Put your heart into it.

I believe traditional classroom teachers are in a unique position that mixes handwritten and typed text more or less equally. The materials I make are predominantly typed; worksheets, PowerPoint slideshows, rubrics, note pages, and so on. However, students seldom type, and even when they do, we still ask them to print their work to hand it in, with adequate space to mark, correct, and comment on it. Furthermore, the notes I give to my coworkers and the reminders I write myself are all handwritten, usually on decorative sticky-notes. My desk is covered in sticky-notes: lists of tasks to complete and their deadlines, motivational notes to keep me focused, thank-you notes and little jokes from my coworkers, and heartfelt messages from students, that remind me why I’m here, why I come in every morning and stay into the early night.

When I made a mistake, I scratched it out or simply wrote over the mistake. Tidiness means little when I’m the only one reading it (if it did mean something, I wouldn’t have used cursive either!). However, in writing a note to others or a résumé (as they are written out by hand here), I would absolutely start the text anew if I made a mistake. Understandably, writing such texts takes much longer, and if I can type it, I will.

There is something to be said for kinesthetic learning as well. Studies have shown time and again that students who make their own handwritten notes instead of reading and just highlighting retain information better (provided that they are not simply copying directly from a board or slide). However, note-taking is a learned skill. Writing out these ideas myself, it was no more difficult than typing a diary entry, albeit a bit more time consuming. That extra time also meant more thought went into the phrasing, and organizing what I wanted to say. However, when recording thoughts or working through ideas linearly, I still prefer to type, simply because I can get my ideas down faster, then go back through, edit, cut, comment, and correct them until a coherent conclusion emerges. For those of us with a weak memory, writing is good, but time is of the essence, and the medium that can record those thoughts the fastest and present them back to us is the victor.

-Basia.