Tuesday 10 - 10 Things I Handwrite

I'm a procrastinator, so very rarely are my posts written ahead of time.  Today's Tuesday 10 with Lena is no exception.  However, The Author is home from school since she's not feeling well.  Bugaboo is begging for someone to play the Wii with him.  He even has my mii selected.  How can I say no to that 3-year-old cuteness?  That means you get a guest post from The Author!

Hello everybody! Today's Tuesday 10 is "10 things I handwrite." This one is really easy for me. And I know that you all want to have pictures of Bugaboo playing the Wii.

1. Homework
This seems obvious. Sure, I'm at a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) magnet, but almost everything is still done by hand. Being at a STEM school means that we have fabulous classes and half our tech doesn't work. (And engineering group projects take up all the space in your email.) Homework is unwanted and can take forever. Why, yes, I am thinking of geometry!

 
2. Notes
My school doesn't assign computers to each student. I don't regularly use a computer in most of my classes. Any notes we take are done by hand. Four classes a day (we're on block scheduling) means an hour and a half per class. Depending on how much we get done, we may or may not spend the whole class period cracking jokes and taking notes.
And everybody wonders why all the pencils vanish... I'm confident that they're with everybody's socks and pens.

3. Quiz Bowl Scores
I'm on the Quiz Bowl team. At practices, we have a handy-dandy system that makes scorekeeping very easy. At meets... not so much. If the reader doesn't have a helper with them, they need the team's "alternate" to time and/or keep score. Timing is a lot harder because you have to pay attention to the stopwatch, so I delegate that to one of the other team's members or the helper.

4. Novels
I know that this makes me sound crazy. Yes, I write novels by hand. My friends that also write books do the same. Why?
We're in school for eight hours a day, with limited computer access. Even if we had regular access, there are filters. They'd probably find a lot of the stuff in our novels "not school-appropriate." Say, a book about ninjas. With weapons. And magic. And semi-questionable morals. Oh, and it's set in a dystopia... Easier to handwrite. (Notebooks are easier to carry around, too.)

5. Journals
Mom does this, too. There's something magical with the concept of handwritten mementos from another time. A person's handwriting is so special, so unique, and totally different from anybody else's. Mom writes her journal entries in cursive. I'm so used to print that it's second-nature to start writing in it.

6. Swim team attendance
I manage the swim team. Actually, I managed the boys' basketball team (2 years ago), both swim teams (last school year), the volleyball team (this year), and started on the boys' swim season last week. Managing requires taking attendance, running various errands, picking up equipment, handing out towels at the end of practice, etc.
It's easier to take attendance with paper and pencil than vanish into the coach's office for a few minutes to do it online. I don't have to get the key, go to their office, enter the office, take attendance, close up the office, and come back.

7. Tests
It's weird when tests are on the computer. We took practice tests to narrow our Academic Pentathlon team down to nine students last week. They were on the computer. It was very different from what we're used to!
In the past, we've even done state writing tests by hand. I'm not sure if we're doing that this year. The tests start today, and here I am, guest posting at home.

8. Quotes
I don't copy quotes off of the internet or any of that. People say some really weird things. Those random, everyday things are what I write down in the margins of my notebooks.
Here's a really good example of a quote with a story: "It's a snake!"
I'm just going to say that PE last year, walking outside, and seeing a snake gets totally out of hand when one of the girls picks it up and everybody else goes crazy. I'm the fast walker sitting on the steps waiting for everybody else to get up the hill, laughing at the whole thing.
I want to put it in a book someday.

Wow. This is harder than I thought it would be.

9. RPG character sheets
I'm the person in my family who has been wanting to run a family RPG (role-playing game) for over a year now. It hasn't come to anything yet, so I use the book to create RPG versions of my characters. It helps to make them more lifelike and less Mary Sue-ish.

10. Things I want to remember
This goes hand-in-hand with number 8. If I want to remember what somebody said, I write it down. If I want to remember what word I missed at the spelling bee, I find out the correct spelling and write it. If it's an away meet tomorrow and I need to remember what time to leave class, I take a note.
Fun fact: My school's National Junior Honor Society has been instructed not to tell the others in the school how much we use our agendas. It's the example-setters that don't use their agendas at all... Yeah, we're normal teenagers.

I can't leave you with only two pictures of Bugaboo.... Here!

A final note on teenagers' stance about cursive and handwriting not being taught in schools anymore: When we learned this in my geometry class a few months ago, we were appalled. We had a nice argument with the teacher about whether or not we'll actually use it. (We insisted that we will, in fact, need to know how to write things by hand.) Most of us use print more than cursive, but there are people I know that are so used to cursive that they've forgotten how to print. I think that handwriting is probably here to stay.