Writing code out by hand

I started teaching myself programming and I fucking love it.. So I decided well I might aswell take a course at university so that I have a really strong foundation to build on myself. It's such bullshit. They keep taking points off my assignment and giving me comments like "recursion hasn't been covered in class yet". SO fucking what? Now they want me to write an exam and write my code out by hand? Is that even possible? Are there ever any 'real world' scenarios where you would ever need to do that?

>>1
While I do all my coding on the computer, I do the system planning and design on paper.

>>7
Hand written psuedo-code is still real code. While it may not correctly follow the rules of a grammar, the point of doing it will always be to plan out the logic before committing the logic electronically.