As we abandon cursive writing for the curse of keyboarding, are we losing touch with how to learn?
I received a letter from an old roommate the other day. She’s from Belfast and we try to keep in contact as much as possible. We Skype and send the odd Facebook message and, once in a while, we write.
We said we’d write every month—that was a little ambitious. Actually, I send and receive about four letters from her a year. They are four great days.
I love opening my mailbox to find the letter and peeling open the envelope to find her unmistakable penmanship. Dated and signed days earlier, the information is old news by the time it’s in my hands, but it is perfect nonetheless.
I wish we wrote more, but it’s hard. Writing a letter—writing anything by hand – takes time. There is no spellcheck and usually it’s a lot messier than typing an email or class notes.
Still, as I write less by hand, I feel almost as though I’m losing touch with something that’s necessary to love and learn, to be human.
It’s become the great dilemma of the lecture room. Internal dialogue goes back-and-forth, “Should I bother to write this down? It’s all going to be on Moodle anyway, I’ll just check it later…but it would be good to have my own notes…but really, there isn’t an exam in this class anyway.”
So sometimes we take down some incomprehensible notes—things we think will be important or things we’re interested in. We might write them down on some looseleaf or type them into our laptops in between checking Facebook and Twitter and the BBC. But if we miss something, it’s not a big deal, everything is on Wikipedia and Wifi is everywhere.
But several studies have shown a direct link between the increased use of laptops in the classroom and decreased ability of students to take information in and memorize it.
Many professors at St. Thomas University prefer students not use laptops in their classrooms, while others use Facebook to keep the class going long after classroom hours. In fact, one of my classes was cancelled last week because of the snowstorm and held on Facebook.
But what do we lose if we stopped writing things down altogether? What if our handwriting became nothing more than Times New Roman 12 point font and our signatures nothing more than a list of our titles and contact information, or a four-number combination.
James Whitehead, a professor at STU, said he tells his students on the first day of class that taking good notes is imperative.
“When it comes to learning, writing things down helps the student extract what is being said.”
Studies show that in order to memorize something, generally, it must be gone over at least three times.
“It may actually help students to write in class and type later on. That’s operation number one—the action of taking notes is just the first part,” he said.
Whitehead said he can usually tell which students will do well based on the body language of the class.
“Typically, kids who take notes, do better.”
But with all the information we could possibly need no further than our smart phones why bother?
“When you’re retrieving something out of a computer’s memory, you don’t change anything — it’s simple playback,” said Robert Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles in an interview with the New York Times.
But “when we use our memories by retrieving things, we change our access” to that information, Bjork said. “What we recall becomes more recallable in the future. In a sense you are practicing what you are going to need to do later.”
Memory comes with repetition. Athletes don’t need to think about every mechanic that goes into pitching a baseball or driving a golf ball, it’s built in to them through hours of repetition. The same goes for musicians; I doubt Jeff Beck thinks long and hard about every note he’s about to tap. So, the same can be deduced of knowledge. To write it and see it helps us know it.
But there’s more to it than smarts.
Elementary schools are spending far less time teaching cursive writing to children. The painstaking hours we spent copying the letter “S” from the backboard to our campfire notebooks could soon be lost on a younger generation. Typing is deemed more beneficial.
But something gets lost, something deeply personal.
There is an art to cursive writing. No two people will do it the same — the spacing, the length, the strokes — it’s perfected over years. Now, when we stumble across a letter written by a grandparent or great-grandparent we pause to admire its beauty.
We feel we know that person, for that moment of their life — who they were and what they loved. Not just by their words, but by the way they construct their words.
It’s more intimate than all the sexting in the world.
