Response "The English Teacher's Red Pen: History of an Obsession"

I found this article to be extremely interesting. The whole time I was reading this, I found myself nodding my head in agreement. I cannot tell you how many times throughout high school, as well as college, that I have gotten a paper back that was marked all over with negative comments, circles, and lines through things. I feel so discouraged when this happens, that I don't even have the desire to actually look through the paper. Just think, if teachers put as much time into praising students work as they did correcting grammatical errors, students would feel much better about their writing. I feel that this is one reason why students dislike writing so much, it is no longer about expression and creativity, but rather about if they spelled everything correctly and made no punctuation errors.

Thinking back to my pre-internship last year, I am automatically reminded of my mentor teacher, who was a prime example of a teacher that marks every little error with a big red line through it. Handing back students papers was heartbreaking, as all I would here was sighs of disappointment. The thing is, this is not really helping students at all, it is only discouraging them from ever wanting to write again. What ends up happening is that students give up their creativity, instead spending so much time a correcting little mistakes that their own voice never comes through in their writing.

During high school, I had one English teacher that would give us our writing assignments back with many positive comments, and very few corrections. She would simply write that there were a few spelling or grammatical errors, but instead of correcting them for us, she would encourage us to go back and see if we could find them.

All in all, I feel that we have to encourage self expression and creativity in writing, instead of looking for meaningless mistakes. This will empower kids to write, and they may actually enjoy writing.