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Chapter 1: How has our relationship with handwriting changed over time?
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A handwritten note is super important and yet I feel like that's something being lost. It's useless. Cursive is outdated. My wife not so much in agreement on that. I take a lot of pride in my handwriting, actually. I joke that I was a calligrapher in a past life.
My parents started dating back in the 80s, and for a while, they were long distance. This was way before the smartphone, so they sent each other a ton of mail. They wrote letters back and forth, and my dad would make my mom mix tapes to send her. I love it because it's a peek into my parents' lives before me. I can feel the paper. I can see my mom's beautiful penmanship.
But it also makes me realize we really don't physically write all that much anymore. But some of you are trying to bring it back. Handwriting is a big part of my life. I've been bullet journaling since eighth grade, and now I just graduated college.
I love writing my notes. I keep a shopping list that my partner likes to make fun of and consistently tries to make digital.
My husband loves to joke that I write enough letters to keep the post office in business. I'm Jonquilin Hill, and this week on Explain It To Me from Vox, the handwritten word. How our relationship with writing has changed, and how that's changed us. First up, learning how to write. I called up Sean Datchick. I'm a professor of special education at the University of Iowa.
I'm also a former K-12 teacher, administrator, and former director of the Iowa Reading Research Center. Okay, Sean, it may be a surprise to no one, but it has been a while since I was in elementary school, and things have changed a lot since then. When do students start to learn handwriting in schools, and how is it being taught now?
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Chapter 2: What are the current standards for teaching handwriting in schools?
Back with more Explain It to Me. Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she researches technology and human behavior. And one human behavior that she loves to dig into is writing.
One of those things that I think we all take for granted, that's a skill we all have, and I had young children at the time and noticed that they weren't being taught handwriting in school the way I was. So I thought, well, am I an old timer who's just sort of hearkening back nostalgically to the good old days? Or is there something useful in handwriting?
One of the most surprising things I discovered is that learning to write by hand, whether that's printing block letters or later cursive handwriting, doesn't just teach you how to put words on paper. It implicates all kinds of things about short-term and long-term memory. It affects our ability to analyze text. If you haven't learned how to write well by hand, you approach words differently.
You understand and remember them differently. So there's all kinds of broader implications for how we remember the things we read. that are based in some of that embodied cognition. So that was really fascinating to me. The other thing I found is that it just makes us slow down. If you're thinking and writing, your body doesn't allow you to write as quickly as you can type on a keyboard.
So that also changes the process of how we put words to paper.
I will say, we heard from a lot of listeners on this topic, and we heard from a lot of listeners who still prefer to write things out.
Right.
I do typically write a card, a letter, a few postcards.
I write those at least two or three times a week. My friends and I, after we graduated from college, got into the habit of mailing each other monthly letters. My wife likes love letters, and so I write her one once a week.
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Chapter 3: When did handwriting become less of a priority in education?
And so that's one of the things where a lot of kids these days when they the most interesting anecdote I have come across in my research were bakeries like at supermarkets having problems hiring people to be bakers because none of the people they hired knew how to write a happy birthday message in cursive to make it look nice on a cake. Wow.
So they had to teach them cursive so they could decorate the cake. So yeah, it's great. I think we need the basics, though, in order to then later have a more expressive form of handwriting. Change is normal.
Socrates said writing things down would make people lazy and make us stop relying on our memories. People thought the Sony Walkman was going to make us antisocial and isolated and Do we romanticize the past? Do we need to accept that people have moved on? Or, yeah, I wonder how you think balancing that. Like, moving forward with the times, but also kind of cherishing these old ways.
This is the great question, and it's each age has to ask it again for itself. So I think, look, I don't want to go back to—you can pry my washing machine out of my cold, dead hands. Like, that technology is here to stay. And, you know, look, I use digital streaming music. We use our computers every day for work. I wouldn't want to go back. But I think the challenge now is—
is that we have to actively carve out those analog moments. We have to make the effort and we have to relearn lessons about what we should value in daily life. So I think we should value more face-to-face interaction, more civility in public life, like acknowledging the stranger when they walk into the elevator.
And these seem like small niceties, but they really matter in terms of our day-to-day lives and the ability to be civil to each other. So We have to choose it now. It is an option never to do it that way. And that is brand new.
So in some ways, I think we do adapt and we have adapted, but we can overcorrect towards technology and start to become a little too machine-like in our own way of behaving and thinking. And I think sometimes we need to step back and say, what are the human things that we've lost in doing that?
You know, if someone's listening to this interview and is thinking, I haven't written anything by hand in weeks, what would you tell them they're missing?
They're missing the experience, first, of frustration. If you haven't been writing in a while, you'll be shocked that you might not be able to read your own handwriting. A lot of people have that experience. But you're missing the process of embodied cognition, your mind and your body working together.
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Chapter 4: What evidence supports the importance of handwriting for learning?
Do you think people are recognizing what's been lost and are reclaiming those tactile experiences? Like, what's going on there?
I think so. I think that's exactly what that is. And I think it's part of that sort of broader movement towards using your hands again. I think people genuinely feel like they don't touch grass anymore. And all of this is sort of trying to touch grass, touch pencils and pens again, like they haven't in a while.
And I think there's also just more and more research coming out that, for example, writing by hand helps you learn things in a different way, helps keep you engaged in a different way than just sort of staring at your screen. Well, I mean, maybe one day we'll see screens that, and this is something that's come up in some of my conversations, they're trying to make screens a little bit more
tactile potentially in the future so maybe less smooth exactly more feel like you used to go to a mall and like buy a shirt and you can like feel the texture of the shirt and like of course brands want to recreate that somehow we're at this point where one person i spoke to described it as kind of like um touchscreen mania and maybe little by little we're sort of moving away from that
That's it for this week. We want your help with an upcoming episode about my least favorite part of summer. Mosquitoes. Do they love you? Are you one of the lucky ones that they avoid? Either way, we want to know how you keep them away and how you deal with those annoying bites. Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545 or shoot an email to askvox at vox.com.
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Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy, and I'm your host, Jonquilin Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye! Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the U.S. gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000. And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch Pet Insurance comes in.
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