorable toward the more engaged students. Who could blame them?
We had 40 kids or more packed into each class. The sisters, many of........