Writing on Paper

It’s getting harder to write an article using pen and paper the more we are exposed to technology. It’s very convenient to simply use the backspace in case of typo errors. Except when I am drafting my solution for a Math problem, I prefer using the word processor when encoding articles and the like.

But at the moment, I am writing on a piece of paper. I will be transferring this content after we arrive home. We are here at my sister’s boarding house and I don’t have my laptop with me for typing. While she is teaching online, we are here on the background, silent and trying to be productive still. I was like a mouse searching for pen and paper a little while ago.

Another problem when using pen is when the pens blot. I tried around five of my sister’s pen before finally able to use a good one.

I remember the good ole days when we wrote using pen and paper. Sometimes, when writing letters, we use special pens and stationary papers.

I have a stack of letters left in my cabinet back at the province. I’m not sure what condition the stack is now. Maybe, the papers were already burned or perhaps have been at the hands of others who feasted reading them.

The letters were mostly from family members and friends. Letters I received from suitors were very much countable. But I don’t feel sad about that. I don’t care. I’m conceited anyway and I would write letters for myself if needed. Judging by the content of the letters from boys, those were probably crafted by pair or by group. Poor admirer must have had a hard time writing on his own so he must have sought help from more able friends. Not bad. But I was rarely taken by those letters because no one came close to what I wanted. I like serious and honest ones. But no one gave me that. In case there were, I must have forgotten about them. +_+

My hands are aching while writing this. I plan to transfer this one word per word when I go back home. The rain stopped now and I will be going back in a short while. My sister has already finished a 30-minute session with her student and she would transition to another in 5 minutes. While writing, I am listening to her as well. I love learning from others and I admire her skill in doing good with time management. If I were that, I would’ve worried that I will screw the flow of the lesson. When I teach, I usually prepare text, with few equations here and there, powerpoint. I am lazy putting design or whatever into the powerpoint. I don’t have the heart to do that now unlike before when I was more passionate and had only a kid. I have more kids now and time are divided for a lot of stuffs. I will get back to how it used to someday.

The tip in writing on paper is to have the right position when writing. There should also be a good surface to lay the paper so that the pen will not destroy the paper. My hands are pretty big so I choose to write on wide-sized paper like 8x11 or 8x13. The small notebooks, I only write my lists there but not paragraphs or articles. I tried doing well with some special notebook at one time and I realized it was hard trying to control how I write on the paper. I write big and messy. When needed, I have to really make an effort not to make errors. There was a time before when we have to write grades on hard copies. I was a customer of white ink. There were even no correction tape before. Just ink which made my life even more miserable. I resented those who could write neatly and legibly. But at least when it came to technology, I am not that very far behind.

But those days of manually writing grades were really remarkable because of the effort we had to give. Nowadays, we would just use excel and print things out. Our school have preformatted grading system which reduced our work significantly. We didn’t have to worry about formats or whatever. We labored more with checking papers and recording scores. When time comes, we simply upload grades into the school system using the class record system where we recorded students’ scores.

This is such a long thing to write by hand. But I still love having to do this once in a while.