Repeating a point that I think needs to be emphasized

We praise daily work that contains little effort and no serious thought. We are taught when studying for teaching degrees to seek something positive to say about any work turned into us, and not to use red pens, since marking up papers with a lot of red ink makes students feel bad. When students copy each other on group projects, we allow this as a “group effort.”

Frankly, some of these papers deserve to be covered in red ink. Some of these group efforts should be shut down. While I believe in positive comments, in fairness I know there are times when “Think!!” is a perfectly reasonable word to scrawl in a margin. Character counts.