The Dreaded Red Pen

For this week’s article, the first sentence that caught my attention was “To us, intensive correction is the standard, responsible, professional way of responding to a piece of imperfect student work” (Zemelman 1). I instantly began to think about the activity we did last class period as well as our assigned homework to edit other student’s papers with (ironically) our own red pen. I felt as though my corrections were more negative than positive which is exactly what the article went on to explain. Teacher’s red inked corrections make students feel overwhelmed and they rarely go back to improve due to embarrassment.

One part of the article that I found interesting was that “most adults remember their English teachers as people who made them feel bad about writing and about themselves” (Zemelman 2). Although I could not personally relate to this, I know a few that can. I grew up loving English class for many reasons. However, I know that adults and even students today look negatively to their English teachers. From the time I began to notice this trend of “hating English and English teachers” I wanted to change that, helping others realize that there are positives to English. This article helped me realize how I can help establish that positive effect, even in my corrections to student’s papers.

On the teacher side of this issue a quote that stood out to me was “The stories are legion of teachers who pridefully announce their idiosyncratic and arbitrary rule: ‘I’ll read tour paper only until I get to the third error, then I’ll stop and send it back’” (Zemelman 2). This particular quote made me think about my hours of field experience at my former high school. I was shadowing a former English teacher I had had and realized that her grading was very similar to this concept. I remember her telling me that for the research paper drafts that her students were working on she would only go to the second page (of about 5 or 6 pages) and mark the errors only on those first couple of pages. My first thought was, okay maybe YOUR work load is getting done faster but are the STUDENTS improving from this method? Even I could suspect that the errors the student made on the first page may not be the same in the concluding paragraph.

A positive aspect that I found from this article was that “in real life we rely very little on external evaluation and much more on practice—unmonitored, unsupervised, uncriticized practice—as the key way of learning almost everything important” (Zemelman 3). I strongly believe that practice makes perfect and that the practice does not necessarily mean constant correction of errors. Therefore, using the example of the music teacher, “Even when the teacher is evaluation, she does not stop the student to point out and criticize every single misplayed note or passage. Instead, the effective music teacher is selective—she skillfully focuses the pupil on a few problems at a time, one that are within the student’s teacher to attend to and correct (Zemelman 4).

Ultimately, after reading this article I began to look at the student papers we had for homework more positively. I told myself to read completely through them rather than begin marking the very second I see a need for correction. Once I did that I added in suggestions rather than simply crossing out a section. Finally, at the end of each essay I made a list of about two or three suggestions or room for improvement ideas. This article definitely let me see error correcting in a new and more positive light.