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[OakLeaf]

And, remember, that dismantling does not come from teachers.

Oh, totally. I hope no one got the impression I thought teachers were responsible.


I have mixed feelings about growing up with tech though. I'm of that narrow age group that first learned to write (really write, college and post-graduate level essays) with pen and paper and typewriter, and then later shifted to real writing (legal briefs) on the computer. It's been so long now that I don't even remember the ways in which my writing changed, but I remember, at least remembering that it changed very drastically, the way I approached a project and put drafts together. It's different, for sure, and I completely understand those many novelists who already had well-established writing methods before personal computers came along, and still insist on writing from beginning to end in a less ephemeral fashion. But I wouldn't be so quick to say one is better than the other.

I'm reminded of the recent controversy about children learning to write in cursive. All the skills that are touted as being fostered by cursive writing, are skills that are served even better by learning the arts. If writing the alphabet is the greatest exposure to the arts that a child ever gets in school (which I know it is these days - and I'm not talking about calligraphy or illuminating manuscripts, either), that's just really sad and misguided, to me. The only thing I would say about cursive writing is that it's much less distracting than typing is, to the person or people on whose words I'm taking notes. Voice recording and speech-to-text would solve that; or if people want to stay with old-school solutions, they could go back to teaching shorthand in high school ...