taking notes

The ponds talk is coming on nicely, though I realised at lunchtime that I should probably have got on with writing up the minutes of yesterday evening's music society committee meeting while it was all fresh in my mind.  I took copious notes, but they tend to make more sense when used as memory joggers to what was actually said, rather than reconstructed cold.  I never learned shorthand, but after years of going to investment meetings have developed a consistent set of abbreviations that generally make sense afterwards, and a rapid scribble that can keep up with most discussions.  Each to their own, the secretary of the beekeepers brings her laptop to meetings and types the first rough draft in real time, while the final version of Monday's meeting has just popped into my inbox.

Fast handwriting is a mixed blessing.  The Systems Administrator's is extremely slow, the legacy of a peculiar childhood visual problem that left the SA a right hander trapped in a left hander's body. The SA writes left handed, but the result is as laborious as I would be if I broke my right wrist and was forced to take up the pen with the wrong hand.  The advantage is that the SA has learned to condense, structure and precis, because in exam conditions there was never going to time to get down more than a page and a half of A4 on any question.  I, on the other hand, can waffle for England, with the freedom that the ability to knock out ten pages of script in thirty minutes gives you.  It isn't always a good thing.

How long will it be before exams cease to be handwritten, I wonder?  Youngsters now are children of the screen and the digital age.  They communicate via their phones and use tablets in class. Making exams a test of their ability to get things down on paper is going to seem increasingly anachronistic.

I can almost touch type, as long as it's mostly text; with digits and dollar signs I have to look.  But only on a traditional keyboard.  Give me a touch screen and I'm agonisingly slow, searching for each character and dabbing at it with a finger.  I watch the young ones jabbing away with their thumbs and am aghast at how they do it.  Technology moves on, though, and in fifty years' time they'll probably be just as amazed at their grandchildren's dexterity with a communications system invented by somebody who hasn't yet been born, compared to which their nimble thumbs look as clumsy and slow as my hesitant forefinger.