Green is the new red

This past week my tutor at the school placement caught up on the correction of the students' coursebooks. She told me that in the training courses and seminars she had attended regarding this methodology (Eleanitz, designed by ikastolak) they told her that the teacher wasn't meant to do any correction work on the students' activity books, but she felt better by doing so. She also told me that the number of errors she found were unbelievable, taking into account that all exercises were corrected in class after the students finished them.

On Friday afternoon, in the LH4 lesson, when the students took their coursebooks to complete an exercise on telling the hour in English, I noticed that she corrects using a green pen. I found it amusing. She told the students that they had to pay more attention in class, because she had found a lot of mistakes. By the way, often we correct exercises before most of the children have time to finish them, because we are pressed with time, because there is a programme to complete...

I had noticed that one of our teachers at university uses the green pen too. To be honest, the teacher at university mostly writes her reflections on the diaries we write, more than correcting mistakes, although she does some of that too.

Apparently, green is the new red. I have been thinking about it over the weekend, and I was surprised to see that I got really mad at times thinking things like "it's the same old bullshit, just disguised in green!". I didn't think I had that kind of resentment in me towards the red pen (in my childhood?), but there seems to be something somewhere...

I hate sugar coatings and disguises of that sort. If you are going to point the accusing finger at students, you might just as well do it openly and be honest with yourself, using a thick red marker. And if you really want to do things differently, then squeeze your brain a bit more than just changing the colour of a pen.

On the other hand, we have been told that when it comes to learning a language, fossilised errors need to be corrected, so why not use the red pen on those, and only on those? Of course, that is much more difficult than correcting all mistakes in green...

If a teacher has managed to create a positive atmosphere, the correction of errors is something that can be done naturally, because there are many ways to do it. I practised some last Friday, while students were doing their telling the hour exercises, and it's not that hard. Most of the times a question is enough ("are you sure about this?" or "if you have said this in the previous exercise, shouldn't you be saying something else here?"). Even a red pen will be taken in a good way, if you have managed to create a positive atmosphere before.

This school placement is being great, because it is creating many "disbalances" in me in a constructivist sense, and I feel a bit restless because I haven't balanced back yet. A good sign: it must be that I am learning.