The time when I won a handwriting award

I was a bit of a shit at primary school. I never paid attention; I kept fucking about, and I spent more time outside the headmaster’s office than in my lessons. One time I wrapped elastic bands around my head until it hurt. Another time, I organised a protest to stop the local council from cutting down our favourite log in the playground. I was an all-around pain in the arse. Weirdly, though, between my acts of defiance and my desire to be the class clown, I was really good at handwriting. I don’t know what specifically made me latch onto that subject, but it was my standout lesson.

Our school operated on a writing implement progression pathway. Kids weren’t trusted with pens. Instead, they weaned kids onto them. Year 1 started with a girthy old pencil. By Year 2, I was rocking a pen, and by Year 4, they trusted me with a fountain pen. That's when I was hoisted into the Year 6 handwriting group. What a lad. My teachers latched onto this, and in a bid to give me focus and stop me from running feral, they signed me up to represent the school in a county-wide handwriting competition.

The competition

I’ll be honest, some of the above is hazy. Although I distinctly remember the point when the governor visited our school and poked his head into the room just as I was putting a third rubber band around my head. The details surrounding the competition, I’m not sure about. But I remember writing a poem about ‘The Harvest’. It was partly a nod to my dad, who worked, and still works, on a farm, but also an excuse to illustrate the poem with drawings of a tractor and hay bale. It’s weird how I can’t remember what I ate for lunch yesterday, but can vividly picture the hay bale drawn on the right-hand side of my A4 literary masterpiece. Anyway. My beautiful handwriting won me an award: a crystal pen that, if I edit this properly, may well be pictured below, if I can find it.

The death of a skill

Cut forward 28 years (why did I work that out 👴), and now I write like someone who just discovered a pen. A 2001 Space Odyssey monkey motherfucker bashing bone into dirt, except it’s pen onto paper. The pen slips out of my fingers when I grasp it, and it always ends up getting away from me. I’ll start writing, and it takes a while for my hand to catch up with my head. I then write two or three letters ahead of where I am on paper, resulting in some indecipherable nonsense that makes next to no sense when I read it back. Admittedly, that could be a smidge of dyslexia, and no fault of the pen, but alas. The golden era of Kieran’s award-winning handwriting is long past. And it’s to be expected. I don’t need to write any more. Not in the traditional sense.

Since the back end of secondary school, most, if not all, of my writing has been done on a keyboard. The clicking and clacking of keys flooding digital paper with words. That’s nearly 20 years of my life. And nowadays it’s not even a physical keyboard; it’s a digital one on the screen of a touch device. And even that helps you spell properly. I can mash my pudgy fingers against the glass surface, and my phone makes its best guess at what I’m trying to say. A pen is so antiquated in comparison. The keyboard has made the skill of handwriting redundant.

Now swap out the keyboard for AI, and handwriting for critical thinking. Surprise! It’s a covert article about another downside of AI.

The rug pull

While it’s fun to write about how I literally had the best handwriting in Lincolnshire (for an 8-year-old in the late 90s called Kieran), and now I can’t even hold a pen, it’s a growing concern that this is exactly what will happen with AI. By its nature, it’s a problem-solving tool. It thinks for you. Need an idea for a gift? Ask AI. Unsure how to solve an issue with code? Ask AI. Don’t have the skills to draw something? Use AI and its billions of bytes of stolen data to draw something for you, then claim you’re an artist! Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. But it’s removing our need to think about anything. And that’s incredibly worrying, because much like my handwriting, we’ll completely lose the fundamental skill of thought.

This isn’t an original thought, ironically. There have been many studies about how using AI, even in limited doses, is negatively affecting our brains. But it was only when I recently joked to a colleague about not being able to use a pen that this whole thing clicked for me, and it’s a grim realisation. I really want to avoid a future where I’m writing a shitty blog post called ‘The time when we used to think for ourselves’.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash