Soul's Typography

It’s been about four-five weeks (depending on when you actually call the end of the school year, based on the fact that seniors were supposed to be released a week before the underclassmen) since the school year ended. I’ve NOT missed the early wake-up time, the smell of the hall bathrooms, the drama of the annoying people I have to work with. You know what I have missed? Handwriting.

I teach English, so there’s obviously more writing there than say, chemistry, but I’d say that teachers could probably be really great at one of those FBI/Forensics jobs where the nerd with the thick glasses and bright light in a dark steel room analyzes handwriting and what it says about the bearer’s personality. Teachers start to notice things about the ways people write-- silly things such as drawing circles instead of dots over i’s, some people’s penchant for writing in print or cursive, and even the way some people have the propensity for killing a whole lot of paper by skipping lines or writing unusually large. 

I assign journals—in fact, I think it’s one of the hallmarks of why my classroom “works” so well. Students have a regular channel of communication with me—regardless of how much time we get together—if we have any quiet moments for any tete-a-tetes-- if it’s a testing week or a teaching week. This channel is sculpted so that kids can have a free-choice topic and they have the open option of writing down song lyrics (rap/r&b) and essentially explicating them, as one would do poetry. Now, when they’re writing a detailed explanation of why they like certain lines of the song and how the meaning is subtle/broad/nuanced, etc. they don’t realize they are doing higher-order thinking. I’m tricking them into academic discourse. Plus, I love music. I may not enjoy angry rap, but I get its place in a teen’s world.

Another aspect about journaling is that kids, although they are so completely plugged in—texting, calling, facebook, twitter, etc., they feel like so many of us may have felt as teens—that no one understands them and that they have no voice. Or that if you have a voice—there’s either no one to hear it or it’s not worth being heard. Having a journal in which a trusted adult (eh-hem, that’s me) responds and can write back or even open up a personal conversation about in response to the entry? That’s communication gold. It’s private, safe, and available. They know that it’s not getting ignored or, heaven-forbid, not “liked” or “followed” on social media. This leads to some powerful writing and teenaged catharses.

So it’s summer time. And I realized I miss handwriting. A student sent me a graduation “thank you” note today—thanking me for teaching him and helping him have a great senior year enclosing  a prom and senior portrait. He was a sweet kid-- polite, played sports, had a plan for college and career success. The kids generally have my home address because I send cards—handwritten ones—throughout the year. I kept a spreadsheet of how many cards I sent this year. It was a lot. Postage jumped during the year, thanks recession. It took a lot of time, but the payoff was good—for the same reason that reading 6 stacks of journals—close to 200 a week—is a good payoff. Having human connection—something tangible and real—that’s powerful. Seeing this kid’s handwriting brought back those moments in August when I’m reading through intro index cards and thinking, “How will I ever learn all these names?” even though generally I have all of them by the end of the week. His handwriting was uncharacteristically neat and tidy, for a teenaged boy.

I’m not sure what the rebellion within handwriting expression lies with teen boys is, because often, when I taught 4^th and 5^th grade kids, the boys had very neat handwriting. They’d spend time making sure it was perfect. The girls were often so busy flying through their ideas in the forms of paragraphs and poetry that their handwriting didn’t have time to be perfect. Somehow it switches back by high school—the girls are writing neatly, and encapsulating good ideas within the syntax of those pronounced paragraphs, but the boys are dawdling, wasting time writing with sloppy yet fluid, messy lines, and having less and less to say. 

I’m over-generalizing of course, but it has been an observation. By high school, general-level boys are writing less and less and think they have less to say or be good at. There are a few poets, lyricists, and scientists in the bunch, but there’s less than with the girls. The advanced girls write neatly, are organized, and turn in multiple drafts, and on time. The gifted girls are hit and miss. Sometimes they write as neatly as a Word document and other times it’s complete gobbledeegook. 

Thinking back over this year, three of my most creative writer-girls—they were all three musicians (band instruments and one singer), all poets, and all, Bertha, Lumeria, and Miranda,  had some sort of rough aspect to their home life. A terminally sick dad, a custody fight between parents, a child who was the first generation American who mom relied on heavily for translating-- these three 18-year-old girls had atrocious handwriting! It was bubbly and flowing and messy and squished up at the end of each line and completely annoying to read. Sometimes it would be giant and take up two lines when one would have sufficed and other times it was so crunched up, I needed a magnifying glass to read it. What is the commonality? The creativity. The songs within their hearts. Seeing the beauty around them for all the pain within them. So that handwriting? Annoying to grade—powerful to know the voice which was creating it.

Some other kids had type-writer perfect handwriting. Neatly made, whether it was print or cursive. Every assignment was neatly outlined and carefully spelled. These types of handwriting make life simpler! It’s a little bit of a chicken-or-egg dilemma though—am I grading more subjectively in their favor because they have good handwriting? Or is their good handwriting a product of more carefully thought-out answers and better foresight? Who knows. Several of the kids who I can think of who had delightful handwriting—Sarah and Corean in particular—were sitting on scholarships to the colleges of their choice by year’s end. Was it the handwriting on their admission packet? Doubtful—most of that is word processed.

Which brings me to my point—I MISS handwriting! All this word-processing and Web 2.0 stuff is great—the fact that everything is in real time, can be time-stamped, retrieved at a later date, can’t get lost, etc. can be a salvation for disorganized teachers. But when it comes down to it, the pop-quizzes are generally hand-written, and Georgia is still woefully behind the rest of the nation when it comes to open-response (essay) format tests, so they are still administered with bubble scantrons and number 2 pencils. Honestly, you could hand me nearly any piece of paper with writing on it and I could tell you which of my students did it—or that it wasn’t my student at all. 

Handwriting is beautiful—typography representing the subjectivity of the writer’s inner voice. It’s summer time and I miss having stacks of handwriting to wade through. I do!