For many years, two of my favorite teaching tools have been oral exams and handwritten journals. When my bookstore stopped selling blue books years ago (back when we had a bookstore) for a little while I bought them from other sources. One big challenge: students often don’t carry writing instruments. Another: most of us have poor handwriting.

Oral exams are time-consuming, but when students take them seriously they turn the exam into something like a private class, and the aim becomes more and deeper learning.

Journals can be a hard sell, because the practice of journaling is so unfamiliar for most of my digital-native students. So I show them examples of journals from history. Pausanias. Henry David Thoreau. My mother’s journal from her trip to Europe after she graduated from college. (Mom died 14 years ago; I still have that journal.)

It’s not easy, but I teach students how to use journals as a practice of being present without distraction. And I ask them to think of a journal as an epistolary practice, writing to their future selves and to others whom they might someday know and love, like their great-grandchildren. (I have letters my grandfather wrote to his mother while he was fighting in the Pacific in WWII. What treasures!)

My sabbatical is coming to a close, and soon I’ll be back in the classroom. I’ve got some work to do to prepare for the fall classes. My students will be even more digitally-oriented than previous generations, and much of higher ed, including my university, continues to adopt digital “solutions” to education in the form of course management software, digital evaluations throughout the semester, quantified assessment of courses. All of those digital artifacts are ephemeral collections of binaries that will likely be forgotten.

Most likely I won’t be offering any blue book exams, but I hope to provide my students with opportunities to be present and still, to converse with those who have written letters from long ago, and to write their own letters to the future in a material, tangible form.

As I type this, I know this reflection is itself one of those bits of digitalia that will also likely vanish. Such writing can be worthwhile, but I don’t want them to completely replace the incarnate and haptic practice of holding a pen, of feeling the nib run across the fibers of paper, of stopping to think bodily about what to write next.

And as I write this I have before me a handwritten note from a student who will graduate today. She wrote to thank me for a course I taught in backcountry Alaska, where the only assignment was a handwritten journal.

She wrote, “I hope that we someday have an Alaskan reunion trip because that may have been the most transformative experience while at Augie!”

Well, I can think of a few things that she experienced while here that were likely much greater, but I am grateful for her handwritten words nonetheless.

And I hope that in the coming semester, my students will also write things that they will look back on with gratitude for the experience.