As a fourth grade student at Mt Pleasant during the 1973-74 school year, I participated in a a calligraphy experiment with the goal of improving penmanship in beginning writers. This ancient Asian art form was taught to me weekly by a Catholic nun from Marylhurst College. Her name was Sister Grace and she studied calligraphy under the tutelage of a Reed College professor named Lloyd Reynolds, widely regarded as a master calligrapher and responsible for spreading its gospel to thousands of people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One of those people was Steve Jobs. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
According to my mother Dawn Engel, and\nmy 5th<\/sup> grade teacher, Doug Bansch, both elementary\nteachers in the Oregon City School District during the 70s, the\ndistrict was somehow chosen to pilot a curriculum that called for\ncalligraphy to replace the ball and stick and cursive methods in the\ninstruction of penmanship for elementary age students. I am not\nmaking this up. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was one of the few students who\nparticipated in the calligraphy experiment and I can still remember\nSister Grace dressed in full habit entering my fourth grade classroom\ncarrying a box that contained the special pens, ink and paper. It was\nthe first nun I had ever seen. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s my belief now that my teacher,\nNancy Johnson, had taken a class from Sister Grace because she often\nfollowed up Sister Grace’s lessons with calligraphy exercises if\nspare time suddenly reared itself which it invariably did in the days\nbefore the totalitarianism of state testing commandeered public\neducation. I even recall staying in from recess to practice, for all\nthe good it did me. I was a terrible calligrapher, unlike my mother,\nand once the project was abandoned, my handwriting became an amalgam\nof calligraphy, ball and stick and cursive, and largely illegible to\nmost people, including myself after a week or so of writing\nsomething. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time I practiced\ncalligraphy, so did Steve Jobs while he attended Reed College,\nlocated in SE Portland. In multiple Jobs’ interviews and biographies,\nhe claimed that the calligraphy course at Reed his freshmen year\ntaught by Reynolds was the only one he ever regularly attended. (He\nflunked out after this first year and started Apple two years later.)\nHe stated that he often attended the class while on LSD. Furthermore,\nJobs maintained that the crisp, minimalist elegance of calligraphy\ninformed his entire aesthetic for developing Apple’s revolutionary\n(anti-Microsoft) approach to simplifying and beautifying the visual\ninterface between human and computer, an approach that truly changed\nworld history, but perhaps not for the better. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n To consider that a calligraphy course\ntaught decades ago in Portland played a major role in our later\nenslavement to cool digital gadgetry is one of the disturbing and \nagonizing historical reflections of my life. Someone really needs to\nwrite a novel about this seminal and horrible event in American life\nand all the chapter titles should be written in haiku. \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a fourth grade student at Mt Pleasant during the 1973-74 school year, I participated in a a calligraphy experiment with the goal of improving penmanship in beginning writers. This ancient Asian art form was taught to me weekly by a Catholic nun from Marylhurst College. Her name was Sister Grace and she studied calligraphy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5849,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,942],"tags":[1083,6,704,1084],"class_list":["post-5874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-city","tag-calligraphy","tag-matt-love","tag-oregon-city","tag-steve-jobs","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5874"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5876,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5874\/revisions\/5876"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}