Pack Creek Ranch, San Juan County, Utah
Finally some Winter – clouds, wind, snow flurries, 25 degrees – and then clear blue skies in the afternoon
The 25th day of January in 2012

News from the world of astronomy today is a reverse view – the Earth’s blue ball taken by satellite on Jan 4. It’s all over the internet - take a close look.
Somewhere down there . . . you are . . .

THE CURSE OF THE SLASHING RED PENCIL

For twenty years I served on the faculty of an elite high school.
Drawing, Painting, and Art History were the subjects I taught.
Part of the pleasure of any given day was time spent in the faculty lounge.
Swapping the war stories of the teaching experience, talking ideas, kicking administrative incompetence around, telling jokes, and above all, bonding with those whose basic values included quality education.

The faculty lounge served as an informal seminar, where you could learn aspects of subjects you did not teach or comprehend – Chemistry, Math, French, and Music, for example, in my case.
The faculty lounge, at its best, was a graduate seminary in education.
And several times this led to be being allowed to sit in the back of other teacher’s classes to get a taste of their knowledge and pedagogical style.

There were some remarkable colleagues there and I treasure their memory.
I miss them and the experiences of the private club of the faculty lounge.

On the other hand.

It was often painful to watch when teachers of English and History marked and graded papers in the faculty room – a common event.
The marking and grading was done in red pencil.
The teachers often thrashed through piles – multi-tasking in haste, as if they knew what to expect and could do the work without much deliberation.
The teachers were looking for mistakes in punctuation and spelling, as well as content and construction, and seemed to take pleasure in finding errors.
They worked with swift slashing motions as if they wielded a sharp knife or an ice pick – cut-and-stick style.
It seemed like a “gotcha” approach to correcting papers.

They scribbled notes and esoteric remarks that were hard to decipher.
I know because when I went over the papers with students who were my advisees I often could not fathom what the teacher said or meant.

There were times in the faculty room when a teacher would say or even shout, “Listen to this!” And read a garbled sentence or a paragraph full of confused facts.
The denizens of the faculty lounge would laugh.
And gossip about the intelligence and personality of the student.

I found this process of speed marking and this brand of comedy painful.
This breed of English teachers had blood on their hands, from scratching out the heart and souls of aspiring young writers.
Intentionally or not they were wounding instead of inspiring.
Students were being held up for ridicule for being students.

What I witnessed reminded me of what must have happened to me and my writing once upon a long time ago . . .
And probably to you, as well.
Remember all those papers you got back marked in red?
“WRONG!” was what one teacher used often on my work.
Why was it wrong? She didn’t say. I was just supposed to work it out.

And I recall one teacher whose handwriting was so bad and whose notes so cryptic it would take a code book to figure out what she meant.
But some of us figured out that if you just re-wrote the paper with minimal obvious changes she would never re-read it. And your grade was really based on what she thought of you as a student in other respects.
She didn’t really care about the writing – she’d seen too much of it, I guess.

On the other hand.

My favorite English teacher addressed a paper first with a green pencil.
She first read through a paper for basic content – looking for the good stuff.
Her green comments, which I can still see in my mind’s eye, were such as:
“Good.” - “Yes!” - “You’ve been thinking!” - “Strong paragraph.” And the best one: “If this paper was a song it would be a hit! Keep singing!”

At worst she would write: “Think about this again.” or “Are you sure?”
and “What about another point of view?” She raised questions to encourage me to think, not to leave me defeated with scars on my spirit.
I looked forward to getting papers back from her with excitement, not fear.

And yes, she did go back and read papers again using a red pencil.
Using little editorial marks we understood: “sp.” – “punc.” and a slash line meaning starting a new paragraph would be better.
We did make errors.
We were students.
We most needed encouragement, not damnation.

This English teacher was not a wimp or a pushover, by the way.
She had high standards for us and for herself.
She made us work hard, and even memorize poetry.
She thought the best of us.
She wanted us to think the best of us.
She was an educator, not a teacher-terrorist.
I still treasure her marks in green pencil.

(And then there was the professor who used a whole box of pencils of many colors . . . he favored purple . . . but that’s a story for another time.)

All of us have been victim of the slashing red pencil syndrome.
As teachers we tend to refer to our own teacher’s example, and they, in turn, were probably victims of the slashing red pencil syndrome in their own time . . . and on back into far time, forever.

The red pencil approach to education slops over into our way in the world.
Encouraging a red pencil approach to life itself.
We edit the world:
Wrong, wrong, wrong and again wrong . . . bad, bad, bad . . .

This is not meant as indictment of all English teachers.
But it is an indictment of a style of approaching life . . . and editing.

Editing.

That’s what set this train of thought in motion in the first place.
If you make your living as a writer, as I do, then the curse of the slashing red pencil continues to be a part of your ongoing life.
And I’m in the process of marketing three new manuscripts – all to be scrutinized by the wielders of the red pencil.

Editors edit.
That’s their chosen profession; that’s their job; they get paid to wield the slashing red pencil. It’s a mentality – “I can fix it – I can make it better”
And, to be honest, the best ones can and do.

Once I had an editor for my nationally syndicated newspaper column who said to me that there was nothing I could write that she could not improve.
And she added that the test was whether or not I agreed with her edits.
And no matter how often I sent something to her that I thought she could not mess with, she did, and she was right. Every time.
I don’t know what tool she used to mark up my words.
Her edits were conveyed to me in black and white in e-mail form.
But what I sensed and felt was the work of a green pencil.
I thought of her as a coach, an advocate, an educator – not just an editor.
I’m a better writer because of her.

Enough of all that.

Here’s a summary of Fulghum’s view of writing and editing.

The theories of post-modern literature make sense to me.
There is no one book – one way to write – one way to think.
There is the book the author writes – with his intentions and sensibilities.
There is the book the editor edits – with her values.
And there is the book each individual reader reads, adding their intelligence, desires, experiences, and imaginations to what the author and editor began.
None are the same book.
All reflect a human need to communicate one’s truth in one’s way.
All have validity.
All should be respected.
All should first bear the marks of the green pencil, and then the red one.

Finally, this encouragement:
When you go out into the world to examine what’s offered, always carry a green pencil with you.