AI Can Wait

“I don’t see why anyone should even care about teaching cursive handwriting anymore. That time would be better spent teaching kids how to use AI.”

It is no surprise that the friend saying this to me was a technologically proficient 30-something woman with an East Coast background. She was quite confident in her pronouncement. And I am confident she is wrong. Swapping cursive for AI is a trade I’m not interested in making.

I am aware of the arguments against teaching cursive. Who needs it? After all, who really writes anymore in a world of keyboarding, thumb-typing, and voice recognition?

The “technical” answer is that learning handwriting helps with other skills: fine motor skill development, hand-eye coordination, memory retention, and the ability to read historical documents.

Besides those “hard” reasons, there are “soft” ones, too. Handwriting is an opportunity for creativity. Calligraphy is a true art. And the little flowers and hearts that dot i’s and j’s have so much more personality than emojis chosen from the same list as everyone else uses.

If we applied a similar logic, the argument against teaching cursive could extend beyond the handwriting issue. Art, literature, music— for most students, none of those will lead to lucrative careers in medicine, technology, or the law. Why expose a second-grader to them at all?

“Let them learn how to use AI instead,” she said.

I am quite fond of AI. I frequently use it in its various forms. But I began using them after I had learned how to think critically, how to frame an argument, and how to write an essay (or a blog post).

If I were still involved in education and designing a curriculum, cursive would remain a primary-grade staple. AI can wait. Kids don’t need to meet ChatGPT until they know how to live and learn without it.

It’s not all about football.

I rarely spend time on online videos. But the other day, a Facebook reel titled Eight Minutes of Ridiculous caught my eye. I clicked and spent the next eight minutes enjoying perfection.

The video was a compilation of kick-off and punt returns by Football Hall of Famer Devin Hester, the return man who electrified Bears fans for almost a decade.

You don’t need to be a football fan to appreciate the flawlessness of those plays. Hester would field a kick, glance at the eleven angry men charging at him, and in an instant make his choice. Sometimes he’d hesitate, other times he’d surge forward, or when it seemed prudent, cut back or dart to the side.

He could slip past tacklers or simply outrun them, with bursts of speed that left defenders gasping. You could feel his joy, as well as that of the teammates who threw their bodies into blocks to clear his path. For the man who returned more kicks for touchdowns than anyone else in NFL history, his end-zone celebrations were strikingly modest.

The videos also capture the amazement in the voices of countless announcers. Even neutral broadcasters couldn’t help but sound awed. But it was Jeff Joniak, the Bears’ radio voice, who immortalized Hester with his call: “Devin Hester, you are ridiculous.” Ever since, in Chicago, “Hester” and “ridiculous” have been synonymous.

Perfection is rare: Nadia Comăneci’s perfect 10 in 1976. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The first iPhone design. Some say perfection is the enemy of good. But for eight minutes in my office, perfection in motion brought me joy at a time when joy can be hard to find.

Thank you, Devin Hester. You are, indeed, ridiculous.

I Missed Out On Jury Duty, But My Perry Mason Dream Lives On.

The benefits of aging are numerous: a Senior property tax exemption, healthcare from Medicare, and an income stream from Social Security. But I recently learned of a new “benefit”, and I find it bittersweet. I will soon lose the opportunity to be a juror.

I thought I had a chance. I had received a summons to be available for jury duty at the county courthouse next week. I kept my schedule clear, and Friday night was set to visit the county website to find out which days I should report to the courthouse. But the county beat me to it. I received a text telling me that my service would not be needed at all.

And that probably ends my prospects for being a juror. In less than four months, I will hit the magic age after which compliance with a summons to jury duty is no longer compulsory. My birthdate will become an automatic “Get Out of Jury Duty Free Card.” I doubt the county will bother to summon me again.

I am disappointed. Jurisprudence runs in the family. Barb has sat on a jury for a pair of trials. My mother served on the jury for the infamous Mirage Bar trial in the 1970s. But I’ve never taken a juror’s oath. On my only previous summons, I made the drive north to the county seat, but never saw the inside of a courtroom.

Why do I want to sit in the jury box? It’s a childhood dream. I want to be there when the music plays and Perry Mason, attorney for the defense, strides into the courtroom.

I grew up watching Mason humiliate prosecutor Hamilton Burger every Sunday night, week after week, year after year. I admired investigator Paul Drake and was smitten with legal secretary Della Street. I waited along with the rest of America until the turning point in each episode. I knew that under Mason’s intense questioning, a witness would break down and admit to the crime Mason’s client was accused of. Mason never lost, and justice always prevailed.

TV law shows today are too muddy and indecisive. The Lincoln Lawyer has some tricks up his sleeve, but compared to Mason, he’s barely passed the bar. Has he ever terrified a witness into confessing on the stand? Jurors at his trials must be nodding off to sleep out of boredom.

Which makes it just as well that my only jury duty will be in my imagination. I may never serve on a real jury, but I’ll keep my Perry Mason fantasy intact. And my Della Street one, too. That verdict is final!

If you want to send me a message without going through Substack, email me directly at lesrraffblogger@myyahoo.com

From the Microscope to Life’s Bigger Picture

Some pathologists are balkers. They dither and debate, unable to decide until every morsel of information has been individually processed, every unlikely diagnosis ruled out. When they hear hoof beats, they don’t just think of zebras; they think of zebras that have been extinct for 100,000 years. You cannot run a pathology department with a batch of balkers.

Michael Kaufman, MD, who passed away last month, was not a balker. If he had a motto, it was “Let’s get this done. Now.”

Mike was one of the attending physicians during my pathology residency at Evanston Hospital in Chicago’s northern suburbs. I was at Evanston for four years. He was there for almost 40.

There were many outstanding pathologists at the hospital during my training. But none were better than Mike in evaluating the big picture. The answer to a diagnosis on a biopsy wasn’t necessarily in the minute details of each slide, but rather, as he put it, in the gestalt. The moment the first field of a slide hit the microscope stage, he had an impression of the diagnosis and knew what he wanted to do to confirm it.

Mike was rarely wrong, and even less often inefficient. With caffeine as his fuel, he would glance at a stack of slide trays, calculate the number of slides they contained, and set a time limit for completing that afternoon’s work. When a rafter of residents was slow, Mike pushed them along like a golf ranger urging a slow foursome to pick up their pace.

He needed to be that efficient. Mike was the master of the side hustle before the term even existed. He always had some place else he needed to get to, or a case he had to study for his sideline medico-legal consulting services.

He was happy to spread the wealth, hooking the residents up with Medical Records gigs, and even ear-piercing at the local Carson, Pirie, Scott’s Department Store. We were also his off-site autopsy service, performing post-mortem exams at other North Shore hospitals. If not for Mike, I never would have driven around town with formalin-fixed body parts in the trunk of my car—something I never did mention to Barb.

I learned how to be a better pathologist, time manager, and entrepreneur from Mike. Those lessons guided my career. But my most vivid memory is of him walking through the lab with little Jamie on his shoulders—showing us all that joy belongs alongside work.

Mike was never a balker, in medicine or in life. May his memory be a blessing.

It’s Hard To Resist When Artificial Intelligence Offers to Write Your Blog Post

I came close to caving in. But I’m not ready to do it yet…

Today, an old marketing tagline popped into my head. It was from the 1960s, an era when I was watching plenty of Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear on TV, and Kellogg’s Cereal was the superstar advertiser of all those cartoon shows. Each ad for their sugar-sweetened apple-flavored crunchy cereal ended with “Apple Jacks will not be sold to bullies.”

I thought that line, nostalgia for the 60s, and commentary for the current day would make a nice amalgamation for a 500-word blog post. It should have been easy. But then I checked my files and saw that in the past year, I have written two posts about bullies, beginning with a holy terror from my high school days and concluding with the unholy Donald Trump. I didn’t see how I could drink from that well a third time.

But we are in 2025, not 1965, so I decided to see what AI would say. I clicked ChatGPT’s tab on my toolbar and gave the program the following instructions:

Create a blog post relevant to today, recalling the old tag line of Apple Jacks cereal that “Apple Jacks will not be sold to bullies.”

In less time than it took for me to type the prompt, the chatbot produced a well-executed, near publishable version of what it thought I wanted to say on the subject.

It wasn’t perfect; for one thing, it was loaded with em-dashes, the trademark of AI. And the first version was too preachy. But with a few rounds of suggestions and responses, I had a piece that met my standards to deliver to the Substack world.

I could have justified the post as the best of both worlds, a plug-in hybrid, combining my gas with the website’s electricity. But unlike Oscar Wilde, I can (sometimes) resist temptation.

So I’m not using the Frankensteinish creation. This is my post, all my own words, that you are reading. Every mistake, cliché, and bad simile is mine and mine alone.

Maybe someday I’ll discover something new I want to say about bullies. Until then, just keep eating your Apple Jacks. A bowl a day might keep Presidents and AI away.

On the art of small talk, bottle-cap lasagna, and why I’ll stick to haiku.

You’re Probably Doing Small Talk Wrong was the headline for a guest essay in the New York Times this week. Maya Rossignac-Milon and Erica Boothby dissect the art of small talk, particularly those first few minutes when you meet someone new, be it on the job, at a cocktail party, or on a pickleball court.

The authors, both behavioural scientists, argue that our meet-and-greets often fall flat when they consist of exchanging standard formalities, such as “How are you?” and “How was your weekend?” or (in Chicago) “Da Bears.” If we want to create bonds with the people we are meeting, Rossignac-Milon and Boothby maintain that riffing is the way to go.

I had heard of riffing in music, but never in terms of conversation. The article doesn’t define the process, but my browser’s AI describes it as “the spontaneous exchange of comments, in a playful manner, where participants build on each other’s thoughts.” That’s a mouthful, but the Times article gives the following example:

“How was your weekend?” “Good, but I spent way too much time watching people make tiny food on TikTok.” “Whoa, like … dollhouse-size?” “Yes! If you want to learn to make a lasagna in a bottle cap, let me know.”

I have never had a conversation even remotely approximating that one. I don’t think I am capable of it. For me, conversations rarely veer into bottle-cap lasagna territory. In fact, they usually stall out right around ‘Where are you from?’

Give me time to prepare, and I’m fine — my remarks to the Lake County Finance Board about mosquito control even earned a mention in the Tribune. I can write blog posts, plays, even haiku.

But riffing? Not so much. I’ve never been fond of miniature food, anyway.