One of the things I always hated about algebra class at university, besides the fact that it was algebra class, was the notion of “showing your work”. On a couple occasions I got the correct answer on an exam only to lose points because during my “reasoning” process I’d made off-setting mistakes that somehow produced the correct answer.

I thought this was absurd until I realized I actually had to do the same thing in history and English classes.

In history and English classes we had to provide our own exam booklets, aka blue books, which we would use for the longest and most complicated essay questions. We were also required to write in pen which, in theory, made our handwriting slightly more legible, but also left our mistakes and second thoughts visible as glorious scribbled-out wounds on the page.

I vaguely remember crossing out most of a page after I realized I was heading in the wrong direction (i.e. suddenly remembered what we’d actually studied). My blue books were usually marred with lots of crossed out sections and several arrows and useful annotations to provide guidance to the professor and/or teaching assistant attempting to navigate the scrawl.

The only pens that were banned, unfortunately, were Erasermate pens that, although they could be erased, also tended to smear and seemed to be universally hated by lefties. (My attitude always was “I’m not a lefty so I don’t give a crap about their problems.” Remind me again, why don’t I get invited to parties?)

I always wondered if it wouldn’t be better to allow us to write in pencil as we could erase our mistakes and produce a much neater package. The only issues would be badly erased sections, crumbled sections and randomly torn pages, which, I suddenly realize would have been about as sloppy as what I produced in pen. Then there was that broken pencil problem.

After becoming a teacher and reading hundreds of essays written in pencil, I suddenly realize why professors were willing to live with the pen scribbles. More on that in another post.