From time to time I have a discussion with one or other of the older grandchildren on the best way to revise for exams. Their preferred method has always been to highlight printed notes or to read through stuff on one screen or another. Mine has always been to make (written) notes on notes on notes, condensing down to a point where key words are enough to remind you of what needs to know for testing. (A fellow language teacher friend of mine always used to teach her students a tune to associate with grammar rules - declensions, word order and so on.) I always maintained that there is a connection between writing stuff down and fixing it in your brain - actual, physical writing rather than typing stuff on the keyboard.
Now it seems that experts agree with me. “Psychologists Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer compared students taking class notes by hand or on a laptop. They studied how laptop use affected the learning process for students who used them. They found that “even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing”. In three different experiments, their research concluded that students who used laptop computers performed worse on conceptual questions in comparison with students who took notes by hand. “Laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning,” they wrote. In other words, we retain information better when we write by hand because the slower pace of writing forces us to summarise as we write, as opposed to the greater speed of transcribing on a keyboard.”
It’s all to do with having to process information as you take notes. But there seems to be a problem: we might be in the process of losing the ability to write. In some places - Finland I think is one such place - they no longer teach cursive - joined up writing or real writing, as we called it when I was a child. “A high-school student who took the preliminary SAT used for college admittance in the US confessed to the Wall Street Journal that “audible gasps broke out in the room” when students learned they would have to write a one-sentence statement that all the work is the student’s own, in cursive, or joined-up handwriting. “Cursive? Most students my age have only encountered this foreign language in letters from Grandma.”
Granddaughter Number Four, 8 years old, by the way, is very proud to be the first in her class to be given her “pen badge”. This means that she no longer has to write everything in pencil but is proficient enough a writer to be allowed to use a pen. No doubt that’s a ballpoint pen, not quite the same as the pens we used to have to dip in the inkwells with which all school desks were provided, and which got clogged up with blotting paper and other such absorbent material! But the important thing is that she has made that important step. And she writes her own little stories and illustrates them herself.
Research shows that learning to write helps children learn to read. I have a theory that the process begins before children begin to learn to write. Scribbling is an important part of the process, in my opinion. When a small child picks up a crayon and starts to scribble on a piece of paper they learn to manipulate the crayon and discover the most efficient way to hold it - drawing recognisable pictures and eventually forming letters follows from there. Nowadays children start school unable to hold a pencil properly.
Even though I type this blog directly onto my iPad, I still like to have a notebook on the go to keep track of ideas and events, to write poetry when the mood takes me. And I have always been intrigued but the fact that different nations have different writing styles. As a young teenager I had pen-friends in various countries, each country with a distinctively different way of writing. There’s a generational aspect too; my grandmother’s generation learnt one style, my mother’s generation another, and no doubt my children will see my generations style as different again. Superimposed on those generational styles is usually a personal style - rather like siblings being recognisably related and yet each one different.
I’ve gone on at some length about this. Here is a link to a long read on the subject of losing the ability to write by hand.
Here’s a new word: “snaccident” = eating an entire bag of crisps by mistake.
And last night on the news I heard about an AI development, a kind of mechanical AI glove that can be used by aspiring piano players to train their hand to extend the fingers further and faster in order to play complex pieces of music more proficiently. The report even suggested that wearing it overnight allowed you to wake up a better pianist. And wearing it on one hand also made the other hand improve as the brain passes the information along. It all sounds futuristically strange to me.
Finally, on a different topic altogether, here’s something about second thoughts that popped up on social media:
First person: “I’m Hispanic and voted for Trump. Nobody told me this dude hated Mexicans. All he’s talking about is deporting Mexicans.”
Responder: Surely you’re joking.:
First person: No, I don’t keep up with politics much so I wasn’t aware of a mass Mexican deportation.
Just one of the Trumperies.
Meanwhile it seems at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday “the Episcopal bishop of Washington has appealed directly to Donald Trump to “have mercy upon” communities across the country targeted by the new administration’s immigration and LGBTQ+ policies.”
“Asked later about the sermon, which amounted to a bold public criticism of the new president, Trump told reporters it was “not too exciting”. “I didn’t think it was a good service, no,” he said as he walked into the White House on Tuesday. “They could do much better.”
On Wednesday, he went further, writing on his Truth Social platform: “The so-called Bishop who spoke at the National Prayer Service on Tuesday morning was a Radical Left hard line Trump hater. She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart … She and her church owe the public an apology!”
So much for the division of Church and State!
Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!
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