Schools begin banning teachers from using red ink

[Lukeje]

Maybe they need to bring back the cane and encorage disaplin with drills and the like.

This is supposed to be ironic, right?

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

2 years ago. Utter lies.

[HEADING=1]DON'T READ TABLOIDS.[/HEADING]

I wish I was kidding about this

You are.

 

[Harlief]

I'm training to be a primary school teacher, we've been introduced to a system of marking using highlighters: Green for 'growth', Pink for 'tickled pink'.
Basically it's moving off the system of "this is wrong, end of story" and onto a system with one side saying "think about this, figure out what's wrong and how you can fix it" and the other side saying "this is good, more of this!"
In terms of the feedback that kids receive it's more helpful to them because they know what they need to do next and more helpful to teachers because it means that the students are learning without you spelling out everything for them.

tl;dr: Red pen is being banned? Meh! There are far better ways to do things anyway.

 

[Dethenger]

Well, red IS a psychologically aggressive colour. We're trained to consider it alarming, so this makes as much sense as not letting teachers swear at students who misbehave.

Outright banning seems a bit...overboard, but it's probably best that red ink be discouraged. Green would be a good alternative.

I'm not sure, I haven't researched it thoroughly, but I'm fairly certain red is an aggressive even without conditioning. I remember at the very least reading that poisonous animals are usually bright red, so...
In any case, I think red is an excellent colour to use, because it properly demonstrates that you've made a mistake. If it were green, I'd be confused, because I would probably think I had gotten it right.

 

[wooty]

Reds always been a good colour for me, it alerts you to your mistakes and helps you notice them. Even the board on the fridge has red writing on it for when importantl things need doing/paying.

If this keeps up, pretty soon parents will be able to sue teachers if their own dumbass offspring starts failing in a subject.

 

[Images]

The Daily Mail? Seriously?
Nuff said

 

[roneel]

soo there will be no writing at all in colors known to man, perhaps invisible ink?

 

[Macgyvercas]

It's at times like this I wish I had the "I don't want to live on this planet anymore" image.

Will you accept a video clip instead?

My sentiments exactly. First they get rid of dodgeball, kickball, and red rover and now this shit.

God I hate this planet.

Well, only one thing to do: Start drinking.

And the drinking will continue until the intelligence of authority figures rises.

 

[NakedSnake]

People who are moaning about the banning of red ink are just as bad as the ones which they moan about

 

[Quellist]

I just fucking love how these morons keep ruining the educational system, ah fuck it they don't just ruin that they totally ruin growing up for kids by wrapping them in cotton wool lest something might happen to upset them slightly. Then at age 18 they drop them like live grenades leaving the impressionable ones with little or no skills, no idea about responsibilities and the idea that the world owes them a living. Yet these bleeding hearts still keep making things worse and assuring everyone that its done 'for the sake of the children'

Pass the Sambuca, i cant live in this world anymore if i'm sober...

 

[Woodsey]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1101790/Teachers-banned-using-confrontational-red-ink-case-upsets-children.html

Pro-tip: anything that has Daily Mail in the title should be instantly disregarded until the story's popped up everywhere else.

These are the people that said Rockstar were making a game about a guy who shot several people earlier this year, and then they told the mother of one of his victims.

Is there no moderate nation anymore? The US is too conservative in a lot of places but a lot of western Europe is almost liberal enough, if only they'd go just a bit further.

Fixed that for you. Not that you could include Britain in the liberal part of Europe, they're very nearly as conservative as America.

We're really not, although no, we aren't as liberal as other places in Western Europe.

 

[SuccessAndBiscuts]

If it is true, and I'm not saying it isn't because it sounds ridiculous enough to be possible. Then I feel it is an utterly daft idea. But I just can't shake this...

Here's the link if anyone wants to read the article to make sure I'm not bullshitting...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1101790/Teachers-banned-using-confrontational-red-ink-case-upsets-children.html

But bullshitting is what the Daily Fail does best...

Having now read the article it just seems like some basic guidelines/recommendations in a couple of schools and if my experience is anything to go by they will be largely ignored or incorporated depending on the teachers method. So a little bit of easily ignored fluff has been turned into A PANSY LIBERAL ATTACK ON TRADITIONAL EDUCATIONAL VALUES!

Having said that I do have the distinct feeling that there is far too much tampering going on with how teachers are supposed to operate. You wan't a standardised policy, teach kids with machines, you want a more flexible and interesting system? Give teachers a bit more creative freedom and leeway to come up with methods of teaching that suit the class.

 

[Corporal Yakob]

Red ink to be replaced by the blood of poor students. More at 11!

 

[Pinkamena]

I'm fine with this. As long as they are allowed to use colored ink, I don't see the problem.

 

[Gwarr]

Next thing they'll stop giving grades because stupid kids are demoralized . Same with weak kids getting poor results in sports . Hey , you know what? tough luck , kids need to learn their weakness and fix them and they should be bashed till they do.

 

[pearcinator]

I'm a secondary ed major, and I completely understand what you mean. It's like at some point the entire profession started scrambling to find any way at all to improve test scores, and since things like actually making sure kids had a good home life and were well fed were off the table, they started trying random crap and hoping some of it worked. Some of the things they teach us to do -- not to mention the things they teach us not to do are enough to make even the most bleeding heart liberal on the planet start to respect what George W. was trying to do with the No Child Left Behind act. I thought it was a terrible attack on the teaching profession -- until I actually started on the path to become a teacher, and realized just how much of a reality check the profession needs. I still think NCLB went about it the wrong way, but I no longer doubt that the president had pure intentions -- and coming from me, when talking about that president, that is really saying something.

I'm from Australia so I don't really understand all the American politics but it's basically the same. We have all these acts like the child care protection act and 'keep them safe' which means that we as teachers have to write reports if we have a child who appears to be in a domestic violence household or something. They put so much focus on the child psychology units, almost more than the teaching itself (I got classes like 'Indigenous Australians in Education', 'Sociology', 'Positive Behaviour Support' and 'Understanding children and young people')...just tell me how to teach and what I need to know. They had to add a few psychology classes to fill out the 4 year course.

 

[Vrach]

Congratulations on missing the point that it's not the red ink that depresses students, but the teachers who simply "write off" the students via mistakes without actually being involved in the process of correcting them further than the "right check, wrong check, next paper please"

 

[Alduin Silas]

Somewhere, there is an appropriate facepalm image to go with this topic. Possibly drawn in red ink.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I.... don't see the problem with this. I honestly don't. Red ink is used for Fear factor. Red is the color of danger after all. That's the only reason its used. It says: "You fucked up son. You fucked up bad. Now I'm gonna fuck you up!".

It's a classic remnant of the traditional/old-fashioned education system (there's a word for that, I'm sure); the system that scoffs at modern teaching practices like peer-discussion based education and gamification of education. It's a 500 year old practice that's designed to embarrass kids for their mistakes instead of helping them learn from their mistakes.

What I'm trying to say is, traditional/old-fashioned education sucks, in my opinion at least. If they have any kind of reason to believe that getting rid of red ink will help kids feel more attached to schoolwork, and less like a slave of the educational system: Fucking, TRY that shit OUT! Experiment until you find a definitive answer, or something close to that. If it works out: FANTASTIC! We just evolved a little bit as a sapient race.

Also, I don't know if I should be disappointed that so many of you sound like bitter old coots yelling "Those darn kids! We're making them soft! In my day, the teacher used to get out the red pen.....and beat the ever-loving FUCK out of us!! They deserve the same, not better!"

I'm glad you have an opinion based purely on your own misguided ideals of what helps kids to learn better.

My opinion (that traditional teaching is generally better for kids than alternative methods such as those you've described) comes from my experience as a high school math teacher, and surveys of several classes I've taught. In the case of the surveys, I'd teach them two chapters, each with a different method, and in the case of the alternative method, they had an opportunity to do anything they wanted to demonstrate their knowledge rather than just taking a test. Then I asked them if they preferred the traditional lecture-study-test method or the alternative teaching with project-based learning. According to "the research" out there, kids should have overwhelmingly said that they preferred the alternative methods "because they learn better", but just over half of the kids voted in favor of traditional methods instead. And of the half that voted for alternative methods, the majority were kids who do poorly on tests and just preferred the easier grades that come with project-based learning.

So, as an educator, I can tell you that kids generally don't care if you're trying to make learning fun....it's school. They don't find school fun, and many of the public school kids never will, no matter how hard you try. Plus these methods do, in fact, tend to coddle kids....there was a movement for alternative teaching in the past, and it eventually was phased out in favor of traditional teaching again because the kids were not learning their fundamentals nearly as well as the research suggested. I give it another decade or so before similar research pops up to disprove this recent push for alternative teaching being "universally better".

Thank you for posting this; it describes exactly how I feel. Ever notice how in most other fields, a paradigm shift comes maybe once a century, because something major has changed, while in education, one comes every 10 years or so? I'm sorry, but kids don't really change -- especially not that quickly. We have documented pedagogical methods going back, what, to the ancient Greeks? You'd think the best practices would have been figured out centuries ago, not within the last 10 or 20 years.

Also, it almost seems like teachers lock onto psychological theories that make them feel good, whether they're actually based in solid psychological methodology or not -- for example, the "theory" of multiple intelligences, which is what happened when one man decided to replace the word "aptitude" with "intelligence." Teachers love it, and they go around teaching new teachers to actually play to things like musical and bodily kinesthetic "intelligence," which even Gardner himself will readily admit are not workable substitutes for things like his verbal-linguistic and logical-mathematic categories. Also, is it just me, or are the various packages of reading strategies like CRISS and Kagan a load of BS that some very successful salesman did a good job of selling to administrators desperate for something, anything that would improve test scores? Has a KWL chart ever in history done any good? Long story short: teachers and administrators are gullible, desperate, or both. That's the only explanation that makes sense to me.

Edit: Oh, by the way, be careful using phrases like "students who do poorly on tests and prefer the easier grades that come with project-based learning." Current pedagogy is supposed to recognize that some kids are just terrible at taking tests, and rather than, you know, letting the teachers help them get over that problem -- and make no mistake, it is a problem -- we're supposed to accommodate them by finding an alternative means of assessment. It's like, on the one hand, we're supposed to accept that all kids can learn. On the other hand, we're supposed to recognize that a lot of them (and I'm not talking about the disabled; that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish) are unable to perform basic educational tasks, so rather than teaching them how to perform them, we should just give up and have them do it in an easier way. The blatant BS is so strong in the educational program that, until my microteach started and I actually got into a classroom teaching kids, I was so fed up with the whole thing that I wanted to just get my degree, and then either take the LSAT and go on to law school, or do something crazy like move on to a masters in history. If I had been as fed up in my sophomore year as I was a month ago, I would have changed majors. I'm glad I didn't, but good lord.

 

[Chris646]

Well, if red ink is so 'demoralizing,' then tell them to quit screwing around and pay attention.