Writing the future

I was driving my 10-year-old son home from soccer practice a few weeks ago, bracing myself for the parental equivalent of shouting into the void: “What did you do at school today?” 

Usually, this question earns me a dramatic sigh and a classic one-word reply: “Nothing.” But on this particular evening, as the sun dipped low and the car smelled faintly of shin guards and regret, he surprised me. He nonchalantly announced, “We’re learning cursive.”

He’d learned to write his name in cursive and mentioned which letters in the alphabet were the most difficult — lowercase “f” and capital “G.” But then, without skipping a beat, he began to question the entire curriculum, ranting about “never having to need this in real life.” 

But I write in cursive every day, I told him; taking notes in meetings and interviewing someone for an article — cursive helps me write faster, I said. 

“You’ll probably use it in college when you take notes in class,” I said. 

But then it hit me — he probably won’t even take notes on paper by the time he gets to college. The simplicity of a fresh composite notebook and a new ballpoint pen will most certainly, by then, be obsolete.

I asked the magazine’s graduate assistant, Cat, how her fellow grad students took notes in class. Most use laptops, she said, and one or two jot notes down in a notebook (hooray, a win for my side). 

But the majority of students aren’t taking notes at all — they just record the lecture with an artificial intelligence app like Otter.ai, Knowt AI and Noty.ai, and use the audio to create notes later. 

Huh.

I didn’t even have a laptop in college. In fact, I still remember when I walked into our journalism lab and the department had gotten brand new iMac G3s (you remember, those colorful box-shaped Macs with a handle on the back?). The keyboard had a cord, and so did the mouse. 

I cannot imagine the type of technology that will exist just eight years from now. But every time I talk to a student lately, I feel like we’re already there. 

A few weeks ago, I spoke with a few English majors in an internship class and met Rachel Smith, a senior focusing on technical and creative writing. She was a summer intern for the Google Workspace Platform team at Trimble, a global technology company with an office here in Dayton. And what she told me was eye-opening.

“At first [as an English major] I was really resistant to the idea of AI because a lot of people are quick to demonize it and to say it’s going to take our jobs,” she said. But then, with her internship experience, she was forced to look at AI from an unbiased standpoint.

“I had to leave my own personal feelings at the door and learn how to teach others about it and how to use it in a way that is useful in the workforce,” she said.

Rachel and her peers are learning this new technology and how to harness it as a tool in the workforce — a tool that was introduced in the last few years, and already they are able to add it to their résumés as a skill.

So maybe a lowercase “f” won’t haunt my son forever. Maybe cursive will fade, like landlines and LimeWire. But as I watch students like Rachel step boldly into a world shaped by tools we didn’t even imagine a decade ago, I realize something: the tools will keep changing, but the learning will not.

And I asked Rachel how she takes notes in class. “Handwritten on paper,” she said.