As little as 10 years ago, lecture halls were filled with hundreds of students with their heads cocked straight forward, a binder of paper, and with a pen or pencil in hand. But gone are the days when the gentle scratching of ink on paper provided the soundtrack to a lecturer.
All of that has been replaced by laptops on knees, phones in hands, and warm glows coming from students’ gizmos and gadgets. This is not surprising since as society delves deeper and deeper into its obsession with connectivity, technology has quickly transformed the very dynamic of the classroom and how we act as students.
Kathy Muldoon, a journalism professor at Sheridan College and former editor at the Toronto Star, can speak to how the slow death of handwriting has affected students, but she also says she’s seen it in herself.
“I’m even finding it difficult now to read my own handwriting. We’ve totally begun to rely on taking things down by tapping it into a cell phone and texting ourselves notes. The only time I ever
need to write with a pen and paper is when I write a cheque, or when I write notes during an interview or meeting.”
“I get pleasure out of making something beautiful.”
All of Muldoon’s students use laptops to take notes and complete assignments, and this reliance on technology has become obvious when they need to complete exams with pen and paper. “I remember exams coming back to me where the answers were written in a concentric circle that just kept spiralling and spiralling,” Muldoon says. “If you’re asking people to write with pen and paper, you have to accept what they give you. You can’t grade for penmanship if it’s not part of the rubric.”
In 2008, Kitty Burns Florey wrote Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting, a book which tackled the history of handwriting and the tensions between handwriting and modern-day communication. “Well, it’s not going to end civilization as we know it,” Florey admits when asked about the consequences with society abandoning handwriting. She does believe, however, that a high school student should be able to type like the wind, and they should have a legible and reliable handwriting. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or fancy, but I think everybody should have those two skills.
“It just doesn’t seem that hard to have that in your arsenal of ways to communicate,” she adds. Florey has seen the current state of lecture halls and says these students on laptops are missing out.
“There is a pleasure in being able to sit down quietly with a pen and a piece of paper and write something. It could be a letter or a poem, but just rough out what you’re trying to write on paper instead of a keyboard. They are missing out on the chance to slow down and do something quietly without the intervention of a screen.”
Florey also says that as more people lose touch with handwriting, there will always be those, including herself, who want to keep it alive.“I get pleasure out of making something beautiful. It’s a beautiful object when I write a grocery list to take to the grocery store,” she says.
At York, a typical arts degree doesn’t require a laptop, and most students decide for themselves to either bring a laptop or take notes by hand during lectures.But Adam King, a teaching assistant in the sociology department at York, noticed the soaring presence of laptops during his years of undergraduate studies.
“It seems that the temptation to browse the Internet or chat with friends is often too hard for many students to resist.”
“I would wager that over half of students now attend lectures with laptops, as opposed to taking notes manually,” says King. “It seems to me that handwriting as an exercise has been relegated to certain academic spaces like the exam setting.” He adds, “The general acceptance of word processing technologies has filled other spaces.”
It is very hard to assess the impact this pen and paper exodus will have on classroom dynamics, with many professors and teaching assistants having differing opinions. “My own feeling is that laptops in the lecture promote a sort of detachment to the intellectual experience,” says King. “It seems that the temptation to browse the Internet or chat with friends is often too hard for many students to resist, and thus can be a significant distraction for them.”
“It seems indicative of a shift to a culture defined by short attention spans,” King says. “From the way we consume to the way we get information, or the way we entertain ourselves. Slow and time-consuming doesn’t seem to be our ethos.”
So for those of you going off to lecture for the first time, this would be a great time to decide if that shiny new laptop is really going to help you out. That pencil might feel like a foreign object, but you are bound to need it at some point, right? Birthday cards will still need to be signed, and important forms will still need to be filled out. And if you can’t legibly print your name on a form, you just might run into some problems as you transition into adulthood.
Make the choice – join the crowd of gadget users and technology enthusiasts, or be a fleeting romantic with a piece of paper and an H2 pencil. Those left wielding a pencil could be considered vintage or hip – the vinyl collectors of this generation. As for those who choose to keep on diving into gadget obsession – they will quickly realize that a world without handwriting probably won’t impact our society in any way.
Michael Burton
Executive Editor Online
