…are suggesting that cursive writing be dropped from the curriculum.
a) it’s the foundation of the ability to sketch and manipulate graphics and styli, a damned interesting choice in the computer age.
b) it enables us to sign our names distinctively.
c) printing is a timeconsuming bitch
e) and if you don’t learn these skills as a gradeschooler, you will not learn them as well as an adult. It’s about the sequence of development of motor skills.
They probably think that you can type your name on the little scanner. Or that cursive is too hard to learn. (We’re not talking copperplate here, AFAIK, or they’d have a valid complaint.)
I relearned handwriting after I got out of high school; I went for italics. I can’t say that it’s more legible, but I can have really nice cursive if the occasion warrants.
Not unexpected, but also not very wise. I read an article about young people in China and Japan in their 20s and younger who are having a hard time writing in their language because they spend so much time on computers and smart phones which use western input or a simplified version of their own which can be keyed in. They can read things easily enough, but they have lost the ability to write as their parents can and some struggle to hand write their own names even. There are just too many pen strokes to memorize. Now cursive is a lot easier than memorizing thousands of unique characters, but the same baby in bathwater situation applies.
Deny a whole generation that skill as kids and when they are adults they will find it a zillion times harder to pick up should they need to. And how hard it is it to teach anyway? I learned cursive before print since my mom was teaching my older sister and I sat in on the lessons. It doesn’t take that long to learn and then you know it for the rest of your life. I actually had to get used to printing when I started public school because that was what everyone else was doing.
It is funny you should mention this now because on Fringe last week they were in the alt’verse (technologically advanced parallel world) where they have gone paperless and a kid in his 20s didn’t know what a pen was when asked if he saw one at a crime scene.
I learned it in the first grade with Miss Irene Littlefield, sister of the gal that played Dale Arden on the TV version… And Miss Littlefield had a number of interesting notions. We were put up against Copperplate, and Williamsburg, to draw the closest analogy; and we practiced hard to make those loops uniform and precisely tilted. Then we got into Miss Garvin’s class, and she wouldn’t let us do our pretty cursive, because we weren’t supposed to know cursive yet. I still did, and she refused to grade my papers. So I took to writing a great deal at home, so as not not lose my skill. This probably had something to do with my early bent toward both art and writing. Miss Littlefield also had us view immensely complicated pictures, classical art, photos, etc, two seconds to look, and then we were scored on what we observed accurately. I wonder how many of my classmates went into the CIA. But it was a very, very useful skill. There should be many more Miss Littlefields, who, stating that fish had no necks—was merely amused, not threatened, when I asked what about seahorses… Suffice it to say, in all the not-so-good teachers I had later, the memory of Miss Littlefield sustained my opinion of what teachers ought to be.
I learned classical math and then started a new school that used some different method so the teacher would mark all of my problems wrong even though I got them correct because I wasn’t showing my work the way she wanted to me to. And there was no way for me to quickly learn how to show the work the way she wanted it because I missed out on all of that bit during the previous grades since I was a transfer. It went so far as my parents being called in and them suggesting I had a learning disability or was cheating! My parents refused to have me shuffled to the special class and I just suffered through that teacher all year. I liked math before that, but afterwards I hated it. I graduated with a 4.0 so obviously I wasn’t stupid, but I was shell shocked when it came to math and never really regained my confidence there. I stayed after school for math classes all through high school on my own accord just so I could get extra time there because I was convinced I was always on the verge of falling behind. My later teachers thought I was nuts for being nervous about math, but it was something I felt I needed to do. Math still makes me panic thanks to Mrs B_ .
There was another boy in that same class who had trouble showing work the way she wanted it. He had similar bad experience as me and struggled all through school since he was labeled a cheater and slacker in math and couldn’t shake it like I managed through extra work. After working in a pizza place post-school for a few years and getting nailed on a couple drug charges he decided to go to college and tested into a special physics program and was discovered to have a some crazy high IQ too. His mom works with mine and occasionally gripe about that math class that almost screwed up both of their kids. It doesn’t take much unfortunately. Just one bad or stupidly inflexible teacher and you can get completely derailed. One size fits all just doesn’t work for school. Some teachers get that but others obviously don’t.
Yep. Miss Garvin patrolled the class with a yardstick while we did our math exercises, and if you weren’t fast enough she’d whack the back of the chair hard. If she made the circuit again and you still weren’t performing, you got it across the back of the shoulders.
I spent the last 6 weeks of the second grade year in the principal’s office all day long—because I refused to apologize for calling that woman hateful to her face. I was to get one whipping a day til I apologized. My parents stood by me in all this, and said I could do what I thought was right. By the end of it all, the principal was talking to me as an adult and quietly advising me it was just respect for her age, and I should apologize and he really hated the situation, but we were stuck with the policy. I said very politely that it was nicer in his office than in her class, and I still wouldn’t apologize. Then in the last two weeks of the year I broke my arm in an accident, and Miss Garvin relented and passed me to third grade anyway—I think she’d come up against it, in the situation, too, and couldn’t back down. Neither could I. Years later she asked my parents if I was still mad at her. She was an odd duck, very elderly—she’d have been born in the 1800’s, I think, maybe the 1880’s, and if she’d ever talked, her experience might have far been more interesting than her teaching was. Today I’d like to have had a conversation with her, but that chance is forever gone.
Well, putting aside that students seem to know cursive all too well (“****!” “****!” “******’ ****!), and the appalling admin burden of General Motors style, industrial sized schools (notably Los Angeles’), I’ll rant on the 3Rs. They are–let me phrase this with malice aforethought: Necessary but not sufficient.
From which some of you will gather that the first additional R is Reasoning. Logic. Fallacies. Speech & Debate. Any citizen who is responsible (there’s another missing R! Japanese students clean their own classrooms daily–responsible for their own messes! How medieval!) should be able to rip a political yammermouth’s arguments apart without even thinking hard, but we have people parroting hate-mongers as if they came down with stone tablets. “I give you these fifteen laws–whoops! [crash] (damn Vicodin) …–these ten laws from your God….” (Monty Python?)
Another is Research. I got taught it, but with the 3Rs obsession, is it still taught? Of course, it’s very different in details now with the Internet, but the basics still apply. You need Reading, but you also need Reasoning to sort your Research into the credible and not.
Of course, a question is always how to teach more. I can only say that I found nothing compares to re-teaching something you just learned as a method to lock it into memory. Teaching–or just being a student aide–also promotes responsibility. Having just learned something, you at least know what you found difficult. And, every additional teacher gives a different perspective on the subject. So, I say, extend class hours by using the responsible, quicker-learning students to tutor those having problems, and if you can manage to extend hours to the extent you don’t have latchkey kids, all the better! (Shift some teachers earlier, some later, have staff meetings in the overlap time.)
That “15 commandments…” bit is from History of the World, part I,” or at least there is a bit very much like that in the movie. Not Mel Brooks’ best, but funny still.
Thank you! I obviously thought that one line was funny.
When writing to be read by other people, I print more often than I write cursively, because my cursive had a run-in with shorthand during my teen years that it never quite recovered from. (Even I have trouble decoding some of the things I scribble down.)
That said, I *like* writing. I don’t do it very often, but I enjoy it enough that the experience has made its way into one of my stories. I’m thinking now that I should finish that piece, before the skill deteriorates to the point where readers won’t know what I’m talking about…
My cursive these days is an odd thing. It wavers between legible, running away with itself, and showing a few idiosyncracies, both from calligraphy and from my own tendencies. I often use print instead.
As far as styles of writing go, there is always the struggle between legibility of each letter and speed.
Really, I can’t see pens disappearing in the computer age. If anything, a stylus (pen) is likely to become one of the standards along with the keyboard. But people still need to learn how to write by hand. Sticky notes? To do lists and grocery lists? That quick note to your friend or roommate or partner or co-worker?
I’ve heard some school systems teach what looks like an Italic style, rather than cursive. — But I learned block printing and then cursive in elementary, and I see the need of both. I learned calligraphy because I liked the alphabet and language history and the artistic shapes. So I’m biased. …But I have a hard time seeing how *not* learning cursive (or learning it later or not ever) makes sense. It honestly is not that much of a leap; it’s why bookhand developed into italics into chancery cursive in the first place.
Now, for Chinese or Japanese, I can understand why their students have difficulty. I’d imagine, given enough time, they’ll develop a simpler or alternate system. After all, Japanese has its syllabary, in two versions. But Chinese could use a syllabary or alphabet. Computer input and the need for a simple, clear, fast system may eventually lead them to change…slowly or all in one jump, purportedly how the Koreans did it by decree, centuries ago.
I suppose we should be glad the students are still being taught to write with block printing. Cash registers at some fast food chains use *pictures* of the food items. Not words and not pictograms. Pictures. I suppose it’s faster, but at some point, a picture is hard to distinguish among options.
I am very glad I went to school when I did. As a kid, I asked questions and liked to learn, but some subjects, I didn’t “get it” (or get *why*) nearly as easily; and I did not always ask questions if needed. (Admittedly, the teacher’s style and personality influenced that.) If I were a kid today in school, I think I’d be greatly frustrated and have a lot of unanswered questions or study on my own.
My mind is boggled by the idea of not bothering to teach cursive. It’s a skill that will be expected of graduates; so expected that they will assume it’s known if a student graduated; they won’t even think to test for it.
Someone there (several someones) really are not using their heads. Possibly. they need to be sent back for remedial education. Heh. (I’d laugh more, if it weren’t so likely it’s needed.)
Oy, what a planet. Better mark this one with a buoy, “Primitive Culture. Revisit in 100 years for re-evaluation of viability.”
Now, for Chinese or Japanese, I can understand why their students have difficulty.
I’m just starting to learn Japanese, so take this with a bowl of salt, but for me, the stroke order is vital. I cannot remember pictures – but I can remember patterns. (I’m a kinesthetic learner. Movement is what I do.)
Thankfully, I have found apps (I *love* my iPhone) that will draw those characters out for me, which makes the process… still very slow and cumbersome, but easier. Knowing how a character is drawn makes it easier to recognise it or its compounds – and *that* will be fatal to lose.
I just learnt yesterday that new Macs now have trackpad input for Chinese (sadly, not yet for Japanese): draw the character with your finger, and your computer will do the rest. That sounds, to me, faster than typing the syllables and navigating through the sometimes *very* confusing array of options, so I wonder whether handwriting kanji is as dead as it has been predicted to be….
There is so very much culture and history and psychology bound up in the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, unlike ours, which is much more a Swiss Army Knife of alphabets—I think there will be major loss to those cultures if the kanji become, say, voice-typed.
I realised some years ago that in the last 20 years or so I’ve used cursive handwriting only for filling in cheques (which will, in theory, be extinct by 2017), and birthday and Christmas cards for less than a dozen friends and relatives.
The fact that I was an early adopter of computers (born 1956, started coding c.1979), and have spent much of my life working as a programmer is probably relevant. Ironically, when my then employers absconded six years ago and I had to complete hand-written aptitude tests at various job interviews, my inability to write legible cursive fast was a real problem. I’d never even been taught (and therefore hadn’t practiced) how to write an ampersand, which makes for difficulties when trying to scribble sample code in C/C++.
The serious point behind this anecdote is that unused skills deteriorate, and if my experience is any guide, a growing proportion of the population will never do enough manual writing to stay in practice. I certainly agree that the skill should still be taught, for the reasons given by CJ. I just doubt that the skill will be retained, which makes it an easy target for the numerous disciples of Gradgrind.
As the secretary for a rather large shooting club – 600 members – when I take the meeting minutes, it’s always in cursive. I have no choice, since as CJ pointed out, block letters take too much time. As it is, I’m stretched to get everything I need to put down. I’ve been lambasted because I don’t put down everything that’s said. Well, if you speak at say, 100 words per minute, and I can only write at 20 words per minute, then you have me at a disadvantage. My script is horribly mangled, I’ve never had pretty handwriting, so it’s always a challenge to read my own handwriting after a couple of days.
Are these the same geniuses who decided that we should also teach Ebonics alongside English?
I have very mixed thoughts about not teaching cursive. I learned it in the third grade, but my handwriting has never been very good. I learned cursive well enough to get through school, but somewhere in the intervening years I also learned to type and now my handwriting is basically block printing. Illegible block printing. Illegible even to myself a lot of the time.
It’s a skill I never developed, and never use. I can type too fast.
But I see people with nice-looking handwriting, and I’m a little jealous. I think it’s a good skill for kids to learn, but where do you use it these days? Kind of a shame.
Well,
1) Cursive didn’t help me when learning to write machine readable graffiti. And I sketch decently well.
2) My signature is distinctive without cursive (illegible with)
3) I print faster than I ever wrote cursive
And I have two dyslexic boys. Teaching them the fine motor skills involved in writing was hard work. Getting their letters oriented correctly was very tough. By the time we got over those humps, they were writing, and it didn’t make sense to try and teach cursive. As HS/College students, they barely write at all. They do everything on their laptops.
They tell me that the only thing the don’t like about not learning cursive is that it’s hard to read other people’s cursive. They use this skill less than once a month.
Me? Like Parsifal, I rarely put pen to paper these days. Writing by hand is so much slower than typing that it feels like an imposition. Worse, it’s often illegible, printed or not.
Personally, I’d like typing to be a mandatory class in school.
Up until 4th grade we had a writing teacher come in once a month. I think she was there to check our work, because we also had writing once a week. Teachers also had left handed students turn their paper in the opposite direction! No leftie contortionists! I can still do a very proper cursive if I need to. I think I also had a leg up when I had to do some required calligraphy. At least I could slant the letters evenly.
I keep a journal of thoughts, drawing and notes so I write every day. I love the sensation of pen and/or pencil on paper. Sometimes when I am drawing it feels like alchemy. 8)
Two thoughts re the other r’s, reason and responsibility—
1. kids are bombarded day to dark with commercials that say, subconsciously, this big hulking boxer equals this razor. This sunny day in the grass equals using this margerine. Eating this cereal equals size 3 slimness. It’s a wonder if their brains don’t also equal cottage cheese. Kids are also bombarded with images of smartasses getting away with their deeds—kids trashing the house, splashing through puddles, while mama smiles in Xanax-induced happiness and pops their filthy clothes (for them) into the laundry from which they emerge ironed and flawless. Good lovin’ rationality, Batman!
2. Responsibility: when I taught high school, our janitors were NOT what I’d call up to snuff: mostly they hung out in the boiler room chatting away all day. So I found the supplies closet across the hall unlocked and mustered my students to actually get the classroom clean, the windows washed, every desk scrubbed and sparkling, the floor smelling of oil-mop and shining. “There,” I said to this array of happy faces–“You deserve to learn in an environment that’s clean.” And through the open door sailed a nearly-full cup of iced drink from some low-life class-cutting hall-crawler. It landed on that polished floor. I drew half a breath in indignation, but my students were faster and instinctive. They boiled out of their seats and headed out and down the hall bent on killing the offender. I was out the front door in time to head off the last, but the rest made the impression that my classes were Weird and it wasn’t a good joke. They came back to the classroom bristling and triumphant as Attila’s returning army, nobody from admin ever stirred to know why thirty people were chasing a guy down the upper halls, and meanwhile we cleaned up the mess and settled to wait for the bell.
@Parsifal: I was an even earlier adopter of computers – started coding in 1963. In school I had a great deal of trouble passing penmanship because my natural style is to have the letters slant back to the left and not to the right as in copperplate. I practised and practised but it never got me very good marks. Now, my cursive is worse than ever. I subscribe to a number of genealogy mailing lists and every once in a while someone mentions that the younger researchers at a library or archives are having immense trouble reading cursive from as late as the 1940’s and 1950’s. They’ve never been taught and the style changed.
I guess I am going to go as the dissenting vote here. I learned cursive as a kid, and work in a position where my job is writing, and yet, I recall thinking recently that the only time I ever use cursive anymore is to sign my name and for the money amount on checks (which are few and far between now with on-line banking). I got through a Master’s degree in engineering using nothing but printing, and everyone I work with uses printing for their notes. And some have very pretty printing, too… there are a couple of people in my department that would make good draftsmen. I believe it was in college that I switched back to printing full-time, since it is _faster_ than cursive and more legible for me. I do every so often just write down the alphabet in cursive, and have to admit that I do not remember how to do some of the more obscure letters, like capital Q, and have to think about which way the loops go on p and q, which I can make perfectly recognizable by simply using block letters when I need to.
I don’t buy the argument that you need cursive for signatures, since most of the signatures I see (and being in the job I am, I see lots of them that I have to try to decipher) are artistic scrawls that can’t be parsed for letters. I had one coworker who’s 12-letter, two-word signature consisted of essentially a downstroke, a long sweeping horizontal line, and a dot. I can still recognize that signature to this day without having seen it in years, but there is no way that you could figure out the name from it. Those people, like me, who actually want their names to be readable can achieve that in block print as easily as I can in cursive.
As to it being “a skill that is expected of graduates”…. I don’t see that. I have never once asked or cared whether someone I was interviewing knew cursive or not. All the official documents that I work with are computer-generated, and, as I said above, any short notes are printed. Or put into an e-mail, or texted (where my complaint is the use of Leet-speak versus normal spelling!). Quite honestly, I think that the important thing is that the kids are able to communicate, and to me cursive is up there with learning to write Copperplate with a fountain pen or goose quill pen for the relevance that it has to communication. If they can print legibly, then I don’t see the need to force them to learn a system that most of them will probably only use a few times in their lives. What I look for is whether they can write something that accurately conveys the message that we want to put out there to the world, and, to be honest, what computer programs they know, since that can take some time to come up to speed on.
And for the worse of both worlds… I had a college roomie who was either Vietnamese or Thai (I have to admit I can’t remember which now), where they learn cursive letters for printing. Think of all those pretty cursive forms, written down individually in each word. So you lose the entire point of cursive, which is the speed you get in running the letters together.
Engineers and accountants are professionally biased towards block print (which my Mechanical Engineer father-in-law insists is “lettering” because only printers and printing presses “print” regardless of font). In fact, one of the beginning engineer’s tools is a lettering stencil that they can use until they’ve trained themselves to write acceptable freehanded print. They have been trained to do that because their workpapers have to be absoluteley legible to protect both the public from potential harm and themselves from litigation. Since I’m a somewhat ambidextrous lefty, it took me quite a while to develop an adequate cursive hand, but I still think that cursive is useful, especially when speed is required. In fact, my handwritten notes tend to include both cursive and a flowing printed font that contains elements of cursive and italic. I also think that the choice between writing longhand versus typing can alter the end product. I’m no fan of the movement to completely throw away manual processes for “infallible” electronic aids. There are many people with technical degrees who are so reliant on their calculators that they will swallow absurd results hook, line and sinker simply because their calculator is “infallible” and in many disciplines an order or two of magnitude can be the difference between life and death. Just this last week, a baby died at Children’s Hospital because a dose of medicine was miscalculated by a factor of ten. Those of us who learned to do all of our arithmetic by hand are more intimate with the numbers and calculations and will have an idea of the magnitude of the answer before it is calculated, and by the way, far faster at simple calculations. Using electronic aids exclusively tends to turn the parameters of problems into disembodied symbols to fit willy nilly into boxes on the screen without any feeling of how they relate and what they actually represent quantitatively and qualitatively in the real world.
My father had been an engineer, and he was trained in drafting style block printing, notably the closed, one-line four: up, down-left, right. I learned the sliderule, where you always have to do the manual calculation in parallel to ensure you don’t have an order-of-magnitude mistake.
I was also trained by some really paranoid computer experts to double check everything. One time I was testing some software, doing a performance study. Naturally, I used the computer under test to do the timing, but I also used my chronograph watch. One product under test was making the computer miss timing pulses! (Essentially, missing a pendulum swing.) I talked to the company about it, who immediately threatened to sue if I ever said this was happening. That confirmed my observation and wrote them out of the competition.
Of course, doing everything by computer has made my cursive cursed. I haven’t written anything but my signature for decades. On a whim, I went to an office store to get an old-style fountain pen to practice–much more fun doing calligraphy–but they didn’t have any.
@Walt: These folk have a wondeful catalogue for writing implements. http://www.levenger.com/PAGETEMPLATES/NAVIGATION/Products.asp?Params=category=8|level=2|pageid=151
I love to look but have never bought.
Interesting timing for me.
Last weekend I went to the 50 year reunion of my grade school class. I went to a private school-Town School in San Francisco-and many of us are still in The City and in contact. Out of a class of 40, 30 guys showed up.
And one of the things we talked about was Mrs. Foden and how she taught cursive writing.
Amazing what you can dredge up after 55 years or so with the right prompting.
And adding to a previous discussion, we had grammar pounded into us as well as Latin. And a lot of writing. To this day I think and speak in complete sentences.
Phil Brown
But sadly my eyesight sometimes betrays me. Sorry for the typos.
Phil Brown
CJ: fixed that for you!
I’m in two minds about this. I’m another one that only really uses formal cursive for birthday cards and cheques/checks these days. (And I’ve written about six checks and one cheque this year.) From ages 11 to 18 I was forced to write all my homework with a fountain pen, which was an exercise in frustration, chipped nibs and ink-steeped fingers. Once I got to university and could use ball-points and other disposable writing implements, my laborious cursive degenerated to something much sloppier — but still legible — with only about half the letters joined. I can see the advantage of standardized style and the practice of fine motor skills for school purposes, however. (Some of us will never get really good at the fine motor skills part, though.)
Re people having trouble with handwriting—it’s very often the guys, who don’t develop fine motor skills in the same year as gals do, and who are very frequently frustrated, which is a problem with the year-by-year school system we do. Take poor Eddie Cordell, who had the world’s worst—poor lad just couldn’t hold a pen correctly, and took a death grip on it, which made it even worse, and he even zig-zagged, he was so tense—Give him about a year, maybe second grade or third, and the right instructor, and he’d have had a far easier time. The main thing is to train the muscles to make the sequential movements and the eye to discern an alignment coordinated with the hand that’s producing it, all useful skills in crafts and art, and in some fields that require fine adjustments. Poor Eddie just formed a terrible self-concept, I fear. Now his old classmate (me) could have helped him, but he just slogged on—this was under the dreaded Miss Garvin, whose cure for a mistake was whacking the student. So yes, there, are some sad tales. And adulthood isn’t totally too old to learn—just harder. I learned Greek as a college freshman, and there’s a difference between the fraternity letter caps and the manuscript Greek that’s faster to write—as an example, most people know the upside down horse-shoe that’s omega (big o). But its lowercase equivalent is a soft-bottomed w, ie curves instead of points. I got so proficient in it, it began to affect my handwriting, and to this day I do a Greek d—the top flowing left instead of right. [The big d (delta) is a triangle.]
Then to confuse everything else, I learned Russian, which is based on the Greek alphabet (Cyrillic)—and got a little kinkier in my handwriting. Not to mention I also learned Mediaeval script, which is a close relative of the beautiful Uncial hand. If you want to do Tolkienian script, take a look at Uncial on wiki.
Anyway, my handwriting is like archaeology: various letters are from various foreign alphabets, especially ones that are easier to write.
I adopted the downstroke at the end of the Russian sh for my ws, and I think it’s halfway there in my signature to this day. I don’t think my Greek got into my English writing, though.
Luckily, even with the (sub)Standards of Learning in my state, the kids still work on cursive during the couple of months at the end of the year between the SOL tests and the end of the school year.
We have enough older educators on the school board that I doubt cursive will be completely eradicated anytime in the next ten years.
For all of the tales about nuns being hard on students in Catholic schools, my first grade teacher was extremely easy going. When we were studying the letters and printing them, we weren’t told we had to use the right hand only, or suffer the pain of a steel ruler across the knuckles. When I was in third grade and the teacher taught us cursive, it was the same way all the time. I can write block letters, I do it for the crossword puzzles I’m addicted to, but as I stated above, when I’m taking notes, I have to do it in cursive.
When I was ready to graduate from Old Dominion University in 2002 (Norfolk, VA), we had to pass a writing exam. This exam consisted of several pages in cursive, although that was never specified, and was based on an answer to a single question of your choice. You weren’t graded on your penmanship, you were graded on your ability to give a coherent answer, present logical points, and finish with the reader understanding your response. Mine was a mess, since I’m left handed and ink got all over my little finger, but at least it wasn’t a fountain pen! I would not have been able to use a laptop to do that test, and putting it in block would have taken me well over the allotted time limit. I wish that I could write cursive as nicely as the girls in my elementary and high school classes did. Oh well, water under the bridge.
Joe, I’ve gotten good results personnaly by tilting my paper 10-15 degrees to the left, holding my forearm with index finger in line at about 45 degrees, resting my hand on the ring finger, and using a fine point pen with fast drying ink, preferably a roller ball pen (Uniball, Pentel).