Red Ink

A line from a song I know goes like this: “If I am 98% perfect in everything I do, it will be the 2% I remember when all is through”.


As a teacher and counselor I have found this view of perfectionism to be far more prevalent than many of us know or are willing to acknowledge. Yes, we are aware that many have traces of perfectionist behaviors and thoughts, but so often it is perceived as just another trait of living.


One of my early memories as a student in elementary school was receiving a paper back from my teacher that was covered with red ink. It was difficult to see any of what I had written due to the corrections made using red ink by the teacher.


I recall feeling bad that I had done so poorly in my work. The large amount of red ink conveyed to me that I had done nothing right and I was very deficient in my knowledge. There was no acknowledging of anything that I had done right or information that I had learned.


Looking back at this event and others like it, I found myself wondering if the teacher(s) was determined to use up a certain amount of red ink each school year or whether certain students like myself were thought to be able to learn more effectively if our mistakes were pointed out to us in a repetitive manner.


Fortunately, I was able to eventually have teachers who believed that encouragement of positive achievement was most effective for my learning. Also, I was blessed to have parents who were focused on aiding me to learn with a variety of techniques and encouraging me for my positive achievements.


When I became a teacher for two years to pay back a state governmental loan, I made myself a promise that I would never use red ink in marking a student’s work. My favorite ink color to use was green, but I also used a variety of colors to keep any one color from becoming THE color of right or wrong.


I also made the decision that whenever I marked student work, I would always focus on marking the correct answers if there was a right/wrong response. Also, I decided to write positive comments about the students' work. I would use words like ‘needs change’ to indicate anything that my own teachers would have marked in red as being ‘wrong’.


Sometimes as an adult, I still feel the scars left by ‘red ink thinking’. Like the opening line from the song at the beginning of this piece, I continue the battle to avoid focus on my shortcomings rather than my positive skills. The scars left on us by unknowing people in our lives from childhood often continues to influence us when we are adults.


One of our personal goals of adulthood can be to use our energy and strength to enlarge our own positive self-esteem by choosing to focus our attention on that 98%.


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