Published Nov. 12, 2021
By CLAIRE PETERSON
After over a year of online school and constant typing away on a computer, handwritten work at Carmel High School has once again made an appearance through AP exam preparation and notes.
Many teachers describe that they have found that Google Classroom has made it easier to provide efficient feedback to students on assignments such as essays, but they are still focusing on handwritten work because of the importance of preparation for AP exams. Handwritten AP exams are something almost completely new to a majority of students at Carmel High, the only exception being seniors who took AP Human Geography their freshman year. All the other grades on campus have simply never had to handwrite an AP test. Because of this, teachers are putting additional work into preparing students for the exams.
“Right now, I’m giving students the option of moving to paper for in-class essays,” Carmel High AP Language and Composition teacher Barbara McBride explains. “And slowly over the course of the year, we’ll move back towards paper.”
During distance learning, most work in McBride’s class was digital, but now that students are back in person, she’s slowly reintroducing them back to handwritten work. Students have already started writing the routinely 12-14 practice essays that take place over the course of the year.
(courtesy of Pixabay)
As the year progresses, several teachers explain that they plan to initiate more handwritten work in order to prepare students for the end-of-term AP exams and focus on the interactive aspects students were missing during distance learning.
Some CHS teachers reveal that the vitality of practicing handwriting is stressed because the speed and style of handwriting an essay versus typing it is very different. Some, such as CHS science teacher Kevin Buran, agree that it’s important for students to maintain a healthy balance between handwritten and digital work.
Students have also found that there has been a decrease in handwritten work this fall in comparison to years prior to COVID-19.
“There’s definitely been a decrease in paper work, and I think COVID-19 affected that,” sophomore Isabel Norman says. “I think teachers and students have become more reliant on the computer.”
According to some CHS teachers, their writing instruction hasn’t changed a significant amount since students came back to school.
“In part because of the pandemic and in part because they moved so much stuff online, that’s how we’re doing it,” AP history teacher Bill Schrier explains. “I haven’t passed out a piece of paper yet this year. If I find out that (the AP exam) is going to be handwritten, we’re going to need to do some of that so students have that experience. My hope would be that they would allow it to be done even on a computer in person.”
Several teachers were forced to drastically change their writing instruction during online school, but have jumped right back into what it was prior to COVID-19.
“The tests and the essays, by large, were typed out,” Carmel High history teacher Brent Silva says, reflecting on work during distance learning. “Students were supposed to do handwritten notes for lectures, although some people did them on Google Docs, which ended up being not very effective, and because they were on shared documents. Each individual person wasn’t necessarily doing the lecture notes.”
Despite the struggle of assigning handwritten work during distance learning, Silva still wanted his students to have a kinesthetic experience through writing out notes.
Many teachers reveal that they struggled with getting students to do their own work during online school, which took away from many learning opportunities, but handwritten work is now back.
