A reporting question on "death of cursive"

I know I've talked about the cursive debate too much, but this time I'm intrigued with a difference in reporting.

"Is Cursive Writing Dead?" at Yahoo News:

Writing in general, regardless of whether it's cursive, may also boost brain activity, according to a 2010 study finding that preschool students who wrote out letters rather than just viewing them showed changes in brain activity when they later viewed those letters. "Coupled with other work from our lab, we interpret this as the motor system augmenting visual processing," said study researcher Karin Harman James of Indiana University in a statement. "In the case of learning letters, printing helps children recognize letters."

So far, so good. But take a look at Morgan Polikoff's statement in the article:

Anderson points critics to a recent study by the College Board, which found that SAT test essays written in cursive received a slightly higher score than those written in printed letters.

But Polikoff and others aren't impressed. The College Board study "is not evidence of anything," he told the Los Angeles Times. "It doesn't indicate that the knowledge of cursive causes higher scores."

"As we have done with the abacus and the slide rule, it is time to retire the teaching of cursive," Polikoff told The New York Times. "The writing is on the wall."

And at WaPo, a much less inflammatory and more nuanced statement. I've put the part missing from Yahoo! in bold:

Jacks and Asherson cited a study conducted by the College Board a year after implementing a handwritten portion to the SAT in which the student essay responses were coded across a variety of characteristics such as number of paragraphs, words and whether they were written in first person. The essays also were coded as print or cursive.

The study — based on 6,498 randomly sampled tests administered between March 2005 and January 2006 — revealed that 15% of the essays were written in cursive and received a slightly higher sub-score than printed essays.

"It's easier to read and easier to score," Asherson said.

Still, the study is not enough to convince Morgan Polikoff, an assistant professor at USC Rossier School of Education.

The percentage of essays written in cursive "is not evidence of anything," he said. "It doesn't indicate that the knowledge of cursive causes higher scores, but it might suggest that the kind of folks who write in cursive during SATs do so because they're probably smarter." [...] 

 "The simple fact is that cursive is not included in the common core," he said, and added that though states are able to choose up to 15% of the standards, few decide to add cursive.

"I think it's important to have nice handwriting, but the importance of having to learn two kinds of handwriting seems unnecessary given the vast method of communication is on a keyboard," Polikoff said. "One reason [to teach it] might be to be able to read historical documents and old journals that are written in cursive."

 Left undiscussed:

1. Do smarter students write in cursive because cursive helps their brain activity?

2. Or do SAT raters give them credit for being smarter because they see writing in cursive as a superior skill?

3. Is there a real correlation between cursive writing and better writing (better thoughts, better sentences, etc.), or is it just an artifact of the rating process?

4. If cursive isn't part of the common core but is taught in good schools (as nicoleandmaggie indicated), how might this affect the professed objectivity of the rating process for other standardized tests, since cursive writing could equal coming from a better school?

5. Why would Yahoo! report Polikoff's view as a "stomp out cursive" message and WaPo report his longer statements, which sort of undercut the idea that cursive is useless?

Handwriting and Cursive Handwriting: Once more, with feeling

The New York Times reports that cursive handwriting is making a comeback, and the headline is this: "Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back."

I've written (though not by hand--hah!) on this blog about handwriting and specifically cursive handwriting, most recently in response to Anne Trubek, who has a lot of strong opinions about it. 

But I have a few issues with, well, this issue.

First--you see what I did there in the title?

Writing by hand is not writing in cursive.

Writing by hand means making marks on a piece of paper (or with an Apple pencil on an iPad, or whatever else isn't typing). It can be printing letters rather than connecting them. It could probably mean shorthand.

Cursive is a subset of handwriting in which the letters are connected. If I could draw a Venn diagram in Blogger, it would show a little circle inside a big circle.

Second,  what's the evidence?

The evidence is that writing notes by hand, not writing notes in cursive handwriting, is what helped students learn back in those studies done earlier in the century. Cursive may be faster to write, but it's not a defining factor. It'd be nice if students learned it, but no classroom has 18 hours a day.

Figure 1. My precious.

Third, there's an ominous political tinge to all this.

Now, I happen to like cursive, and yes, I think that, like languages, music lessons, and unpaid internships, it will become a class marker to separate the haves from the have-nots, if it hasn't already. I also like fountain pens. I mean, who wouldn't like to write with those beauties in the picture?

And yes, it'd be great to have students who could read cursive so that they can read letters from ages past, or letters from their grandparents, or handwritten notes on graded papers. (If they can't read the last-named, they will have a hard time in my class, but so far, no complaints.)

But the idea that they have to be able to read cursive in order to read the Declaration of Independence or other documents from the founders--well, those documents have been in print form for quite some time now.

Figure 2. Go ahead. Tell us what it says, cursive-reader.

And the idea that "Magna Carta" was "written in cursive" is kind of like saying that a tiger is a cat. Technically, yes, but its being written in cursive isn't as much of a stumbling block as that it is written in Latin, which the NYT doesn't mention. Let's not even get into the varieties of handwriting, like 5th-century Uncial or secretary hand, which have to be learned as a separate skill.

There's a fantasy going around now in conservative circles about how if students can read cursive, we can just get back to the originary documents, including the Constitution, written in cursive, that will mystically reveal extreme right-wing principles about how God hates the poor, the rich deserve to be richer, etc. and other principles dear to the GOP heart.

I do like cursive. I am glad it is being taught. But I don't agree with the reasons now being touted for teaching it. 

Figure 3. Something about "all men are created equal" seems to be missing from the reasoning of some state legislators who promote cursive handwriting.

Cursive handwriting (again)

Figure 1. This signature of Treasury Secretary Jack Lew
looks a lot like that of many job applicants.

The Huffington Post reports that some schools are doing away with cursive handwriting. Now, as Sisyphus reminded me a couple of years ago, "no cursive" doesn't mean "no writing"; it just means that students are being taught to print and schools are leaving it at that (I think that's the case; the vagueness of the teachers on this point is annoying).

On one level they have a point. If the students are going to be tested to death--unless Michelle Rhee is in the picture, in which case the teachers cheat or get fired if their students don't get the right test scores*--maybe that half hour a day isn't best spent on practicing writing. I have a couple of observations and questions, as always:

• Students are still going to have to write (as in "not type") essays in classroom situations for a while, so as long as I can read what they write and they can read what I write in response, I don't care whether they print or not.
• Will they be able to read handwriting? The article treats this as some kind of ridiculously trivial skill, like knowing the best way to powder a wig.
• It's faster for me to write in cursive, but maybe that's because I was taught cursive (and retrained myself through calligraphy later on). That makes me a dinosaur, and I accept my scaliness with pride. Maybe instead of "digital natives" we should be talking about "print-writing natives" as the real generational divide.
• Some have said that cursive is needed so that people can sign documents and isn't used otherwise, sort of like that kind of literacy in the 19th century when people knew enough to sign their names but were otherwise illiterate. I don't whether cursive is necessary there, though. In reading job letters over the past few years, I've noticed that a lot of the candidates sign their names with just a squiggle like a sine curve or a couple of loops rather than with a name that you can read. I'm not sure why this is so, or whether it's a trend, but I thought it was interesting.
• I'm puzzled by why we keep wanting students to know less and less. Don't bother memorizing multiplication tables or learning how to make change--who needs it? Don't bother learning another language or having language departments, because Real Americans are proudly ignorant of any language but their own. (Remember the flack John Kerry took because he could speak French?) Don't bother learning to write in cursive, because unless you're going into a profession where people must read handwriting (such as being an academic), it's a useless skill.
• Or it might end up being a kind of class-based skill, the way knowing Latin and Greek were once the marks of a gentleman. The rich need to know how to write in cursive; we worker drones don't have to know it. It sounds silly, but it may be part of that larger trend now toward cutting out "useless" knowledge that doesn't prepare students to get a job, when employers actually want good writing and thinking skills.
• The thing that handwriting of any kind (not just cursive) does best is to allow the brain to make marks on paper through the fingers and thus help the retention of knowledge, as some of us have written about. It's not the same as typing, even on a manual typewriter, which seems to be making a comeback.
• Here's what I don't understand: aren't all the Edumacrats screaming about "hands on! hands on! Learning must be hands on!"? Here is a hands-on type of learning that, let's face it, forces a kind of attention and focus as well as training the brain. Even if they're not in favor of cursive, wouldn't you think they'd like its hands-on qualities?

*Edited because I forgot to credit Historiann for pointing out the scamming outrage of falsified tests that Michelle Rhee instigated.

Okay, I get it: you don't like cursive handwriting

Figure 1. You can read this, right?

In "Handwriting Just Doesn't Matter," a clickbait-y title that considerably overstates the evidence supplied in what turns out to be a surprisingly reasonable essay, Anne Trubek lists all the usual suspects about why we don't need cursive handwriting.

Actually,  I agree with a lot of her reasoning:

1. More people are writing more than ever before, so the kids are all right. (Pretty much true).

2. Typed work levels the playing field since bad handwriting can prejudice teachers (which is true).

3. The current proponents of cursive have seen it as a patriotic act, which is pretty sinister (which is sort of true and really one of the strongest arguments).  Typing is more small-d democratic.

4. She and her son had a hard time learning it, so it's not needed. (Can't judge this one.)

Weaker arguments:

1. Everyone has a keyboard or phone (and by extension is presumably wirelessly connected, with fully charged keyboard/phone) at all times. (Nope, not buying this one. Do we have free hardware and free software and free connectivity for everyone in this country? Disgracefully, no. )

2. It's not important to be able to read cursive, since only "experts" can read documents in cursive: "Reading that 18th-century document [the Declaration of Independence] in the original is difficult for most people who know cursive, as the script is now unfamiliar." Proof? Source? No, it's not difficult to read. It's not necessary, though, to be able to read it in cursive, although this seems to be an obsession with the #3 people above.

 The stronger corollary is that these documents are also written in foreign languages, which, although she doesn't say it, is something the U.S. more or less gave up on a while back.

3. She glides over all the studies that show that students who write notes by hand--which is NOT the same as cursive--retain information better.

Where Anne Trubek and I agree most is on this benign and sweeping conclusion: "The cultural values we project onto handwriting will alter as we do, as they have for the past 6,000 years."

As I've argued a lot on this blog, unlike Anne Trubek, I think that handwriting and/or cursive is important but isn't a hill to die on. But like other forms of creativity or self-expression (or the humanities, for that matter), we need to think a little before we can argue for its elimination on utilitarian grounds.

 Every time some form of handcraft goes extinct, whether it's canning or calligraphy or drama clubs or music--or, worse, becomes a class marker, as in prep schools will teach it  but public schools will not--we lose a little something of our small-d democratic systems.

Death of handwriting--really?

Time Magazine, which I've been checking out of desperation as Newsweek becomes increasingly newsless, has one of its trademark scare articles this week: "Mourning the Death of Handwriting." After the obligatory "here are my fascinating memories" intro by Claire Sudduth,* the writer, there's this little factoid: "And aside from the occasional grocery list or Post-it note, most adults write very little by hand." The article goes on to cite standardized testing, a post-1980s emphasis on learning to write cursive, and computers as major reasons for the decline.

Is handwriting really declining, and do adults really not use it very much?

About the "decline": I can see that fewer people write messages by hand, but the poor quality isn't a new thing, is it? All of you who've read handwritten letters from earlier centuries can attest to the fact that some have that whole Palmer Penmanship down to an art form as if Sister Mary Agatha is still watching, and some, well, don't.

About use: The "decline in use" is probably true, but "write very little by hand"? Is this true in academe? What about essay tests? Annotating books? Taking notes in class? Commenting on papers? I know--it's possible to do all these by typing, but it's actually faster to do some of these by whipping out a pen.

When I ask students who write poetry how they write it, it's often with a pen. In other words, one kind of writing that means something to them is writing they do with a pen.

Since Time is happy to provide proof by anecdote, maybe we can follow its lead: Do you think that handwriting is really "dead"? Does most people's yearly output of handwriting consist of a couple of postage notes and a thank-you note or two?

*Do you really care when she entered third grade? No? I rest my case.

[Edited to add this, because of Carl's comments: When I was at the archives this summer, one of the librarians said, "Your handwriting is so legible! You must have taken calligraphy!" It isn't usually that legible, but I felt as though she'd given me a gold star. Maybe handwriting instruction went out with gold stars?]

Update: Sisyphus, in the comments, has a good perspective on the article:

The article is not about the death of handwriting, which she says is an umbrella category, but of cursive, claiming that people born after a certain point just never stuck with cursive anymore.

That's totally true in my case ---- I write things out by hand all the time, but I never use cursive. Everyone I know who's roughly my age prints things. And I even had an old-school mother (much older than everyone else's) who decided my cursive was so bad that for an entire school year she fought me by making me practice cursive for hours after school every day.

I had never thought of this as a generational thing and had conflated the two-- writing = cursive--but Sis is absolutely right.

NY Times Q: "Is Cursive Dead?" (A. It's very sick!)

The New York Times has weighed in with one of my minor obsessions, cursive handwriting and poses (not, for the love of God, begs) this question: "Is Cursive Dead?"

Answer: Well, yes, kinda, sorta.

• There's an education expert who uses "impact" as a verb and says he personally doesn't use it, so it sure is dead.  
• An archivist who doesn't want it to disappear. 
• An occupational therapist that says brain science (true!) shows that it helps develop portions of the brain. 
• A handwriting expert that says a hybrid works just as well. 

My take?

• Pro: It helps with brain development, and it reaps a more useful benefit than Baby Einstein videos. 
• Con: On the other hand, teachers have enough to do. I'm not in the K-12 trenches, so I'm not sure that I get a vote.
• Pro: As far as cursive becomes elective in the schools, it'll become a status marker, like languages or other such "useless" knowledge. The ruling class will know it, and by those markers will know each other. The grimy proles like the rest of us will not. If we are working on increasing class stratification in this country by educational methods as well as by redistributing wealth to the top 1%, this is just another step in the process. 
• Addendum: I am still befuddled by how hard this culture says it works to develop everyone's brainpower and potential yet how loudly it howls whenever anyone is asked to do anything but the bare minimum of learning, saying that people are learning "frills." Since when can learning anything not about the Kardashians be considered a frill? 
• Con: The argument "we haz the shiny things now and we type instead of write" doesn't cut much  ice if you need to handwrite something, but that can be taken care of by printing, mostly. 

Conclusion: I like cursive handwriting aesthetically and intellectually, but I can't make a case that everyone needs to know it or teach it. They do need to know how to read it, though, which one of the experts says can be done in one hour with no followup. 

Your thoughts? 

More on handwriting

[Sorry! I was trying to get rid of a dead link in this old post and it posted as a new one.] 

 

The Washington Post has an article, "The Handwriting Is on the Wall" about the death of cursive (not handwriting per se--thanks, Sisyphus, for making that distinction). Here's a snippet from p. 2:

In one of the studies, Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills. But Graham worries that students who remain printers, rather than writing in cursive, need more time to take notes or write essays for the SAT. Teachers may say they don't deduct for bad handwriting in class, but research tells another story, he said. When adults are given the same composition written in good handwriting and poor handwriting, "they still give lower grades for ideation and quality of writing if the text is less legible," he said. Indeed, the SAT essays written in cursive had slightly higher average scores than those written in print, according to the College Board.

I'm not as worried about the first statistic. First graders aren't college students, and by the time students have practiced some form of handwriting for 12 years, they're bound to get pretty good at it. Some people can print as fast as they can write (anyone ever teach engineering students? I rest my case), so that statistic may not hold true. But what about the second part? Have you ever noticed a correlation between types of handwriting and the content of the work? Most people I've talked to who've graded a few thousand essays have formed some impressions, although they don't let it get in the way of assessing a paper. Maybe if everyone starts printing, those differences in scores will be erased--or maybe the advantage then will go to the fastest typists. Also, will it become difficult for people who don't know how to write in cursive to read cursive writing? Disclosure: the handwriting thing is hitting home for me because it seems to be going down the tubes just as I've gotten all interested in pens, inks, and paper. I've been trying to keep a notebook recording word counts, notes, page counts, information to look up, etc., and have been writing in it with my new pen. (I'm not obsessed yet the way some are, but I can spend far too much time pondering the qualities of J. Herbin versus Noodler's Ink or Clairefontaine versus Moleskine notebooks. Okay, maybe I'm a little obsessed.)

Cursive handwriting rises from the dead

Figure 1. Thoreau could walk around Walden Pond
 with a notebook and a pencil he made himself.
He knew that the hand  was connected to the brain, all right.

The AP announces that cursive handwriting is once again being taught in schools, after being sidelined in favor of printing (reasonable) and keyboarding (not).

The insistence that keyboarding alone would fill the gap assumed that people would have available at all times a keyboard, battery power, and wireless access.  Like Apple, which insists that the default should be using data on your phone to listen to music instead of downloading it, this assumes a level of financial privilege and an urban environment in which you're never out of range.

Where I live, you're out of range plenty of times. You're better off with a notebook and pencil, like Thoreau, and even if you're in range when walking in the woods, a notebook, unlike a phone, never talks back with little buzzing messages. You talk to it, in writing, and it listens.

Anyway.

I know I've written about this to the point of exhaustion (yours! sorry), citing everything from the class dimensions of not teaching cursive (ruling class needs it, grimy proles don't) to the uneasy alliance with American "traditionalists" who want it, but this point needs emphasis one more time, for two reasons.

First, the connections between hand and brain, as when you do something with your hands and it helps to rewire neural connections in your brain and create new areas, is well documented, as when students take notes by hand instead of typing them. True, you don't need cursive to do this, but I'm in favor of anything that gets students writing by hand because this connection is real and helps them in a way that keyboarding doesn't.

This is what Anne Trubek misses in her bestselling takedown of handwriting. In the new article, she says it's like piano lessons: you don't need them to succeed at life. What about the correlation (not causation, I know) between piano playing and math ability? Doesn't this hand-brain connection deserve more study?

Second, here comes that pesky class dimension and the humanities again. You might not need piano lessons, or music lessons, or art lessons, or a knowledge of literature, history, foreign languages, economics, and politics to succeed in life. But you can bet your bottom dollar that any little Trubeks, and any other middle-class children of aspiring parents, will have access to these "frills," even if the parents have to pay for them separately. Why? Because more knowledge is better and is a marker of future success, that's why. Trubek saying you don't "need" piano lessons is only part of the truth.  They're an added value that helps not only to develop the brain but helps students to succeed.

Figure 2. Lorelei Lee explains the economics of added value.

I'm reminded of what that great economist and philosopher Lorelei Lee says in the movie version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. When accused of marrying Gus for his money, she says, "Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?"

All those humanities frills, including cursive handwriting, do help. Why should they be reserved only for children whose parents are wealthy enough or savvy enough to ensure that their children get them?

Handwriting: a tipping point

Apparently Indiana has abolished the teaching of handwriting (cursive, I think, though the articles don't say) in favor of more typing.

• If you're at The Wall Street Journal, you see this as "the end of civilization as we know it," although I think Anthony Daniels is kidding.
• If you're at The Atlantic, you worry a little more about "how handwriting builds character."
• If you're Karin Harmon James, a psych professor at Indiana University, you talk about how "handwriting increases brain activity, hones fine motor skills, and can predict a child's academic success in ways that keyboarding can't." (The quotation is from the article and not from James.) What's disturbing is that James is talking about printing and not cursive in reporting this result: "The printing practice also improved letter recognition, which is the No. 1 predictor of reading ability at age 5." Eliminating practice of writing would thus have a negative effect.
  

There are class considerations here, too: little Sophie and Ethan* in the suburbs will just add another class to their over-scheduled lives between private music lessons and computer camp while those in regular public school will not. As long as students can still handwrite essays on exams, I don't care if they write in cursive or not, but maybe we're at a tipping point in terms of teaching the physical act of writing with a pen.

But I've discovered something disturbing: I don't much like to write by hand any more, and my handwriting is getting worse from disuse. This is almost as disturbing as discovering that I pay better attention to the books I read on the iPad, even though it's not as easy to mark them up as it is with a pencil. This feels like another kind of tipping point, and I'm not sure I like it.

Has that happened to you?

*Names chosen from the most popular names for 2011--no offense meant to any actual Sophies or Ethans.

Random bullets of where has the time gone?

Happy fall! How's everybody doing? In no particular order, some thoughts:

•  Twitter: There's a lot going on over there, including people leaving in droves, as Musk tries to charge $20/month for blue checks and bring back the most toxic man in America besides himself. I'm staying for now because of this logic: (1) Musk did this for attention and will get bored with it sooner rather than later; (2) he won't want to keep pouring money down a losing proposition; (3) he doesn't understand that the users are creating the content. Scalzi said it better than I just did.
• Covid. Despite my masking everywhere for the past few years & getting every vaccine & booster, Covid has finally caught up with me over some travel--and yes, I masked on the plane, etc. It's funny: when you tell people that you have it, they say things like "oh, I need to get my booster" or "oh, I should start wearing a mask again," which subtly implies to my feverish ears that I should have done those things--which I already did. It's a "just world" type of hypothesis, where if you do what you're supposed to do, a particular result will follow, except that sometimes it doesn't. But the masking, vaccines, etc. have made the experience far less severe than it could have been. 
• Travel. No two airport systems are alike, and since airports are filled with funnel points of no return, it's possible to be very stressed out about where to go and what the process is. I feel no need ever to do a puzzle escape room; the process of figuring out how to rescue lost luggage, where and when to check in, etc. is plenty challenging enough. The European system of announcing a gate on a board only10 minutes before the flight closes and when the gate is 10 minutes away ensures that you get an aerobic workout as you race down the corridors.
  
•  Students. I hired students to do a project, and it's exciting and fun to work with them and to see them learn things. The only downside is that the project involves documents with cursive handwriting, which is challenging for them.
  
• Writing. The writing is, or was, moving along pretty well on my new project.Is anyone doing NaNoWriMo? Do we do that any more? 

 Hope you all are well, and I really mean it. 

Still here

A conference, some deadlines, more travel, a hectic week, and then some more deadlines.  News I thought about writing about but didn't:

• At The New Yorker, the case for banning laptops in the classroom (wait--I already did that). More on this from WaPo and Margaret Soltan. [Edited to add links.]
• Cursive handwriting improves learning.
• The MLA recognizes a jobs problem but touchingly believes that (1) 60% of graduates get jobs and (2) that jobs are going begging in museums, libraries, and nonprofits, all of which will snap up vast numbers of English Ph.D. graduates immediately if we can (3) lower the time to degree and provide different sorts of training without (4) diminishing the number of graduates.  
• Quick quiz: which of these items is probably true?  Answer: 3. Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker does a quick check of the MLA's math.
• Mad Men, although that may be yesterday's news. 

A real post soon.

Writers on Writing: Oliver Onions, "The Beckoning Fair One"

 While sitting in front of a mountain of grading, undone reports, an overdue writing project, work on my new project, and other guilt-making items that piled up when I had a flu/cold the past couple of weeks and had no brains to deal with anything, I did what any sensible person would do: scroll through Twitter/X until I could face even one thing. 

Even in its current state, with the needle firmly in the red zone of "hot mess," Twitter/X surfaces the occasional happy dog picture or something equally unexpected and welcome. This time, it was a set of BBC videos from the 1970s featuring women over 90 talking about the restrictions of growing up at the turn of the century. One was Berta Ruck, a romance novelist (had never heard of her), who was married to Oliver Onions (ditto); Onions was the author of Widdershins, a collection featuring what is apparently a classic and highly esteemed ghost story, "The Beckoning Fair One." 

"The Beckoning Fair One" is about 44-year-old Paul Oleron, who, tired of shuttling between his work room and his lodgings, moves into an old house leased to him by a highly reluctant landlord. He delights in fixing it up, having it painted a delicate white, and figuring out that a square hatch above a half-door is a powder-closet: put your head with its elaborate headdress through it, have your servant shoot the "powder-pistol," and your hair would be all powdered and ready for society. 

But Paul is not just an inquisitive man with a flair for decorating. He's a literary novelist with a tight deadline, and while he's admiring his rooms and speculating about their former occupants, his half-finished novel Romilly Bishop, about which he had been enthusiastic before moving in, languishes. His loyal friend Miss Elsie Bengough, a popular novelist, challenges him about when he defends where he lives: 

"Anyway," Oleron summed up, "I'm happier here than I've been for a long time. That's some sort of a justification."

"And doing no work," said Miss Bengough pointedly.

I won't spoil the story for you (it's at the link), but Oleron gradually abandons Romilly Bishop, and things ramp up as they have a way of doing in ghost stories, until an unexpected conclusion.

But what was striking was that the ghost story here--the gradual psychological horror, the shifting of consciousness--was really about the process of writing, or rather avoiding writing. All the rationalizations are there: Oleron solves a mystery in his surroundings and decides to knock off for the day rather than doing any writing; he excuses himself for not writing but "knows" that tomorrow will be better; he decides that what he's written is lousy and needs to scrap everything to pursue some nebulous vision; and with the new and improved Romilly, he has this exchange with Elsie: 

"And has Romilly progressed much better for your being cooped up?"

"I think she has. I'm laying the foundations of her. I shall begin the actual writing presently."

This ghost story is a cautionary tale. If I don't want to end up like Oleron, I shall indeed begin the actual writing presently.

Edited to add: This is the second time wig-powdering has come up as a blog topic. I sense a trend. http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2011/03/cursive-handwriting-again.html

 

Writers on Writing: Winston Churchill

I want to reply to Historiann's challenge, but first a post about writing.

From The Guardian, a window into Winston Churchill's methods of writing, with comments:

Downstairs there is a room with green lamps hanging from the ceiling, and maps on the wall, and a telephone exchange: and here Churchill kept his researchers – about six of them at once, junior Oxford dons, research fellows, some of them destined for high academic honours. There they were, filleting, devilling, rootling around in books and documents in search of stuff that might be of use.

Comment: Would you want this?  It's the Doris Kearns Goodwin way of writing (teams of researchers finding material that you fashion into text) and it works well for her and others.  But would you have as good a sense of the primary texts if you had outsourced, so to speak, the initial reading of them? 

I'd like to try a research assistant, since I'm sure it would help. If nothing else, I could set a research assistant to changing all the @#$%^& in-text citations to endnotes in Chicago 16 style.  (I have experimented with Endnote's Chicago 16 setting & don't see any way to do this automatically.)

After dictating to a squadron of scribes all night, Churchill would have text. Oh, boy, would he have text--more, Boris Johnson, the author, tells us than Dickens and Shakespeare combined:

The sheaves of typewritten paper he would then correct and amend by hand – and we have innumerable examples of his cursive blue-inked marginalia – and the results would be typeset as they would appear on the page; and even that was not the end.

He would fiddle with the text. He would switch clauses around for emphasis, he would swap one epithet for another and, in general, he would take the utmost delight in the process of polishing his efforts; and then he would send the whole lot off to be typeset again.

Why did he write? Partly for money, but also for this:

His creative-depressive personality meant that writing (or painting, or bricklaying) was a way of keeping the “black dog” of depression at bay. He wrote for that sensation of release that comes with laying 200 bricks and writing 2,000 words a day.

NYTimes: "No Child Left Untableted"

At The New York Times, Carlo Rotella's “No Child Left Untableted” is a good look at what's happening to those who'll be our students in a decade or so. Rotella calls the businesspeople "smart and well-intentioned," but he does have some reservations. A few quotations, with some thoughts:

1. There are a lot of people who are trying to make informed, thoughtful choices about educational policies, like Greg Anrig:

Greg Anrig, vice president of policy and programs at the Century Foundation and the author of "Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools," [says that]  The research on successful schools and good teaching . . . highlights the importance of relationships among the people in a school: administrators and teachers and students. “None of these studies identify technology as decisive.” Where technology makes a difference, it tends to do so in places with a strong organization dedicated to improving teaching and where students closely engage with teachers and one another. “A device that enhances such interactions is good,” Anrig said. “But kids focused on the device, isolated, cuts into that.” 

2.  But others are focused more on the financial killing to be made. 

The first time I met with Joel Klein, the chief executive of Amplify and an executive vice president of News Corporation, he checked his e-mail on his phone a lot, even as we talked about the concern that technology isolates rather than connects people. I pointed this out, and he, in turn, expressed wonder that I don’t even allow the use of laptops in my classroom.

First, I’m impressed that Carlo Rotella sat through this epic display of rudeness, when most of us would have walked out. Second, I love the irony of this: that Klein can’t be bothered to hold an actual conversation with a person sitting in front of him but is most interested in preaching his vision. Of course, that’s what salesmen do—talk and only listen just enough so that they can interrupt you with selling points--but if you’re buying a car, you have a choice of which pitchmen to listen to. Children in schools equipped with Klein’s lucrative-for-Amplify “vision” won’t have that choice.

 3. But at least Klein still thinks teachers have a role to play: 

They might begin by transferring to it what they already do now — existing lessons, homework, tests — but it can only make the hoped-for difference in how and what students learn if teachers come up with new ways to use it. “If it’s not transformative,” Klein told me, “it’s not worth it.”

 [. . .]

He did go on to say that he wouldn’t put fourth graders in a MOOC — a massive open online course — and that he would exercise great restraint in introducing technology into a kindergarten classroom.

Should I say "Well, that's big of him"? No? Okay. I won't.

4. But data is the future: 

Soon, games that know what a student has read (the tablet’s library will contain 1,000 books) will be able to strategically sprinkle a particular word in his path based on how many times the research says you need to see a new word in order to learn it. In a few years, according to Leites, advances like “gaze tracking” and measurement of pupil dilation “will revolutionize” the gauging of cognitive response by making it possible to determine exactly what students are reacting to on the screen.

Am I the only one who finds this a little creepy and a little sad?

5. The teaching end of this article fares better, as in the training session with Robin Britt, the “Personalized Learning Environment Facilitator (PLEF),” which I misread initially as “pelf,” Sinclair Lewis’s slang word for “wealth.”

Britt repeatedly made a fluid gathering-and-pushing gesture with both hands, as if demonstrating a basketball chest pass, as he said: “Then you move that group out, they’re off practicing to reinforce what you just taught them, and you pull together another group, or you go to an individual, then you flow them out to the next task. Gather and flow.”

I hadn’t seen this passage when I used basketball as a metaphor the other day, but in this context, it’s individual basketball. Passing from person to person among the players themselves doesn’t seem to count. Still, it's interaction.

6. What will interacting with screens for six hours a day do to their eyes? Well, what does it do to your eyes?

And overstimulation can just plain hurt. Erika Gutscher, who teaches science at a year-round school in East Cary, N.C., that has been piloting the Amplify tablet since March, reports that she and her students love the tablets but get headaches if they use them too much.

Haven’t you found the same thing—that too much screen time numbs you or can give you a headache? Not to mention the (dead horse topic alert: cursive!) issue of brain connections made when students use pen and paper to write things down.

7. And a big-picture view from Sherry Turkle. 

Sherry Turkle, an M.I.T. professor and a prominent Cassandra who writes about the unanticipated consequences of our immersion in electronic technology, described some aspects of tablets in the classroom to me as “the dystopian presented as the utopian.” She said, “We become smitten with the idea that there will be technological solutions to these knotty problems with education, but it happens over and over again that we stop talking to kids. . . . “There’s a reason they call them ‘discussion groups’ and not ‘conversations,’ ” Turkle said. “You learn how to broadcast, which is not the same thing as what you and I are doing now. Posting strong opinions isn’t a conversation.”

Thank you, Sherry Turkle! “We stop talking to kids.” Or we stop having discussions with each other in classrooms. Or we look at cell phones and check email while preaching our message without listening.

And Britt, the PLEF trainer, gets it, too:

As he told them more than once, “It’s the teacher, not the technology.” 

Asked how to handle students goofing off on the tablet in class, Britt reviewed the mechanics of the app blocker. “But,” he added, “that’s a case where maybe you want to use proximity instead.” Proximity? A couple of the trainees started scanning their tablets’ apps in the hope of finding that feature. Maybe it controlled a miniature drone. But Britt moved up the row of desks to stand right next to the questioner and said to everyone: “You already know how to do this. You keep going with the lesson but you move closer, you show him you can see what he’s doing.”

"You already know how to do this." Yes. Yes, we do. And you can't find everything you need on a screen.