Monday, April 04, 2005
 

A Gripe! Are You Shocked?

I complain about this constantly because it's postively inane.

You're supposed to stay away from red ink because it looks like you "bled" all over the student's work.

Two actual cases of politically correct, touchy-feely grading:

#1: A teacher I know was banned from using red at her school, so she switched to blue. On her evaluations, one kid wrote that she "bleeds Smurf blood all over papers."

#2: Another teacher I know-- namely, my mother-- returned a paper graded in green ink (this would have been in the 1970s). The kid exclaimed, "There's goblin blood all over my paper!"

I often vary the colors of pens I use to grade-- one color for the rough draft, one for the final, things like that; all I'm trying to do is make the papers easier for the students to keep straight when they're looking back over their portfolios. I don't use red because I don't want to hear about it.

It's not the color of the ink. It's what the ink says. And as long as there's ink on a paper that says something besides A+, there will be complaints. They don't take it out directly on the teacher; they refocus it to a kind of underhanded, back door complaint by citing the pen color as the problem. If you complain about a teacher's comments (corrections, whatever) on a paper in class, that's one thing: you're really making yourself stand out and going out on a limb, since the teacher might go ballistic and grade you harder. If you raise a complaint about ink in class, though, it has the potential to be seen as amusing by your classmates, thus raising support. It's indirect and "harmless."

I may start grading in red Sharpie just to see how many souls I can destroy.

And a PS
How about this? I'd better stop wearing tube tops to work.

I will note that one college-aged coworker had on today a cutoff skirt so short that she had to cut the pockets out.

I win the award for most polished-looking female worker, anyway. Will that get me a raise?

Elvisette philosophized at 8:59 PM