Red pens did me good
My second-grade teacher, Sister Mary, would be shocked that I turned out to be a writer.
Please allow me to explain.
In recent years, many schools within the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia have barred teachers from marking student papers in red.
Their thinking is that correcting young students with red pens is too confrontational and upsetting for the children. Many teachers prefer to grade in more soothing colors, such as green, blue, pink and yellow.
Red ink surely wasn’t banned at St. Germaine Catholic School in the ’70s. That school was all business, and the wonderful sisters who taught there were too busy ramming knowledge and values into us to worry about our sensitive little egos.
It’s true that the sisters were more favorable toward the more engaged students. Who could blame them?
We had 40 kids or more packed into each class. The sisters, many of whom entered the convent during the Depression and were getting on in years by the 1970s, were exhausted. They had little patience with daydreaming runts like me.
Whereas the better students were always attentive and eager, I was always staring out the window, thinking about the hills I would ride with my Murray five-speed — or plans I had to put an addition on the never-finished shack my buddies and I built in the woods.
I was a continual disappointment to Sister Mary (we called her Sister Mary Brass Knuckles) and, boy, did she let me have it. When she called me out of my daydreaming world to approach the chalkboard and complete an equation, it was humiliating.
“Are you lost in left field without a glove, Tommy?” she would say.
“Sister,” I’d say, “I don’t even have tickets to the game!”
Sister never let me or anyone off easy — and certainly didn’t worry about our feelings.
She knew the only way to improve our self-esteem, ultimately, was to teach us how to be accurate and correct.
She marked up my English compositions as though she were being funded by the red-ink lobby.
She was ahead of her time. The educational emphasis on self-esteem and emotional comfort over the past 30 years is producing dismal results.
The latest Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results (2022) show that the math scores of U.S. 15-year-olds are well below those of other developed nations.
PISA concluded that “America’s infatuation with the ‘happiness factor’ in education may be misplaced, and could, in fact, be hurting, not helping, American students when it comes to maintaining an international competitive edge.”
In other words, America has some of the most smug, self-assured students on the face of the Earth.
Since they were babies, caring adults and educators assured them they are intelligent, attractive and wonderful — everybody gets a trophy — even though nobody asked them to break a sweat earning their wonderfulness.
So it turns out the proponents of the anti-red-ink mindset have it wrong. The good sisters at St. Germaine had it right.
All those red marks on my second-grade composition papers were unpleasant at the time, but they did me good in the long run.
As I said, Sister Mary Brass Knuckles would be proud to learn that this daydreaming pupil eventually applied himself and has been writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column for 20 years.
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Copyright 2026 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.
Find Tom Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos of his dog, Thurber, at TomPurcell.com. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com.
Copyright 2026 Tom Purcell, All Rights Reserved. Credit: Cagle.com
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