Article - Erase Erasures - Education Consultants Of The Midwest, Inc.

# 16 ERASE ERASURES

A significant number of students have discovered that erasing words, lines and paragraphs is viewed by teachers as honest academic labor. These students use erasing as an avoidance behavior, usually to compensate for their inability - real or imagined - to spell, write legibly or compose intelligent thoughts in sentence form.

Those teachers who have in their possession stacks of papers not only full of erasure holes, but which also appear to have been slept on, can take heart. There is an alternative: the draw-a-line-through-the-mistake approach. It is a simple approach which does not cost the taxpayer's money; in fact it saves money.

Instruct all students they are not to erase anymore. Instead, they are to draw a neat, single line through any error and continue with their work.

This approach produces several results. The first is that the line allows the teacher to see the mistake. This provides valuable insight as to the struggles a student experiences in writing. Secondly, the student's time can be spent on getting as much information down with a minimum of interruptions. The third result is helping the student understand it is ok to make mistakes in class; that's what rough drafts are for. The last result is that when all these errors surface, they can be noted and managed by both the teacher and the student.

Stopping the constant erasing is similar to breaking a bad habit. It is best done school-wide and in "cold turkey" style. The student's initial resentment is soon lost in more productive work. Papers become neater, the writing becomes more legible and the level of production increases.

This article was originally published in 1984 and re-published in a monograph, 101 WAYS TO PROMOTE ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE, by the Minnesota Foundation to Promote Academic Excellence.

Permission to reproduce is given by the author, CWA.