Just like I went back to buying paper books and using a wristwatch, I’m back to writing paper letters.
I used to be a great letter writer. People loved my letters. And then that all died in favor of stupid emailing.
11 responses to “Going Back”
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I think that’s awesome. Really.
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Yeah, I still hand-write “thank-you” letters and my annual Christmas cards to old friends. E-mail is still a bit too, er — not sure what the term is — but still not quite personal enough for certain situations.
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Like the nosey son of a gun that I am I was trying to read, but cursive cyrillic (in a language I only have vague ideas about) is just too much (I see “Dear Mar…..a” and later something about ‘in Russian from (by?) hand”
Anyways, I always was terrible about writing letters (though people usually said they enjoyed them when I forced myself) so I took to email like a duck to water.
And I probably won’t wear watches because my skin discolors and corodes any metal that’s next to it too long (I’ve tried lookin up why that is but no luck, lots of stuff about metal doing weird things to skin but nothing the other way around….).
I am definitely sticking with paper books and have never felt any desire whatsoever to read books on a screen (whenever I’ve downloaded them I print them before I can even think about reading them for that reason).
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I wonder whether I would even be able to go back to hand written letters. My handwriting has become so illegible after years of almost never using it that I don’t think anyone would be able to read my letters if I wrote them.
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Yes, I’ve had to make extra special effort for this letter. It was fun, though.
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A number of public schools in America no longer teach students how to write in cursive (so obviously, the students don’t learn to read cursisve, either).
Is learning cursive still a requirement in elementary schools where the national language uses the Cyrillic alphabet?
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Good question. I think there’s been talk of abandoning the cursive in Russian.
I write on the blackboard a lot and hand out handwritten comments , and it’s true that students resist that a lot.
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Are you sure that all of your students can read cursive? I’ve actually met some young adults who can only read block script.
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That’s the thing, I’m afraid some can’t. And that might turn into a problem eventually.
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I’m assuming that’s part of shutting them out of the labor market (along with Windows 8 and host of other helpful policies and gadgets).
There are many tasks that nothing works like writing by hand (and cursive facilitates that). Particularly for Clarissa handwriting is the most effective tool in foreign language learning (writing down things from memory by hand).
A problem in the US is that they were stuck with the Palmer method which is too time consuming (so everybody abbreviates in their own way).
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Absolutely! You couldn’t be more right on shutting out of the labor market.
I’m deeply opposed to adopting one of those expensive digital whiteboards, for instance. The digital board will process my writing, put it into a file, and give the file to students. But that makes the whole thing useless! The point is precisely that the students follow the process of what I write on the board and try to imitate it as it happens. Having the file with the information does nothing useful. All that info is freely available online but it hasn’t taught anybody any language yet.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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