The scene is right out of the 1950s with students pecking away at manual typewriters, the machines dinging at the end of each line. Once each semester, Grit Matthias Phelps, a German language instructor at Cornell University, introduces her students to the raw feeling of typing without online assistance. No screens, online dictionaries, spellcheckers, or delete keys. The exercise started in spring 2023 as Phelps grew frustrated with the reality that students were using generative AI and online translation platforms to churn out grammatically perfect assignments, reports the AP. "What's the point of me reading it if it's already correct anyway, and you didn't write it yourself? Could you produce it without your computer?" said Phelps.
She wanted students to understand what writing, thinking, and classrooms were like before the digital era. So, she found a few dozen old manual typewriters in thrift shops and online marketplaces, and created what her syllabus calls an "analog" assignment. It might be premature to say that typewriters are making a comeback beyond Cornell's campus. But the revival is part of a national trend toward old-school testing methods like in-class pen-and-paper exams and oral tests to prevent AI use for assignments on laptops. "I was so confused. ... I'd seen typewriters in movies, but they don't tell you how a typewriter works," said Catherine Mong, 19, a freshman in Phelps' Intro to German class. "I didn't know there was a whole science to using a typewriter."
Like a rotary phone, the typewriter appears simple but is not intuitive to the smartphone generation. Phelps demonstrated how to feed the paper manually, striking the keys with force but not so hard the letters smudge. She explained that the dinging bell signifies the end of a line and the need to manually return the carriage to start the next line. ("Oh," said one student, "that's why it's called 'return.'") "Everything slows down. It's like back in the old days when you really did one thing at a time. And there was joy in doing it," said Phelps, who brings in her two kids, aged 7 and 9, to serve as "tech support" and ensure no one has their phones out.
The assignment carries lessons beyond the obvious. "The difference with typing on a typewriter is not just how you interact with the typewriter, but how you interact with the world around you," said Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong, a sophomore. In the absence of screens, there are no notifications to distract. Without every answer readily available at his fingertips, he asked his classmates for help, which Phelps heartily encouraged. "I had to talk a lot more, socialize a lot more, which I guess was normal back then," Lertdamrongwong said, referring to the typewriter era. "But it's drastically different from how we interact within the classroom in modern times. People are always on a laptop, always on the phone." Without a delete key and the ability to correct every mistake, he paused to think more intentionally about his writing. "This might sound bad, but I was forced to actually think about the problem on my own instead of delegating to AI or Google search," he said.
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