Tag: writing

The (Hand)Written Word

Every time you invent a technology,
you also invent a responsibility.
—Aza Raskin, Co-founder
Earth Species Project

As someone who does a lot of thinking, values thinking, and does quite a bit of thinking about thinking, it can be hard sometimes to look at the general state of thinking in our society and not become demoralized.  When 20% of voters believe President Biden is responsible for ending the constitutional right to abortion in this country, it can look like the conspiracy theorists have won.  When a third of those aged 18-29 are getting 100% of their “news” from TikTok, it is little wonder that half the nation remains convinced that the unemployment rate is the highest it has been in 50 years (despite being at a near record low).  And when we have people forming intimate relationships with AI companions rather than fellow human beings (at great risk to your national security it turns out), it can simply feel like it is time to toss hands in the air and start researching survivalist bunkers on-line.

Furthermore, adding fuel to all this has been one of my classes this academic year in which I have observed almost no collective intellectual growth from last September to today—something I have never witnessed in my now 35-year career.  And lest I be accused of subjective bias, I am not alone in this empirical observation; the grade-level dean and others at my school are concerned by what we have failed to see happen over the past 9 months in so many of these students’ courses.

With one exception: math.  Math classes have all seen growth—sometimes simply COVID recovery—but growth nonetheless and across the board at all levels.

Why?

My hypothesis is based on an observation.  There were, of course, individual exceptions in my class in terms of growth over the year, and when identifying what both the act of learning math and these individual growth exceptions have in common, it is one thing:  writing by hand.  My students in my biology class that grew intellectually over the year completed all their work by hand—just as they would have had no choice but to do in their math courses; you can’t readily manipulate equations on a screen.

The science behind my hypothesis is pretty solid and grows with each new study.  We have known since 2014 from research done at Princeton University that students who take notes by hand do demonstrably better on tests than student who only type their notes on a laptop.  But recently, using fMRI to perform brain scans, we are discovering what is actually different in the brain between handwriting and typing and why writing by hand is so central to better learning outcomes.  For starters, handwriting produces significantly higher levels of electrical activity across many more interconnected brain regions than typing does—perhaps most significantly in the motor cortex.  While typing and handwriting both employ movements in your hands and fingers to generate words, writing by hand demands significantly more communication between the motor cortex and visual cortex, engaging the brain more deeply as it must constantly align each finger’s position with the mental models of the letters and words being written.  Put simply, as neuropsychologist Audrey van der Meer says, “when you are typing, the same simple movement of your fingers is involved in producing every letter, whereas when you’re writing by hand, you immediately feel that the bodily feeling of producing an A is entirely different from producing a B.” 

The implications for younger children are profound.  Those, for example, who learn to trace out the alphabet by hand have significantly better and longer-lasting recognition and understanding of words, which when combined with the improvement in memory and recall handwriting produces, leads to better reading skills—the very foundation of all education.  As van der Meer puts it, “if young children are not receiving any handwriting training, which is very good brain stimulation, then their brains simply won’t reach their full potential”—with all the scary possible long-term consequences that can come from that.  It is, perhaps, why several states are passing laws to require handwriting lessons again in elementary schools and why California is going so far as to require training in cursive once more.

But it is not just the youngest who benefit from writing by hand.  Having laid a foundation of literacy through the handwritten word, older children and adults who continue this practice have a better understanding of whatever material they are studying because the act of writing by hand causes the brain to engage with said material more intensely (their brains are literally working harder at the task).  Thus, note taking with pencil, pen, or stylus (it is the physical motion that counts) leads to significantly richer, deeper learning as well as better memory formation and recall, and it is why, though I compose using a keyboard, I still always outline my thoughts for these essays by hand:

It is the only way I can assure that I am presenting my best thinking.

Which brings me back to my class that doesn’t seem to have demonstrated any collective growth this year and a world in which good thinking seems in short supply.  I have watched for over a decade now as many individuals—and especially my students—have increasingly off-loaded cognitive tasks to their digital devices (taking a picture of something, for example, rather than trying to remember it), and I am left wondering if we have not reached a critical tipping point in that process.  Yadurshana Sivashankar of the University of Waterloo in Ontario reminds us that “if we’re not actively using these areas (those involved in these cognitive tasks), then they are going to deteriorate over time, whether it’s memory or motor skills,” and my ah-ha moment with this particular class came when I recently had them correct a quiz in my presence rather than as homework.  Instead of looking back at their notes to work out what they had done wrong, nearly all of them simply googled their questions and wrote down verbatim what appeared on their screens.  It was not about learning from mistakes (or learning at all, for that matter); it was about completing a task and checking off a “to-do” box.

Well, that is something I can try to change as an educator.  Starting next year, no more off-loading.  Just a really, really big supply of paper, pencils, and pens, and a lot of higher quality thinking.  Together, we’ll all write by hand.

References

Campbell, R.M. (Dec. 2023) “AI Chatbots Could Weaken National Security.” Scientific American, pp. 73-74.

Glueck, K. & Corasaniti, N. (May 28, 2024) Eyeing Trump, but on the Fence: How Tuned-Out Voters Could Decide 2024.  The New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/us/politics/trump-biden-voters.html.

Hu, C. (May 2024)  Hand-on: Writing by Hand Comes with Learning Benefits.  Scientific American, p. 13.

Lambert, J. (May 11, 2024) Why Writing by Hand Beats Typing for Thinking and Learning. NPR. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain.

Mueller, P. & Oppenheimer, D.  (April 23, 2014) The Pen is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking.  Psychological Science.  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797614524581.

Plait, P. (Dec. 2023) “Conspiracy Theories Then and Now” Scientific American, pp. 80-81.

A Letter to the Class of 2024

We are not educated for darkness.
—Constance Fitzgerald

It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery,
but a savage and beautiful country lies in between.
—Diane Ackerman

Winners play hurt.
—Vince Lombardi

Dear Members of the Class of 2024,

When essayist and author, Robert Fulghum, was once asked why all his books were so similar, he replied that he returned again and again to just a few common themes because only these were central to his thinking.  Hence, he went on to say:

If you notice phrases, ideas, and anecdotes that closely resemble those that appear elsewhere in my writing, it is not a matter of sloppy editing.  I’m repeating myself.  I’m reshuffling words in the hope that just once I might say something exactly right.  And I’m wrestling with dilemmas that are not easily resolved or easily dismissed.  I run at them again and again because I’m not finished with them.  And may never be.  Work-in-progress on a life-in-progress is what my writing is about.  And some progress in the work is enough to keep it going on (p. 30).

I share these words because I find myself once again authoring this annual letter to all of you, knowing that I still do not yet have it quite right.  And while there are only so many ways for those of us who have loved and cared for you to send you on to the next chapter in your narrative—and usually clichéd ways at that!—I, like Fulghum, feel compelled to try. 

So here goes: one final set of lessons from the heart for the soul.

To begin with, like Fulghum, I too have found certain common themes arising regularly as I have written this epistle each year, and an especially big, “elephant-in-the-living-room” one is the fact that the world your elders and I are leaving you is one hot mess—both literally and figuratively.  I do not need to itemize the details of the disasters; you get enough of that from your daily feeds.  However, it can be quite challenging not to give in to despair in the face of such dysfunction, and “too often we either submit and surrender our souls to the social consensus [that originates it], or withdraw in passive narcissism” (Radical, p. 34).  Worse, “the temptation in hard times is to become the inferno” and burn it all down in one great Götterdämmerung (Garden, p. 21; my emphasis).  Hence, in a world where—as Billy Joel once wrote—“we didn’t start the fire,” how do you find the resilience and inner resources to become an effective agent for positive change?

It starts by attending to, deeply listening to, and embracing the Stranger (what in neuroscience terms is the prefrontal cortex encountering the totally new).  Only interaction with the unfamiliar can challenge us to grow and to change, and more importantly, only interaction with the Stranger enables us to realize that “other people are not required to perform roles in one’s internal play, no matter how wise, good, or reasonable the script may seem” (Garden, p. 18).  When you gain this perspective, you realize that each of us is caught up in our own narrative and can only revise that narrative when we allow another’s narrative to enter into our own.  When that happens, suddenly the “jerk” cutting you off at the traffic light could be the parent frantically heading to the hospital with a seriously injured child, or the distant and seemingly dismissive waiter could be struggling to manage chronic pain that is in no way their fault. 

Is the “jerk” at the light probably still actually a jerk? Of course.  But once you’ve embraced the Stranger—and there will be lots of opportunities as you leave the familiar for the unknown in the coming years—you can no longer judge another with the righteous certainty you once did.  You have a more expansive, compassionate narrative guiding your life, making you a more effective agent in this world.  What’s more, since this is a graduation moment and clichés are mandatory, the cliché for this lesson is:  learn to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes; it will make you a better walker.

Granted, all this learning can be discomfiting—especially in the alien and uncharted waters where you are all next headed. As Mary Rose O’Reilley puts it, “to be stretched almost beyond where you can go is acutely painful.  One often fails and failure brings pain.  One must court doubt and despair in the process of learning anything at all” because as a neuroscientist might put it, “if your brain isn’t uncomfortable, you aren’t learning anything” (Garden, p. xii).  Or to put it another way, if you are not heavily invested in the change you wish to see, there will be no change—in you, in others, or in the world.  Hence, in a very real way, to learn is to love enough to let whatever you are loving fundamentally alter your narrative, alter who you are.

Ah! But any act of love—even the smallest—leaves us vulnerable to being wounded, opening up the possibility for darkness in our lives, and that brings me to a second theme I have found myself returning to again and again over the years:  the reality of Constance Fitzgerald’s words at the start of this letter.  Too often, we do not teach about the character of darkness, that is has a purpose and a value in our lives.  Instead, we tend to revile it or try to pretend it’s not there because confronting it can be so difficult. Yet, the simple truth is that “darkness interrogates us at the places where our knowledge of reality is most deficient, our illusions most entrenched” (Garden, pp. 70-71).  It is what “comes along to tell us we’re worshipping an inadequate object…to loosen us from the bondage of a devotion we’ve offered to an unworthy object, a false god” (Garden, p. 21).  Thus, it is only through our encounters with moments of darkness that we truly stretch who we are as a person, truly grow, and I can share from firsthand experience that it is the only path to wisdom.

However, occassionally a time of darkness will take on a life of its own, and that is when you must discover the power of wintering.  We all do it at some point in our lives, and no matter how it arrives, it is usually unexpected, isolating, and emotionally raw.  Yet, as author Katherine May puts it so eloquently:

It’s also inevitable.  We like to imagine that it’s possible for life to be one eternal summer and that we have uniquely failed to achieve that for ourselves.  We dream of an equatorial habitat, forever close to the sun, an endless unvarying high season.  But life’s not like that…Even if by some extraordinary stroke of self-control and good luck we are able to keep control of our own health and happiness for an entire lifetime, we still couldn’t avoid the winter.  Our parents would age and die; our friends would undertake minor acts of betrayal; the machinations of the world would eventually weigh against us.  Somewhere along the line…[winter will come] (p. 11).

And when it does, you must remember that it is actually the crucible for life, not its ending.  There can be no spring without the rejuvenating and healing power of winter, and “since [its] pain will come to us anyway, why not figure out how to deal with it.  It’s hard to grasp the connection between suffering and spiritual growth if we think of [living] only as a way to gain peace and tranquility” (Garden, pp. 74-75).  The proverbial bottom line is that you have to engage the world as you are at any given moment, and sometimes that means you will “play hurt.”  It is not one of the “fun” lessons of adulthood, but it is one of its more vital ones.

What’s more, as you “play”—both hurt and healthy—I hope you will begin to learn the lesson which all of you, my students, have taught me over these many years.  Experiencing both aching and healing, alienation and grace, sin and salvation throughout the coming years, you may start to notice the paradox that you actually need all of these to become fully human and that it is only out of that full humanity that you can affect the change you wish to see in the world.  The yin and yang of life is like breathing, and it is what you do with the life which this breathing makes possible that matters. Therefore, learn to breathe well and then choose what to do with the life that results in a thoughtful and self-reflective manner.

And, yes, while modern neuroscience may have demonstrated that the agency to do this choosing may simply be a cognitive illusion generated by the brain, that doesn’t mean that the character of the illusion isn’t important. As Mary Rose O’Reilley argues, “it matters what metaphors we use to describe ourselves to ourselves” (pp. 26-27), and as Norman Vincent Peale once wrote, “change your thoughts and you change your world.” Hence, as you now journey forth, I pray for each of you that you choose your individual metaphors and thoughts well. They will define you (however illusory that may be) and, consequently, they will define your impact on this world.

Finally, always remember that “somewhere there is a great mystery that wants to come live in your house and change everything” (Radical, p. 48).  Be open to it when it arrives; welcome it.  It will have much to teach you; you will have much to learn. Reject it at your peril (spoken from hard-won experience) and always remember that the obvious and predictable are not always the safest road to travel: you can get just as disoriented and lost in the familiar as you can in the unknown. Therefore, consider the road less traveled as you let your next great mystery into your life, and remember that Frost was right when it wrote all those years ago about how it can make all the difference.

Congratulations, then, and may the coming celebrations be joyous ones!

References

Fulghum, R. (1991) Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Side of the Refrigerator Door.  New York:  Villard Books.

May, K. (2020) Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  New York: Riverhead Books.

O’Reilley, M. R. (2005) The Garden at Night: Burnout & Breakdown in the Teaching Life.  Portsmouth, NH:  Heinemann.

O’Reilley, M. R. (1998) Radical Presence: Teaching as Contemplative Practice.  Portsmouth, NH:  Heinemann.