[Here’s a post from Diane Ravitch’s Blog about a topic in which I have in the past taken interest.]
When I was in the early grades in the Houston public schools, we learned penmanship. At the time, we dipped our quill pens into an inkwell. It was messy, at least for me. At some point we switched to pens that had ink reserves, and you filled them up and wrote with ink. That was better than dipping the quill.
Then a new writing technology came along, called the “ballpoint pen.” No messy inkwells or ink bottles. You just wrote until they were dry, and then you threw them out. The ballpoint pen was a nightmare for me because I am left-handed and all the desks in my classrooms were meant for people who wrote with their right hand. That meant that as I wrote, I smudged my hand across what I had just written. Not only was the writing smudged, but the fingers on my left hand were always…
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