Lavender Ink

I remember elementary school. I remember big yellow buses with rips in the sticky brown leather seats and windows smudged with fingerprints and faces. I remember the busses ran on diesel fuel. To counteract the impact on the environment we turned paper grocery bags into recycling monsters. A bit ironic thinking back now on the amount of wasted construction paper glued to a brown sack to make it look like a cartoonish hungry-for-aluminum type creature. I remember the teachers were allowed to yell at us and feelings were hardly considered. If we misbehaved we were denied certain privileges, just like we were rewarded for good behavior. It was… oh what’s the word… discipline!

I think about this time in my life each day when I see a hybrid bus pick up a group of school kids, either playing with their cell phones or ipods (though I suppose it is this generation’s pager or sony diskman), and they are dressed in clothes that would suggest virginity is as obsolete as the floppy disk. I’m sure these hybrid busses smell of  sanitation and it would not surprise me if there was a dispenser of purell and a calming aromatherapy airfresher at each exit point.

Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against hybrid vehicles.  In fact I’m pro-many things. Pro-hybrid, pro-choice, pro-germs, (I say let them build a tolerance - in my days of school we had anti-bodies, not anti-bacterial), pro-discipline, and most of all, pro-red-ink.

I don’t know how many people remember the story that explained what was really wrong with the educational system. It was not that students lived in low-income and high-crime rate areas, not ADD or low self esteem or supressing the freedom of expression in children, it wasn’t even as valid as problems arising from taking art and music out of the cirriculum. No. The problems with the students occurred because of red ink. Some schools banned teachers from grading papers in red, instead instructing them to use lavender because its more soothing for the student to receive a less judgmental color. I might add, too, that schools banned games such as ’tag’ during recess to be replaced by games where no one is ever “out”. I suppose this limits everything from musical chairs to teeball.

A child goes to school to learn and be prepared for the real world. The real world is not made up of lavender ink and fairness. I learned from red judgements on my papers, I learned from being picked last for kickball, and I learned that being hit with a fuzzy red germ infested dodgeball meant that I was out. It meant better luck next time.

Advertisement