Cursive writing, once nearly being thrown out with the bathwater, is now having its day in the sun.
Everything used to be written out by hand, of course. Students were (still are?) taught cursive to have a faster, but still neat and tidy, and universally understood way to write. Virginia Standards of Learning still require that cursive be taught in elementary school.
However, of course, like most things, cursive writing ability falls under the “use it or lose it” category. Kids who don’t need cursive for daily life may forget how to do it.
There’s also typing, which has turned into “keyboarding.” Typewriters started being developed in the 1880s.
Like any inventions, there were a few ways of trying it until a standard stuck. You can see some of those ways at the MHC Heritage Museum at 1 E. Main St. Some of the typewriters it has on display include: A Remington Rand, a gift from Tiffany Hayworth; an Underwood, on loan from O.G. Reid; an Odell Type Writer No. 4, circa 1904, on loan from Dr. Mervyn King; and the first portable typewriter, the lightweight Blickensderfer No. 5, from 1893, also from Dr. King.
The Odell is most interesting, because it does not type its letters across the page: It types one letter at a time, going down the page. The paper roll is not horizontal across the top of the keys, but rather vertical, below and perpendicular to the keys. The keys are on one long bar, and you slide and click the letter you want. You’d have to have your entire paper planned out line by line to be able to type out anything. No wonder it didn’t last much beyond 1904.
None of those typewriters, as interesting as they are, carry the thrill of the old brown Royal that’s sitting on a table outside the display case – because that’s set up for museum patrons to type on. It’s a huge hit among kids.
Here’s some of what was typed on the paper during the most recent field trip here: “kkskdkdjfnf,” “hey is this on?” “wwwow holy mol y,” “mama ya addy,” “hi r d jared and rebecca were herehhhhhellio,” and “Kate Brittany I lovemy I love my MOM.”
Typewriters were the wheels on which business ran in the 1900s. Then along came computers. Do you remember when we were told that computers would create the “paperless office?”
In the early days of computers we naively looked forward to fewer papers cluttering our desks and filling our filing cabinets. The opposite happened: Since it was so easy to create documents, more and more and more paperwork was generated.
Since printers and copy machines spit out papers so much more easily than using carbon paper for duplicates did, paper exploded everywhere.
When I bought my first house, the loan package only had four or five papers in it. I remember in the early 2000s sitting through someone’s FHA mortgage loan and the loan package had 38 papers in it.
One of the papers the buyer had to sign said nothing more than that the buyer certified that he had received and signed all the other papers! I bet loan packages are even thicker now.
For a few decades, students turned in assignments they had done on computer, and then came the day when the assignments and tests went straight from the students’ computers to the teachers’ – no middle ground of printing out papers needed. It went all online.
But guess what. Just as things got lightning quick with efficiency (and really – what teacher and student need 24/7 access to each other? Give each other a break!), AI comes crashing in with cheating.
Now students have Artificial Intelligence write their papers and assignments, and teachers are scrambling for ways to stop it.
One method is by using a software tracker such as Brisk. Brisk tracks a student’s activity as he writes in Google Docs. Teachers can see a video which shows the student’s revisions, edits and time spent on it.
Wow, that sounds like a lot of time for the teacher, doesn’t it – adding on video-watching to the already tedious paper-grading?
Another method is to turn back the clock and have students write out essays by hand. Does it seem like an impossible expenditure of time? That used to be the only way it was done. Teachers dealt with hand-written papers all the time. There was no other way.
Of course, that was when teachers were given liberty to teach, not trapped by constant paperwork and reports for outside the classroom.
Getting away from AI cheating will require a domino effect of related solutions. This is one time in which we look to the past to solve a problem of the present which will grow only greater in the future.
