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by swiftcoder 18 days ago
> A student should not see a computer until college or vocational school unless they are taking e.g a high school programming or electronics class.

Are you really trying to put the genie back in the bottle to the extent of making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand? Or maybe we should bring back the typewriter for distraction-free essay writing...

6 comments

As someone who hates handwriting in bluebooks, and who types constantly, yes: I think we should bring back in-class writing by hand, we should lock up cellphones for the school day, and we should proctor exams. If you're not doing this, your students will be stuck to a screen all day, pay no attention to class, and use ChatGPT under the desk to cheat.
This is literally what most grade level school systems are doing, with good results.

The teenage brain is not prepared for addiction of digital magnitude.

> making high schoolers write all their coursework by hand

You make this sound like it is some long-gone practice. I was writing maths by hand as recently as 2020 in university, for my CS-associated maths courses (linear algebra, calculus, physics for computer graphics, etc).

In pre-university essentially all coursework was done by hand, and the national exams are all still handwritten.

I chose a hybrid method (I don't study anymore, this is just for personal stuff).

I bought a cheap graphics tablet, and still handwrite my math, but on a digital whiteboard on my PC so I can save and take backups of it, and waste less paper. But I still get the tactility, and its associated benefits (the act of handwriting something helps you remember it better)

Writing it down by hand and then doing OCR on a high quality photo is a completely different ball game than writing it down and... not having it in digital form though.

I'm not disagreeing at all here, I tried live latexing my math courses and it was hard. I wish I had had access to a cellphone + good digitization back then. (just scanning it in was kinda pointless and I graduated about the time Android came out)

> I tried live latexing my math courses

This was by far the biggest time sink in my maths courses, and frankly, a giant waste of time. Sure, the end result looked beautiful but I think I understood less of it than if I'd just written it all down on A4 ruled paper in gel pen.

In the age of chatbots for outsourcing thinking at one's fingertips, absolutely!

The invasion of tech into the classroom has not produced more capable graduates. There's a lot of empirical evidence to the contrary.

The mind is a muscle, and developing that muscle is the education system's main purpose.

Yes, I really am. For the purpose of learning, internalizing and organizing information, hand writing is superior to typing in every case. It's physiological.
Back when I was in middle school, we had "digital typewriters" that worked fine, and was brought out far more often than the laptop cart or computer lab.
Genuinely, why not? Seems obvious to me that this would produce better outcomes.