That Dreadful Red Pen

By Author: endeavor
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I approach every academic quarter by employing an activity with my undergraduate students that one of my education professors, Dr. Edmiston, shared with me and that I would like to share with middle school and high school educators. For the second class session, I ask students to bring in symbolic objects that represent their experiences with someone who had a significant impact on their learning. In the six quarters that I have taught the class, all of my students, except one, have brought in objects that represented their relationships with individuals who have had positive influences on their lives. It was in the first quarter that I taught the course that Breitling Replica I had a student who boisterously shared her object: that dreadful red pen. Yes, a red pen, much like the one Phillip, a student from the September 2008 issue of "Innovative Writing Instruction," spoke so vehemently against. This student talked in great detail about how her second-grade teacher would use a red pen to mark up everything she ever wrote and would then use ...
... her paper as an example of what not to do when writing. She explained how her teacher almost scarred her for life, and for the longest time she feared writing, hated school, and never wanted to go back. For many years, she did not believe that she was intelligent and insisted that she did not know how to write. Her writing self, as Valerie names it at the beginning of this column, was damaged, and she was convinced that she no longer had the tools, knowledge, or voice to write, write, and write. However, once she was given enough time and distance from that teacher and was able to regain confidence in herself as a student, she realized that she wanted to become a teacher so that she could do the opposite of what her teacher did. She wanted to encourage, not discourage, young writers.

Every time I grade students' written work, I recall the story of the second-grade teacher and her red pen. I wonder: As a teacher, how am I affecting my students (sense of self, engagement with writing, feelings about teachers) with my marks and the ways I evaluate their writing? I realize I teach college students, and the influence I have is different from that of a second-grade or a tenth-grade teacher. Regardless of grade level or age, teachers leave impressions on students, which lead me to ask: How much of a student's propensity for believing that she or he is a writer—a strong writer, a weak writer, or not a writer at all—is dependent on her or his teacher? What am I doing when I grade students' writings? Am I just looking at it, as opposed to engaging with it, to determine whether it is an A, a B, a C, or unsatisfactory based on already existing standards? Or am I invested in positively communicating with students by listening, as literacy scholar Katherine Schultz (76) tells us, to what students are expressing to me in written form? As a current student and instructor, I strive to analyze papers for the latter as I read for the meanings, beauty, and creativity in students' ideas, perspectives, and voices.

When I think about my writing self/writing stories, I believe I am a competent writer. However, I know that I have come to under-stand myself as such because of the positive reinforcements I have received throughout my career as a student. Had my papers been the ones held in front of a class of my peers by Tag Heuer Replica Watches my elementary, junior high, or high school English teacher as the bad example, riddled with red marks bleeding from the page, I doubt I would have become a teacher. I doubt I would have become much of anything—not because I lacked the skill, but because I lacked a teacher who positively influenced my writing. Let's put away that dreadful red pen as we encourage students to explore their writing selves, writing stories.