Manual Scripts and Potato Printing

Do you normally write by hand or type? Did you find this task difficult or easy? Explain.

I often refer to myself as 'old school' when it comes to recording anything, as the first resort is pen and paper. After all, I grew up in an age when the experience of writing primarily involved the above tools.  Typewriting was offered as a subject to business-minded students in grades 10-12 and the limited numbers of computer in my high school meant that simply touching them was a major accomplishment.  I still do write by hand a lot and I'm just now learning to work smarter and not harder by using the affordances of Google Sheets, Docs and Forms and other tools to collect and sort information that I can share and edit with ease. 

Writing is still quite an easy task for me. Having the tertiary level experiences of sitting in lecture rooms and recording multiple pages of notes at a time, has also helped in honing my ability to think, summarize and write quickly. I am not a very fast typist, so I typing doesn't necessarily lessen the amount of time that I would spend recording text. Again, the major difference with writing vs. typing text for me is just the ability to edit and rearrange the text when necessary.

What do you feel is the most significant difference between writing by hand and using mechanized forms of writing? Which do you prefer and why?

There is so much versatility that using a computer to write texts provide that almost no one who has the medium or option would prefer to use the handwritten format.  As much as I don't mind writing most of the times, I would be lying if I say I prefer handwriting over machine writing/typing. For centuries, there have been competitions to make books, etc. through more efficient means. I made reference to the typewriter earlier, which preceded the computer, that definitely helped to change the trajectory of how texts were produced. The age-old handwritten text is still surviving despite all these new mechanized forms. One wonders how much longer it will survive, as children born in the 21st century are fast forgetting or never developed penmanship in the first place, due to their relationship with the modern technologies that are not just used for typing text, but performing so many tasks that complement and enhance the text in addition to the possibility of sharing and receiving text from multiple sources.

As a teacher in 21st century Canada, I no longer insist on my students writing much text, due the multiple benefits of using the modern computer, as well as the differentiation strategies that its use facilitates. 

POTATO PRINTING REFLECTION

I started the process thinking that carving the stamps would have been the most challenging part of the process. I was very wrong. I used my blue marker (1st picture above) to mark out the letters, then removed the parts that weren't blue. After carving the first two, I put them on the paper to check the orientation, as I suspected that I could not write them the way I would write text on paper, since I will be putting them face down on the paper to create the impressions. Sure enough, the "R" couldn't work as is, so I had to write it backwards. I redid the "R"  and paid close attention to the orientation of the "E," then refined the letters. I also chose letters that were mainly straight lines, which added to the ease of carving them. Carving took about 15 minutes. 

Based on the fact that I only did five letters and I used letters that were mainly straight lines, which made both the carving and figuring out the orientation easier, and the whole project required so much thinking and trial and error, I can only imagine how difficult it would have been to create a whole book or scroll. I don't think we give enough credit to early inventors who had to use materials that were prepared using several processes prior to writing on them. Animal skins, for example, required cleaning with lime, stretching the skin and drying before they could even begin writing on it. To compound the processes, writing turned out to be slow and laborious. For example, when the Papyrus was being used, reeds were dipped in charcoal and they had to wait for the ink on the letters to dry. My potato stamps were by no means identical because the paint on the letters were not of the same consistency. Early inventors clearly had a real hard time creating text.