National Handwriting Day was celebrated on January 23, the generally recognized birthday of the man with the most famous signature on The Declaration of Independence, John Hancock.  With this day comes the argument of how important handwriting really is. 

In the modern day world, nearly everything is digitalized.  From grade school to jobs in the real world, technology plays a dominant part in our lives.  We type emails instead of handwriting a letter and sending it through the mail. We text parents where we are going instead of leaving them a written note on the dining room table. We rarely have to handwrite an essay and turn it into a teacher or professor.

One of the few subjects that is still dependent on handwritten work is Math.  This is so, because, as Alliance High School Algebra teacher, Nathan Lanik, expressed, “ I actually believe that when reading written responses students put more thought into a typed response, but it is very difficult to type out the steps to a mathematical problem.” In math, there is more problem solving and worksheets, rather than essays and written assignments. There isn’t as much writing of sentences in math, so much as the writing of numbers and equations, making handwritten work the easier way of solving problems.

The amount of teachers that use computers to have students turn in assignments, instead of writing them out grows larger every year.  AHS Biology teacher, Vicki Joule explained, “[Typing] helps the students understand how to write in their own words because they receive immediate feedback when their grammar is incorrect or they have copied someone else’s ideas directly.” She is among the majority of the AHS teachers that use websites, such as Turnitin and Google Classroom, to have students turn in assignments online.

At the rate that this technology takeover is going, there’s a good chance that at some point in the future, schools won’t even teach children how to write, but instead teach them to simply type or speak into a device that will type out their words for them. AHS English teacher, Kiaya West recalled her philosophy professor in college replying to a student who complained about having to handwrite an exam with “We are the only creatures on the planet capable of holding a pencil. What a shame if we stopped practicing something that makes us different from animals.”

Handwriting is something that gives us all a unique characteristic in our lives.  Sure, there are millions upon millions of fonts available out there to choose from when you type up a document, but what about that feeling you get when you write something that you pour your heart into on paper?  That pen and paper contact has a more personal feeling to it. With writing something out by hand, words are physically produced  by the handling a pen, not by pressing a key and having letters appear on your screen, which just seems so impersonal.