History/Academia/Religion/Culture/Politics/Jazz
Mode for Caleb Caleb McDaniel

This weekend on NPR, I heard about this story: "Harshness of Red Marks Has Students Seeing Purple." The article suggests that teachers increasingly avoid using red ink to correct student assignments. Purple is becoming a popular alternative.

My wife and I were interested to find the story since she almost always uses purple pens to grade her students' papers, and I usually use blue ink or pencil when writing marginalia on the things that I read. Apparently we are not the only enemies of "red." Increasingly, according to this report, "red" is seen as too aggressive, too angry, too critical. "Purple" is a "friendlier" color.

"I do not use red," said Robin Slipakoff, who teaches second and third grades at Mirror Lake Elementary School in Plantation, Fla. "Red has a negative connotation, and we want to promote self-confidence. I like purple. I use purple a lot."

There may or may not be solid psychological reasons for such intuitions. But culture must play as large a role as nature in determining how we interpret color. If purple seems associated with self-confidence, surely this has much to do with its cultural connotations of royalty and wealth. Surely culture is largely responsible for the fact that "red" can simultaneously suggest of both life and death, anger and love? (Or maybe there are physiological explanations for this complex reaction to red. Perhaps I have hit on something more profound than I intended ... ) And it may be that a student's fear of "red" is a learned response; over time, would a widespread shift to "purple" create the same feelings of nausea and dread in the pit of a student's stomach that "red" presently does?

I digress. I didn't start this post to raise the hackneyed debate between nature and nurture. I did want to say that the purple-pen phenomenon addresses an important pedagogical issue. What pen to use raises the question of how teachers can strike the right balance between correcting and encouraging students.

In the article, for instance, defenders of "purple" come across as purveyors of confidence. The defenders of "red" think students should not be coddled.

California high-school teacher Carol Jago, who has been working with students for more than 30 years, said she has no plans to stop using red. She said her students do not seem psychologically scarred by how she wields her pen. And if her students are mixing up "their," "there," and "they're," she wants to shock them into fixing the mistake.

Perhaps the stark difference posed between "red" and "purple" ink creates a false dichotomy between a "shock-and-awe" approach to student evaluation and a campaign to change hearts and minds by careful prodding. (The dichotomy is false in other contexts as well.) Colors are more helpful pedagogical metaphors when we remember that they exist along a spectrum on which red and purple are close together.

Perhaps the choices between boosting confidence and instilling fear are too polar. A more spectral approach to student evaluation is needed. Ultimately, good grading requires a subtle sense of when particular students are better served by confrontation or consolation, an acquired skill that is much more complex than a simple choice between "red" and "purple." Nonetheless ... in the course I'm teaching this semester, I plan to stay away from "red" when marking papers.