Bad Red Pen
Crazy stories listening to Fox News today.
Parents are lobbying teachers to use purple pens to correct papers because their red pens are traumatizing. (As usual, Fox is months behind and factually skewed (dated 2004-08-23) on this story concerning the replacement pen color.) What exactly is it that’s traumatic about red pens? Perhaps if your homework/tests weren’t crud, you wouldn’t suffer the trauma. Maybe the trauma is caused by dreading the poor performance associated with seeing red marks on returned papers, and so after purple pens are in use for a while, parents will lobby teachers for a different color, since purple will have become traumatic, too.
Pat an I had a brief discussion last night about frivolous lawsuits and how they’re wrecking the price of media (like music and movies). There was a story on Fox News about a book a guy had written chronicling several suits that might not have made it past common sense - let alone a preliminary hearing - if people still had any common sense. For example…