Ink pen in the age of computers - what's the point?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The newspaper "Moskovsky Komsomolets" told about the use of technologies of Professor Bazarny in Russian schools.

A 1964 first grade school notebook, which is just a sample of calligraphic handwriting, was recently posted on the social network. Smooth lines - one to one, all curls and hooks are clearly spelled out, hard strokes alternate with soft ones … Users did not hesitate to express their delight: "This is the culture of writing!" force, they write like a chicken with a paw."

But, as MK found out, it's not just aesthetics. The art of beautiful and graceful writing develops fine motor skills, which, in turn, is a stimulus for the intellectual development of the student. And the plastic of effort and relaxation when writing with a fountain pen corresponds to our inner rhythm.

There are many schools in Russia that use health-preserving technologies developed by the doctor and innovative teacher Vladimir Bazarny.

What it is like to write with a pen in the rhythm of the heartbeat, I decided to check the special correspondent "MK", for which I went to the zemstvo gymnasium - the municipal autonomous educational institution of the Balashikha city district.

The 1964 First Grade Exemplary Notebook caused a flurry of reviews on the Internet. Users were divided into two camps.

Some regretted that calligraphy had been undeservedly forgotten, that the culture of writing had left schools with it.

“Recently at the post office I was filling out a form for a parcel, the receptionist said:“What a clear, beautiful handwriting. Nowadays, rarely does anyone write like that. " And I am from that still Soviet school, where a large number of hours were allocated for calligraphy, - says Lyudmila Vasilievna. - This is the good thing that we inherited from tsarist Russia. The copybooks were our reference book. Forcing us to draw out the same hooks and eyes a hundred times with the pen, we developed perseverance and concentration. I am 74 years old, and no matter how fast I am, I always write clearly and evenly. I can't do it any other way, they taught me that."

“Yesterday I reread my grandfather's letters to my grandmother and my father’s notes that he wrote to my mother in the hospital. In the era of ink pens, it seems everyone had great handwriting. In handwritten texts, the emotions experienced by loved ones are better felt,”says Ivan.

Many in the tape agreed that calligraphy is also an introduction to beauty. “Now this 'bourgeois discipline' has disappeared from the school curriculum. What is the result? My daughter is a teacher of Russian language and literature. Checking notebooks at home, sometimes he shows me the compositions of his students. The two of us cannot make out the children's handwriting. I think that slanting, illegible writing is somewhat disrespectful to the teacher. Calligraphy at one time “disciplined” the hand and students in general,”says Nina Georgievna.

The interlocutors in the feed complained that calligraphy can now be found only on logos, printed postcards and in inscriptions on monuments in the cemetery …

“In the passport, on the marriage registration stamp, the registry office employee entered his wife’s surname in a careless handwriting, besides, with a ballpoint pen,” Evgeny says indignantly. - I began to sort through the documents. Here in the birth certificate, all the information is written in beautiful calligraphic handwriting. It feels like it is a document. It's nice to take it in hand."

Among the users there were many who, on their own initiative, began to study calligraphy.

“My handwriting is not very good for me, and when I pick up a pen, I write very beautifully,” Anna admits. - While I draw letter by letter, I completely calm down. For me, doing calligraphy is both creativity and stress prevention."

But lovers of beautiful, graceful writing found many opponents.

“Why is this exotic in our digital age? Writing now with a steel pen is like making dinner in a Russian oven …”- Gennady said.

“As a child, I was taught to write with a fountain pen. Until the fourth grade, ballpoint pens were prohibited in our country. Impressions - the most terrible, you will not wish on the enemy. They said that the handwriting would then be good. It didn't work out. I write badly,”Sergei confesses.

Users regretted that it took so much effort and energy worthy of better use to master the technical side of this letter …

So a colleague recalled that Napoleon wrote so illegibly that his letters were deciphered by a specially trained secretary. And Leo Tolstoy's manuscripts could only be read by his wife. She also rewrote them cleanly. And this did not prevent the commander and writer from becoming great.

Opponents asked: "Why is the ability to write beautifully now?" “Why do we need a pen now, when there is a“keyboard”(a keyboard on a computer. - Auth.), email and printer? In America, for example, in some states calligraphy is generally transferred to the category of optional subjects."

But in Germany, writing with a fountain pen in elementary school is enshrined in federal law. It is believed that the ink in it flows into the writing unit smoothly, children get tired less, write more consciously and concentrated.

To understand what is still very important at an early age, together with the ability to write beautifully, I went to the zemstvo gymnasium, in Balashikha near Moscow.

Learning on the move

The school is municipal, but very unusual. The idea of a zemstvo school, which previously operated in rural areas in zemstvo provinces, was suggested to the organizers by writer and public figure Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

“Education with us is carried out in compliance with such principles as nationality and spirituality,” says director Galina Viktorovna Kravchenko. - We put the education and health preservation of students at the forefront.

Schoolchildren master knowledge of special technologies developed by the innovative teacher, Doctor of Medicine Vladimir Bazarny. As a result, students in the process of learning not only preserve, but also strengthen their health.

In this gymnasium, no one will tell the pupils during the lesson: "Don't turn around!", "Sit still!" The Bazarny system is built on emancipation.

- In a regular school, children are forced to sit for hours in one position, bending over a desk. But it has already been proven that when immobilized, the genome does not work, - says the author of the method, academician of the Russian Academy of Creative Pedagogy, head of the research laboratory Vladimir Bazarny. - When sitting for many hours, calcium ions fall into calcium salts, and this is the path to atherosclerosis. Therefore, our lessons are on the move.

Half of the lesson, some of the students are sitting at desks, the other part is behind the desks, which resemble stands for performances from the stage. Children take off their shoes. They stand in socks on special massage mats woven from small wooden balls.

After 20 minutes, a bell sounds - a fragment from a classic work - and the students get up to exercise. She's special. There is a warm-up not only muscular-bodily, but also exercises for the eyes.

The ceilings in the gymnasium classrooms are all lined. Dash-dotted lines show ovals in red and green, squares in yellow and eight in blue. The students follow them - they guide them during the warm-up with their eyes.

The students themselves carry out the exercises. When we dropped by for a German lesson, a student, doing eye coordination exercises, was giving commands to classmates in German. Such is the ophthalmological simulator.

After charging, those who sat at the desks and stood at the desks change places.

“We teach on the move,” says Marina Anatolyevna Boyarchuk, deputy director for educational work.- There are those who say: "May I not sit down?" And there are children who are slow, they would like, of course, to sit longer. But necessity requires all to sit down and stand up. Near the counter you can change your posture, walk next to it, sit down, massage your legs. With this method, students are not impaired posture and growth is not slowed down.

Moreover, all school furniture is adjusted for the child's height.

- Did you notice colored stickers on the door at the entrance to the offices? - asks Galina Viktorovna Kravchenko. - These are growth ribbons. The guys stand next to them, measure their height and choose the desk and desk, which are marked with the same color.

Balls for rollers

The second important point is that all students in the gymnasium write with fountain pens. Pens, of course, are not dipped into inkpots. Schoolchildren have modern pens with a metal nib and replaceable ink cartridges in their arsenal.

Teachers say that the pen needs to be held at a certain angle, in the right position, otherwise the pen will simply not write. And in this way the child's hand is tamed to the correct position of the hand.

- Fountain pens are very important, - says in turn academician Vladimir Bazarny. - Our inner life is arranged in a rhythmic order. This is the impulse of the brain, and the frequency of respiration, and the beating of the heart … And these rhythms are precisely answered by a refined, calligraphic impulse-pressure letter.

According to the scientist, in the process of writing with a fountain pen, the child gradually develops motor automatism, consistent with the nature of his endogenous biorhythms: alternating efforts - pressures and relaxations - breaks.

- Our brain is the result of improving the functional abilities of the hand and speech muscles. Our fingers for hundreds of thousands of years, like knitting needles, knit an openwork ligature. Only this ligature is our neurodynamics of the brain.

Vladimir Bazarny suggests using a fountain pen not all school years. According to the scientist, the main thing is to develop rhythm, plasticity of efforts and relaxation. This rhythm is then maintained when using any knob.

But the ballpoint pen, the mass production of which in the Soviet Union began in the fall of 1965 on Swiss equipment, is considered by Bazarny to be an absolute evil for younger schoolchildren.

- Today, cursive writing and speed reading are at the forefront. The child was pulled by the ears for high-speed informatization without taking into account his potential and development. What is a ballpoint pen with its continuous writing? Go to school today, see how the children write with them. Everyone is sitting, twisted and tense. Feel their abdominal and back muscles. They are fossilized! With continuous writing, with constant muscle tension, the rhythmic basis in the organization of involuntary motor skills is inhibited and destroyed. Hence, modern children have back pain and a bunch of diseases. As soon as ballpoint pens were introduced, many psychologists and psychiatrists began to sound the alarm. The children's learning and cognitive abilities fell, their psyche and intellect changed. Such is the tragedy at the tip of the pen.

The gymnasium teachers fully support Bazarny.

“With fountain pens, students write more consciously and competently, the pace slows down, there is time for reflection,” says the teacher of history and social studies Irina Nikolaevna Pavlova. - The frequency of clicks on the pen coincides with the heartbeat. Everything happens harmoniously, inner calmness appears.

I had to observe how children put pressure on a ballpoint pen so much that a trace from it is printed on as many as three or four pages.

- A fountain pen does not imply such efforts, it glides on the paper itself very smoothly. This removes the load from the hand, - says teacher Pavel Nikolaevich Lozbenev.

In the school museum, I myself tried to write with a fountain pen dipping it into an inkwell. At first she literally scraped the metal against the paper. Then I intuitively found the desired slope and determined the amount of ink that was required in order not to plant a blot. The pen sliding on the paper itself suggested where to press to make a thicker line, and where to weaken the pressure. As a result, she wrote: "A spring chaise drove into the gates of the hotel of the provincial town …" It was difficult to break away from the mesmerizing letter, but the students were waiting for me.

Boys offer a plot, and girls offer a description

Another feature of the gymnasium is separate classes for boys and girls.

According to Bazarny, girls at the beginning of their education are 2–3 years ahead of boys in their development spiritually and physically. They cannot be mixed in classes by calendar age.

- According to studies, if boys find themselves surrounded by stronger girls, then some boys develop female character traits: diligence, obedience, perseverance, desire to serve, to please, lack of protest attitudes. Other boys develop a neurotic loser complex, - says academician Vladimir Bazarny. - The most self-destructive experience for boys is being weaker than girls.

Therefore, it is better for them to study separately.

“We have been working on this program for 15 years,” says the director of the gymnasium, Galina Viktorovna Kravchenko. - The content of education is the same, but the requirements are different. As for the boys, we take into account that they follow instructions, do not like repetitions, long explanations. They are impressed by the change of events, all kinds of competitions, they like to look for new ways on their own, to be pioneers. It's different for girls. They need to explain the topic in detail, give examples and only then offer to solve the problem. Or, for example, in literature, boys usually offer a plot, and girls - a description.

Duchess Olga Nikolaevna Kulikovskaya-Romanova (widow of Tikhon Kulikovsky-Romanov, the nephew of Nicholas II), who visited the gymnasium, supported the separate-parallel education with great enthusiasm.

Teachers believe that children develop better in separate classes. This is especially true for boys who adopt a masculine model of behavior.

- Girls in the lower grades develop faster, but the boys then “shoot”, - says the teacher Pavel Nikolaevich Lozbenev.

- I teach classes for boys and girls. They really grow up in different ways, and we build lessons in different ways, - supports her colleague, history teacher Tatyana Alekseevna Nazmieva.

Marina Anatolyevna Boyarchuk, deputy director for educational work, admits that she loves to work more in the boys' class

- Guys, it seems to me, are more sincere, compassionate, active, open. They are very reliable, principled, independent, truthful, - says Marina Anatolyevna. - For middle-aged and older girls, it often happens that they think one thing, say another, but act in a completely different way.

Teachers say that they even try to select literature for extracurricular reading taking into account the gender characteristics of children.

“For boys, we recommend works where there are examples of honor, conscience, nobility, fortitude, courage,” says Marina Anatolyevna. - For girls, we select books where there are examples of purity, girlish modesty, hard work, female fidelity. When we have joint events, and these are holidays, evenings, performances, trips, we all reasonably combine it.

- And I like girls' classes more, - says teacher Elena Andreevna Kharlamova. - Girls are an incomprehensible world of feminine logic and intuition. It is very interesting for me to watch how they grow up and prettier, how their accents change.

History and social science teacher Irina Nikolaevna Pavlova also shares her observations:

- Boys grasp ideas faster, are good at analyzing and comparing. Discipline in boys' class is always easier. For girls, the lesson is more measured, with them you have to be distracted. They may be offended, and I have to calm them down. The boys joked at each other, laughed, immediately forgot, and began to work further.

The discussion is continued by the teacher of English, Maria Evgenievna Zhuravleva:

- Boys really compete well with each other. They all want to be leaders, unlike girls. Girls are harder to work with. For example, if one of them does not know the answer to a question, everyone is silent. Girls are afraid to make mistakes, they react very emotionally and sharply to failure.

By the way, the Council of Fathers plays a special role in the life of the gymnasium. And the meetings in the classrooms here are held by the parents themselves. As the menu says in the dining room, which is called the refectory in the gymnasium. Children have the opportunity to choose a dish to their liking in advance.

The health of the gymnasium students is scrupulously monitored. Pupils regularly undergo express diagnostics. The gymnasium is supervised by the Research Institute of Hygiene for Children and Adolescents.

“Our children get sick four times less often,” says Vladimir Bazarny. - They grow faster. By the final grade, the average height of guys is 182 centimeters. They do not have scoliosis, their vision is preserved and even improves.

More than a thousand schools and kindergartens operate in Bazarnoye in Russia and the neighboring countries, in the Komi Republic alone there are 490 educational institutions. Now the method is being actively introduced into schools in Azerbaijan. While in Moscow only one school №760 named after Maresyev operates on the health-saving technologies of Bazarny.