The Case for Writing Things Down by Hand
After a year away from screens, I learned that the mess of pen on paper is not a bug — it is the whole point.
I started the experiment on a Tuesday in late October, sitting at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad and a black gel pen that had been rattling around my desk drawer for months. My laptop was closed, my phone was face-down on the counter, and for the first time in years I had nothing between my hand and the page except ink. The first sentence I wrote was crooked. The second one was worse. By the third line, I had stopped caring about the mess.
The Slate Does Not Auto-Save
There is a permanence to writing on a blackboard that digital tools have spent decades trying to erase. When I taught high school geometry in 2016, I would fill the slate with proofs every morning — chalk dust on my sleeves, eraser smears across my forearms. The board held every false start, every correction, every moment where I changed my mind mid-sentence. My students could see me thinking through a problem in real time.
“The board held every false start, every correction, every moment where I changed my mind mid-sentence. My students could see me thinking.”