We copied maps for geography, thus learnig where things were.
Excellent piece. The bit about copying out other people’s work I have not heard mentioned before but it makes so much sense to me. people learning to draw copy other artists. Those who learn music play the compositions of others. So writing out other’s work is the same – you absorb the style, the language, the ideas. When I was little in the 1950’s this used to happen quite a lot in school- we wrote out poems and decorated them, thus learning them. We copied maps for geography, thus learnig where things were.