School Days Sophia Waugh

A child opened his exercise book the other day and looked at it in total puzzlement.

‘What’s all this, Miss?’ he asked, waving it at me. Now he had me puzzled.

‘Well, I mean to say,’ he went on, ‘What’s all this red?’

What it was, of course, was my marking. I love a bit of stationery and have different fountain pens for different tasks. My beautiful Mont Blanc is kept at home for writing letters, I have a Scheaffer for cheques and admin, and two Lamys – one red, with red ink, and one black, with black ink – for school.

I always always use red ink for marking. When I first began to teach, I took myself and my young goddaughter on a shopping trip.

‘What do you think a teacher needs?’ I asked her, standing in the stationery department.

‘A brain?’ she suggested, looking vaguely at the sales stands. But I was after red ink.

The modern fear of telling children they are wrong has spilled into that most hallowed of teacher territories, the red pen. Apparently, they find it ‘threatening’. Some of them – those who actually care about the presentation of their work – say it upsets their ordered lines. They would rather, they say, continue to get things wrong than receive correction. There is a craze for green pens, ‘green-penning’ being an activity in which children correct their own mistakes, or respond to the teacher’s questions or advice in green ink. Play it right and your book could be a rainbow of correction and counter correction.

Red is for danger – that is why the children are threatened by it. But then aren’t we there to alert them to danger? To the danger of miscommunication, of mistakes, of failure?

I have had a bad week at school this week – I’m facing the reality of the looming (yes, already looming) GCSES for the next batch of Year 11s rather more quickly than the children are.

Every tool in my toolbox is being brought out, in an effort to open their eyes to the imminence of exams – and the possibility of failure. As ever, I cajole, I laugh, I threaten, I praise. I put people into detention who don’t work and send postcards home to parents whose children do consistently try. I am endlessly on the telephone to parents, trying to get them onside (you would think that would be an easy task, but that’s another story).

And now, when all else fails, I begin to try to strike the fear of God into those students who still won’t make the effort, who think gazing into our charming courtyard will be repaid by the grades they need. So the cajoling turns to threats – not about what I will do to them, or the head of year, or the head teacher, but about what the outside world will hold for them.

One boy stood up and ‘dabbed’, just for the hell of it.

‘Yes’, I retorted, ‘dab your way to the dole queue.’

It might have worked better had my vernacular moved with the ages, but ‘dab your way to the benefits office’ didn’t have the same ring.

Among all this nurturing, vital though it is, children are overprotected from the fear of failure. Fear being the key word.

So, if a little red pen is the beginning of a healthy fear, does it matter? I would rather they quailed at twelve than failed at sixteen.