[tombert]

I'm jealous; I didn't know LaTeX existed when I was 11; my dad probably did but he was pretty firmly in the WYSIWYG camp and didn't feel compelled to tell me about it (which, you know, fair enough, I was 11).

Yeah, usually what would happen is I'd turn in 3-4 assignments with my handwriting, my teachers would see that it's completely illegible, they'd ask me about it, and in that conversation I would say "if you want I'm happy enough to type it out". To be clear, my handwriting is really, really, bad, I usually can't even read it myself. It was slightly better in high school since I was writing more often but the teachers really would have trouble. Usually for tests where I had to do things with a pen and paper, I would do my work with my illegible stuff, then very very slowly and painstakingly write the final answer as clean as I could and then circle it.

I guess I got lucky with having some teachers that were OK with it. A part of me kind of feels like I should have just worked on my penmanship but I genuinely do think that there are a lot of advantages to doing math with TeX or MathType. One thing I really like is that since copying takes no effort, there's no reason to not show every step, no matter how insignificant. I think my teachers appreciated that too; when I would make a mistake, it was never ambiguous to where the mistake happened because every step was displayed.