Cursive! Foiled again

When I was in second grade I learned to write cursive. I was entranced by the shapes of the letters, by the logic of their connections, and by the process by which they flowed continuously from my pen. 

When I was in ninth grade I was required to take a typing class. I was admonished that while handwriting was fine for personal notes, in the business and professional worlds typewriting was the norm. Hereafter written assignments were to be typed.

When I was in eleventh grade I learned to use a slide rule. I marveled at the cleverness that made a slide rule work. So that's what logarithms are for, I told myself. The workmanship that went into the device was a bonus. 

When I was in twelfth grade I learned to use an electronic calculator. I was told that while slide rules were still acceptable, calculators were more accurate and would soon make slide rules obsolete. 

When I was a freshman in college I learned to program a computer. The work was tedious. The program was entered on punch cards that were put in a queue to be processed by a mainframe computer. When bugs were detected in the program, as they always were at first, new punch cards had to be created and the stack put in the queue again. But a computer was much more powerful than an electronic calculator, and it made the extra effort worthwhile.

My first mobile phone used a numeric keypad for texts. Each key controlled three letters. Press the key once for the first letter, twice for the second letter, three times for the third letter. It was slow, but texting opened new worlds of communication.

My first smartphone had a QWERTY keyboard with all the letters. Texting was much faster. I never became as quick with my thumbs as my children, but I could type reasonably well on the small keyboard. I wondered how I had ever managed with that old flip phone.

Now I never bother typing on my phone. Voice recognition has gotten good enough that I just talk and it transcribes. As a matter of fact, I am dictating this very sentence to my phone.

All of the above is a preface to the big question I'm currently facing in my teaching: what to do about AI? My initial reaction was to try to figure out how I could prevent my students from using AI in writing essays, and how to detect its use when they did. After all, they were being graded on their writing, and so the writing ought to be theirs.

But the AI got better, and the students got better at using it. And I reflected that in my large introductory history class, teaching writing per se was not the point of the course. The writing was an aid to thinking about history. There are other ways to think about history. And, to be frank, part of the purpose of the writing was to determine whether the students had read the books I assigned. There are other ways to do that.

At present I’m considering eliminating the essays from the course requirements. The AI writes better essays than most of the students, almost regardless of the prompt. And it will get only better as time passes.

Again, this is not a writing class. I teach other classes where writing is the central focus. This class is not one of those. 

I guess it comes down to whether essay writing is like cursive writing—essential at one time and still useful in certain respects, but now largely superseded.

Something will be lost if the students don't write essays. Being able to craft an argument in 800 words makes one a keener consumer of such essays, if nothing else. 

But something was lost when I stopped using a slide rule. And maybe messaging is too easy these days. Something is always lost when an old practice is abandoned.

The question is whether the practice still serves its purpose. At one time the essays helped make my students better writers. Now AI is making them better writers whether they write the essays or not.

Busy corporate executives and government officials have speechwriters. They tell the speechwriters what the speech should be about and let the speechwriters do the drafting. The exec reads the draft and suggests improvements. The speechwriter makes the changes. Maybe AI will do the same for anyone needing any kind of writing.

I'm still working on this. If you have thoughts, please share in the comments below.