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4 min read 49

UofWinds 426, Week 49: primarium, AI Killed the Take-Home Essay. COVID Killed Attendance. Now What?, going through hell, keeping going


Good morning. I slept in. This rarely happens. My son, who did not sleep in, is on campus writing his first exam of his second year of engineering. My husband is watching English soccer while the cat beside him is looking out of the window. Outside, there is a thin blanket of snow that has become crunchy with the cold. My daughter remains in slumberland, oblivious to it all.

I took some days off this week and spent time doing errands that I had put off for the most of the year, working through some of my family's collective administrative burden, and getting the jump on getting ready for the holidays. But the most meaningful thing I did, was taking the time to sit down and go through last year's calendar, photos, and todo lists and do some reflection from the evidence before me.

One conclusion I made was I hadn't watched enough movies in 2025. So, that night, I claimed the sofa in front of the TV and invited the rest of the family to watch Clue.

primarium


As I was leaving work, I had a chat with a co-worker who asked me what I was going to do during my time off. I responded that I was going to do errands and work on my handwriting. She knows better to ask why but if she did, I would have told her that the night before I had listened to The Allusionist podcast episode 221: Scribe and I was still thinking about it.

"I have never felt so naked. That's how exposed I felt at the idea that my handwriting was going to be seen by the world," says Tim Brookes, founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project and author of the new book about handwriting By Hand: Can the Art of Writing Be Saved? Writing the book (yes, by hand!) celebrates the act of handwriting, even overcoming the shame arising from his own.

Much of that episode's conversation is about trying to untangle the feeling of persisting shame that frequently envelops young children as their teacher repeatedly corrects their lettering to conform to a unforgiving standard. Until that moment, I don't think I knew that when I was a child I was also likely taught to abide to a particular and exacting standard and not just "grown up writing".

Which brings me to primarium: handwriting education in primary schools. This website is a collection of handwriting standards, that can be browsed by country, style, or name.

In Canada, many schools taught the MacLean’s Method of Writing. Knowing this, you can read H.B. MacLean's book of the same name on the Internet Archive, read up on its history, and discover an Advanced Certificate in The MacLean Method.

You can unlock so much once you know the name of a thing.

AI Killed the Take-Home Essay. COVID Killed Attendance. Now What?


The byline to Steven Mintz's AI Killed the Take-Home Essay. COVID Killed Attendance. Now What? is Reclaiming Learning in an Age of Distraction and Artificial Intelligence. This was recommended to me by a friend and I'm passing on the recommendation.

In this essay, professor of history, Steven Mintz describes how he, against his prior practice, has made classroom attendance mandatory and the place where students do regular reflective writing on assigned reading.

Active responsibility and public performance matter because they shift learning from private production to observable demonstration. I will no longer ask students to produce written work I cannot witness.
Instead, each student will be responsible for introducing a class session—presenting the core arguments of that day’s readings, identifying key tensions or problems, proposing questions for discussion.
They will take turns facilitating discussions, which means not merely participating but actively orchestrating the conversation: drawing out quiet voices, pressing superficial claims, connecting contributions, and synthesizing insights.
And they will deliver oral presentations on research topics of their choosing, then defend their findings against questions from classmates and from me.
This approach inverts the traditional relationship between student and instructor. I am no longer the sole authority responsible for making the class work. Students become co-creators of the learning environment, accountable not just to me but to each other.

If you are not already completely exhausted by the discourse of GenAi in this moment, I invite you to a webinar that I will be a part of on Thursday. The panel discussion is being hosted by the good people at Library Futures and it features two scholars who I'm excited to learn from in our upcoming conversation about Now What?

going through hell, keeping going


going through hell, keeping going is by novelist Naomi Alderman. It is the essay that I shared with the most people over the last two weeks. On one occasion, I shared it with someone only because at the end of the essay, among the various sundry items was an interesting theory about the TV series Pluribus. That person reported back that they appreciated the theory and they were moved by the essay that precedes it.

The essay is ostensibly about Paul McCartney. But it is really about understanding Paul and The Beatles through the lens of grief. This is my favourite passage:

I also find it really moving that in Linda and Yoko, Paul and John both ended up marrying a woman who had a child already, someone who they could witness being a mother. And it is Rob Sheffield who points out in Dreaming the Beatles that they both also went off and made music with their wives, despite everyone telling them it was cringe to do that.

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