When I was growing up and in school -- the teacher's red pen was a weapon to be feared. The ticks, the crosses and even worse, the angular parallel lines below spelling mistakes struck fear in the bravest of hearts!
Then ... came the revolution. People decided -- no point scaring little children with red lines. Instead, let's hand over a benign green pen to teachers.
My sons work is corrected with a green pen. The same way. There are green ticks, green crosses, and green angular parallel lines below spelling mistakes.
What does he think about it? "Ma, it's wrong, no? It's a mistake, right?" He doesn't like the green crosses and angular parallel lines below spelling mistakes any more than I liked the red ones!
We also have the system of giving a smilie face or a sad face, or stars and grades instead of marks.... which, honestly also have the same effect. The bottom line is, when we feel it is of utmost importance to make sure the child know (s)he is right or wrong, I dont see why it should matter whether it is red or green colour or for that matter sad or smilie face, or grades or stars. We forget the basic fact that children are just as human as we adults are. Just as we find criticism hard to swallow or don't like mistakes getting detected, and corrected, they do get hurt by criticisms and get frightened of mistakes being detected.
ReplyDeleteThe bottom line is, we should recognise that they are still "innocent" children. Rather than protect them too much and emphasise too much on "NOT" making mistakes as it is a "BAD".... we should positively re-inforce the fact that
1. It is OK to make mistakes
2. Every one (adults included) make mistakes, and we learn when we make mistakes.
3. We learn only when we try, and it is normal that mistakes do happen when we try
May be we adults should change our attitudes about children, lest our children will end up just like us..... not willing to try for fear of mistakes/failure and those dreaded red/green line or I got one star, while she got 3 etc....