The exercise started in spring 2023 as Phelps grew frustrated with the reality that students were using generative AI<\/a> and online translation platforms to churn out grammatically perfect assignments<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s the point of me reading it if it\u2019s already correct anyway, and you didn\u2019t write it yourself? Could you produce it without your computer?\u201d said Phelps.<\/p>\n She wanted students to understand what writing, thinking and classrooms were like before everything turned digital<\/a>. So, she found a few dozen old manual typewriters in thrift shops and online marketplaces, and created what her syllabus calls an \u201canalog\u201d assignment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Grit Matthias Phelps gives students a demonstration on how to use a typewriter before class at Cornell University, Friday, March 20, 2026, in Ithaca, N.Y. (AP Photo\/Lauren Petracca)<\/p>\n Grit Matthias Phelps gives students a demonstration on how to use a typewriter before class at Cornell University, Friday, March 20, 2026, in Ithaca, N.Y. (AP Photo\/Lauren Petracca)<\/p>\n Add AP News on Google <\/p>\n Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Read More<\/p>\n It might be premature to say that typewriters are making a comeback beyond Cornell\u2019s campus. But the revival is part of a national trend toward old-school testing methods<\/a> like in-class pen-and-paper exams and oral tests to prevent AI use for assignments on laptops.<\/p>\n Typewriters bring \u2018old days\u2019 taste of doing one thing at a time<\/p>\n Students arrived for class on a recent analog day to find typewriters at the desks, some with German and some with QWERTY keyboards.<\/p>\n \u201cI was so confused. I had no idea what was happening. I\u2019d seen typewriters in movies, but they don\u2019t tell you how a typewriter works,\u201d said Catherine Mong, 19, a freshman in Phelps\u2019 Intro to German class. \u201cI didn\u2019t know there was a whole science to using a typewriter.\u201d<\/p>\n Like a rotary phone, the manual typewriter appears simple but is not intuitive to the smartphone generation. Phelps demonstrated how to feed the paper manually, striking the keys with force but not so hard the letters would smudge. She explained that the dinging bell signifies the end of a line and the need to manually return the carriage to start the next line. (\u201cOh,\u201d said one student, \u201cthat\u2019s why it\u2019s called \u2018return.\u2019\u201d)<\/p>\n \u201cEverything slows down. It\u2019s like back in the old days when you really did one thing at a time. And there was joy in doing it,\u201d said Phelps, who brings in her two children, aged 7 and 9, to serve as \u201ctech support\u201d and ensure no one has their phones out.<\/p>\n \n Students use typewriters to complete a writing assignment in German at Cornell University, Friday, March 20, 2026, in Ithaca, N.Y. Their professor, Grit Matthias Phelps, brings out the typewriters once each semester for students to disconnect from technology and connect with the assignment in a different way. (AP Photo\/Lauren Petracca)\n <\/p>\n Students use typewriters to complete a writing assignment in German at Cornell University, Friday, March 20, 2026, in Ithaca, N.Y. Their professor, Grit Matthias Phelps, brings out the typewriters once each semester for students to disconnect from technology and connect with the assignment in a different way. (AP Photo\/Lauren Petracca)<\/p>\n Add AP News on Google <\/p>\n Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Read More<\/p>\n \n Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong, a sophomore at Cornell University, laughs with classmates while using a typewriter for a German writing assignment on Friday, March 20, 2026, in Ithaca, N.Y. The professor, Grit Matthias Phelps, brings out the typewriters once a semester for her students to use. (AP Photo\/Lauren Petracca)\n <\/p>\n Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong, a sophomore at Cornell University, laughs with classmates while using a typewriter for a German writing assignment on Friday, March 20, 2026, in Ithaca, N.Y. The professor, Grit Matthias Phelps, brings out the typewriters once a semester for her students to use. (AP Photo\/Lauren Petracca)<\/p>\n Add AP News on Google <\/p>\n Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Read More<\/p>\n Students welcomed having fewer distractions <\/p>\n The assignment carries lessons beyond simply how to use a typewriter, which is the whole point.<\/p>\n \u201cIt dawned on me that the difference with typing on a typewriter is not just how you interact with the typewriter, but how you interact with the world around you,\u201d said computer science major Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong, a sophomore, whose class had to write a critique of a German movie they\u2019d watched.<\/p>\n In the absence of screens, there are no notifications to distract you as you write. Without every answer readily available at his fingertips, he asked his classmates for help, which Phelps heartily encouraged.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile writing the essay, I had to talk a lot more, socialize a lot more, which I guess was normal back then,\u201d Lertdamrongwong said, referring to the typewriter era. \u201cBut it\u2019s drastically different from how we interact within the classroom in modern times. People are always on a laptop, always on the phone.\u201d<\/p>\n Without a delete key and the ability to correct every mistake, he paused to think more intentionally about his writing. <\/p>\n \u201cThis might sound bad, but I was forced to actually think about the problem on my own instead of delegating to AI or Google search,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Manual machines were a workout for pinky fingers<\/p>\n Most students found their pinkies weren\u2019t strong enough to touch-type, so they typed more slowly, pecking at the keyboard with their index fingers. <\/p>\n Mong, the freshman, faced the added challenge of a recently broken wrist, requiring her to use just one hand. The self-described perfectionist was initially frustrated with how messy her page looked with odd spacing between certain letters and misspellings. (Phelps told students to backspace and type \u2018X\u2019s over errors.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Marcello Popelka makes edits using a pencil after writing an assignment in German on a typewriter at Cornell University, Friday, March 20, 2026, in Ithaca, N.Y. The professor, Grit Matthias Phelps, brings out the typewriters once each semester for students to disconnect from technology and connect with the assignment in a different way. (AP Photo\/Lauren Petracca)<\/p>\n Marcello Popelka makes edits using a pencil after writing an assignment in German on a typewriter at Cornell University, Friday, March 20, 2026, in Ithaca, N.Y. The professor, Grit Matthias Phelps, brings out the typewriters once each semester for students to disconnect from technology and connect with the assignment in a different way. (AP Photo\/Lauren Petracca)<\/p>\n Add AP News on Google <\/p>\n Add AP News as your preferred source to see more of our stories on Google.<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Read More<\/p>\n \u201cThis thing I handed in had pencil marks all over it and definitely did not look clean or finished. But it\u2019s part of the process of learning that you\u2019re going to make mistakes,\u201d said Mong, who found the assignment of typing a poem \u201cfun and challenging.\u201d <\/p>\n She embraced the odd spacing and played with the visual boundaries of the page to indent and fragment lines in the style of poet E.E. Cummings. It took several sheets of paper and many mistakes, all of which Mong saved. <\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m probably going to hang them on my wall,\u201d Mong said. \u201cI\u2019m kind of fascinated by typewriters. I told all my friends, I did a German test on a typewriter!\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n The Associated Press\u2019 education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP\u2019s standards<\/a> for working with philanthropies, a list<\/a> of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The scene is right out of the 1950s with students pecking away at manual typewriters, the machines dinging…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":556204,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,3876,247053,23276,526,793,11382,4117,149,2005,74,795],"class_list":["post-556203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-back-to-school","tag-catherine-mong","tag-colleges-and-universities","tag-education","tag-general-news","tag-information-technology","tag-laptops","tag-lifestyle","tag-new-york","tag-technology","tag-u-s-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/556204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Grit](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1774964114_708_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Students](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1774964115_226_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Ratchaphon](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1774964115_816_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n![\"Marcello](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/1774964116_348_.jpeg\")
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