Fletcher Update #3

I picked up three notebooks today!  That was pretty exciting.

One of my new students, however, turned in essays written on a word processor.

I know I stress this in the summer homework meeting, and I include it in the instructions in two places:  all writing must be done by hand.  I don't care if you print or write in cursive, but you must write it out -- and, in black or blue ink only,  please.  I will not read lime green or hot pink, either.

I am not being a hard-headed, cold-hearted wacko; the AP exam is a handwritten exam.

from Chapter 10, "A Thing Like Me," The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr:

Every tool imposes limitations even as it opens possibilities.  The more we use it, the more we mold ourselves to its form and function.  That explains why, after working with a word processor for a time, I began to lose my facility for writing and editing in longhand.  My experience, I later learned, was not uncommon.  "People who write on a computer are often at a loss when they have to write by hand," Norman Doidge reports.  Their ability to "translate thoughts into cursive writing" diminishes as they become used to tapping keys and watching letters appear as if by magic on a screen. Today, with kids using keyboards and keypads from a very young age and schools discontinuing penmanship lessons, there is mounting evidence that the ability to write in cursive script is disappearing altogether from our culture.  It's become a lost art.  "We shape our tools," observed Jesuit priest and media scholar John Culkin in 1967, "and thereafter they shape us."

I always suspected the truth of this, (and also worry about the increased potential for cheating when I accept word processed essays).  I have always required my students to write in longhand -- and when I say longhand, I mean either cursive or printing.  That part does not matter to me.  (I realize many of you are not comfortable or fast when writing in cursive.)

It is certainly my experience that when I write in longhand, I produce a different quality of text than when I write on the keyboard.  I'm NOT suggesting that one is superior to the other; I am merely pointing out that the two modes of producing language on a page ends up impacting the language itself.

If I send you into that test room next May without giving you HOURS of practice of thinking and writing in longhand, I would be guilty of not preparing you adequately.

When I ask for work in a particular format, there is a reason.  When the College Board starts allowing students to test live and online, sitting at a monitor with fingers on a keyboard,  I will change my policy.