When I was young my mum n dad used to force me to do a hour of writing everyday after school to improve my writing, never worked, and now I work in IT so have almost zero reason for a pen or pencil. What a waste of time. Good job I was unsupervised and only used to do it once a week then give them the same sheet every day!
I’ve always had sloppy handwriting, but I had to handwrite a note for someone and I’ve never seen my handwriting so neat! I’ve not had to write anything with a pen or pencil for at least 2 years. But all of a sudden, its clear, neat and legible, even my cursive is pretty clear too!
Soon we’ll all just be talking to our computers and physical input devices will be a relic. We’re prolly gonna get to a point where were just hooked up to neural networks. Over time people will forget that we used to be able to speak.
Fun fact: me and two other guys were the first ever at our school to be allowed to take our written exit exams on a computer. We had to bring our own and, this being 1999, that meant desktop pcs with huge clunky crt screens 😁
My Dad had a Mac which made it even worse but some of my fondest childhood memories are around playing Full Throttle on that thing. Though Hocus Pocus on my mother’s windows 95 PC is probably my first exposure to PC gaming. But I’ve played NES since I could physically grasp a controller!
With my brothers and me, it was Commodore 64 (Bubble Bobble, Giana Sisters, International Karate, Rockstar Ate My Hamster and many more), then Amiga 500 (Outrun, the first Formula 1, Defender of the Crown and others that don’t come to mind right now) and THEN pc gaming 😁
Then you’re likely the same age as my uncle. In many ways I’m a bit sad I missed that era, the Commodore 64 really shaped a generation in ways the NES just didn’t do because it was “just” a game system. Programming was just so “accessible” in a lack of better words on the 64 and it just didn’t get as accessible again I feel until YouTube but it’s just not the same. I tried to dabble on PC back in the late 90s and early 00s but it was wild west with poor resources outside of schools/heavy (English) literature and full of viruses! In late middle school I learned Basic and it blew my mind back then. But Java felt like such a let down in University. Nowadays I’m into scripting instead and work DevOps.
Yes this is also shown to be the case in scientific studies. Something something reinforcing memories by activating several parts of the brain at once. Yes I’m too lazy to actually find one and link it but I’ve come across it several times
Not being able to just slam every word the prof says into your computer also forces you to be more deliberate about what you choose to write down, which makes handwritten note taking a form of active learning–you are real-time engaging with and processing the content rather than unthinkingly slapping a keyboard.
I tried that, but I much prefer the haptics of real paper and writing with an actual pen. Also, I really like the look of ink on paper. Of course, there are still cases when a tablet is just the best. For example, when annotating PDFs.
It’s still pretty useful to do simple math in your head. For example chicken adding a few numbers together or multiplying something. In general stuff that would take longer to type in than just calculating yourself.
If it’s not important enough to take a few seconds to a minute typing it, it’s not important enough to use a skill that’s severely atrophied from decades of intentional disuse 🤷
That sounds like an incredible amount of work vs just adding rough estimates together. I can add two numbers in less time than it takes to reach into my pocket.
It’s technically all the same font. The script characters are “Mathematical Bold Script” Unicode characters (U+1D4D0 to U+1D503), rather than plain ASCII letters in a separate, cursive web font:
Add comment