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I was in high school from 1986-1989, and my experience began with TI-99/4A in grade school, a VIC-20 at home, and then a C=64 (high school offered a Commodore-based lab as well.) Dad indulged me with many peripherals, including an Epson dot-matrix tractor-feed printer that printed 132cps! Among its features were configurable fonts and point-size. I discovered that this device could be set up for extremely small fonts that remained legible. So, for Spanish and other classes, I decided to go into the "cheat sheet" production business. I worked out how to print a sheet full of little 2x2" sheets that contained Spanish vocab, or the study answers for our next quiz or whatever, and I used them myself, and then I began to sell them!! And the most ironic thing happened, when I discovered that I never needed the cheat sheets: having created them by typing them in, repeatedly, correcting errors and checking against our textbooks, I had internalized, memorized and learned all the answers as any ethical student would! I got caught, once or twice, and disciplined for distributing those cheat sheets, and I definitely did not continue cheating in classes, because I'm not that kind of guy, but the process was a revelation to me, and ever since the 1980s I have relied on hand-written notes to reinforce my memory of those words and facts that flow from ears, to mind, to hand muscles, to pen, and onto ye olde fashioned paper. Now can we see a reason that "writing 100 times on the chalkboard" may have been an edifying exercise, beyond its punishment value? |