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 4th
and 5th 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!
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