Handwriting

So the other day, when I fell in love with recipes, it was primarily with ones that were handwritten by people I have loved and lost.  So it was a multi-layered love.  I fell in love with the recipes, with the food itself, with the friends and family who'd given me those recipes . . . and with their handwriting.  And in writing that post, I thought a lot about handwriting, which some will tell you is a lost art.

The bulk of my teaching career took place in a time when students submitted their essays in their own script.  A handful of students, those who took a typing class or those who were fortunate to have a typewriter at home, submitted a typed copy.  I would save grading those papers until last, my reward after struggling through dozens of handwritten papers.  Although it would have been nice to require that all papers be typed, we could not do that, as it would discriminate against those who did not have access to a typewriter.

And it was the same thing when computers arrived.  Until . . . computer labs!  Even if a student did not have a typewriter or computer at home, the school's computer lab was open during lunch, study hall, and after school.  No excuses anymore!  English teachers everywhere celebrated the end of bad handwriting!  And so it has become the way it is, but at what cost?

It amazes me that you could take a class of 25 second-graders and teach them how to write in script, all of them able to view the posters of the letters of the alphabet right there above the blackboard, and each one of them will enter third grade with handwriting that is uniquely his or hers.  There has to be something to this.  And I'm not talking about the flourishes that individuals apply when they enter their teens, like dotting the letter "i" with a smiley face or making an elaborate loop out of every letter.  We all follow the basic construction of the scripted letters, but somehow, when we put them all together, our writing looks different than everybody else's.  And I do not think this is deliberate.

When I would collect in-class writing from my students, I knew without looking at their names whose paper it was.  Their handwriting was as much a part of how I knew them as their smarts, their laughter, their shyness, their style . . . or their lack of any of those things.  Their typed papers told me less about them.

I have an antique steamer trunk that is full of family heirlooms, military medals, and various other memorabilia that I have inherited.  From my mother, I have an essay that her father wrote on government.  When and why he wrote this, I have no idea.  In fact, I never knew my grandfather, as he died before I was born.  There must have been a reason that my mother kept this essay, and I suspect that it is because of the beautiful handwriting.  Although some spelling errors abound (there is no "n" in government, for instance), the essay gets an "A" for sheer beauty.  And so I am in love with something handwritten nearly a century ago by a man I never met, a man who served his country abroad in WWI, arguably the worst war ever fought, but held such a deep respect for his government that he wrote about it in perfect swirls and measured loops of letters that provide me, his granddaughter, with a small idea of the kind of man he was.