“Washington state lawmakers are considering a bill that would make cursive writing instruction mandatory.” …
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article57603903.html
I think they should learn it. D16 learned in 2nd grade in NY. S19 was not taught in school (Ohio). The second grade teachers didn’t think they had the manual dexterity to learn it, the third grade teachers where more concerned about testing. So I bought a primer in Walmart and he learned that way.
I agree. Our son just barely learned cursive (can sign his name and that’s about it) and I think that was a huge educational mistake. OTOH, he was not compliant about my trying to teach him at home, and he doesn’t seem to feel it is a problem. But I think cursive is a crucial skill, and I would gladly substitute cursive instruction for some of the “teaching to the standardized tests” that replaced it.
Anyone remember the Palmer method?
Yes. Few people have the patience to print each individual letter when they hand write - and no, handwriting will never go away. If kids only learn to print, what will happen is that each will develop his/her own cursive to make handwriting quicker and easier. That, after all, is what cursive is. It’s hard enough to read people’s cursive now. If we leave it up to each person, it would become a nightmare.
They should learn to READ it. Writing it is unimportant.
I’m mixed on this. It’s a good skill to have but when I think back we spent WAY too much time and effort making it perfect. and if you were left-handed you were sunk. But I think a lot of school hours are wasted in other non-essentials so to throw a bit of cursive in there would be good. I learned in second grade but it used to be taught in third grade.
And manual dexterity is important–they keep trying to push writing earlier and earlier and kids just can’t hold a pencil well. I shudder when I see some kids writing now–they have no idea how to even hold a pencil to write.
I agree with learning to read it. Letters from grandparents, and original source documents are examples where it is needed.
I think it is even more important to learn to write it than to read it (though that would of course, go along with writing it). Studies are beginning to show those small motor skills associated with the acquisition of cursive have cognitive benefits:
.https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/why-writing-hand-could-make-you-smarter
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/science/whats-lost-as-handwriting-fades.html
Cursive was a nightmare for me. I could never form those letters the right way and I never was on the honor roll because I always had a C in handwriting. I could write fluently but not prettily. Now my son is full-on dysgraphic and I can see where he got it. I’m glad they never even tried to teach him cursive.
I think it is important to learn it, and it helps build fine motor skills. Some kids will gravitate towards it, while others will always prefer to print. However, after learning it I feel that they should be able to choose however they want to write, as long as it readable. High school teachers insisting on papers written in cursive is fruitless, in my opinion.
Handwriting was the only class I ever got below an “A” in during my K-8 education. I got a C, every freaking semester (I think once was a B- out of pitty). I was taught by stereotypical Catholic nuns and they would’ve hit us with a ruler to correct our handwriting had they been allowed.
Now with that said, I think cursive is a valuable skill that should still be taught. I think it’s stupid to spend as much time “perfecting” it as I had to in elementary school but I use a modified cursive for notes all the time. This is helpful as more and more profs are banning electronics. Further, it’s so helpful in my work as a historian because I can actually read the notes. Many of my undergrads never really learned cursive so they can’t read a lot of what’s been written on the documents that they’re supposed to be collecting data from.
Is this still a thing? I graduated high school in 09 and even by then all papers were expected to be typed- nothing handwritten.
My main regret for my daughter is that her signature looks like a fourth grader’s handwriting. It frustrates/embarrasses her too–I guess if she cares enough, she’ll practice to perfect it.
Don’t most people’s signatures look like a 4th grader’s? Mine just looks like my first and last initials and then loops.
My son’s signature not only looks like a 4th grader’s, it looks like a forged 4th grader’s. It takes him so long to remember how to shape the letters as he is writing it that you can see the pen marks are slow and deliberate. I think he should eventually just sign first and last initials with blurred line afterwards, as I’ve taken to doing on those electronic signature scanners for credit cards. They turn everything into incoherent mush anyway.
Aside from being able to read older archival materials and letters from Grandma, cursive is a useful skill like learning to touch type. It goes faster than printing (who cares if it’s stylistically “perfect”?), and research is starting to show that one remembers more of a lecture when taking handwritten notes than typing them on a keyboard into a laptop or tablet. And it works independent of battery status. Not to mention the thousands saved on occupational therapy to improve “fine motor skills” by the very exercise of learning cursive, even if it’s never used again beyond school.
I remember when my son was in third or fourth grade and he wrote a paper and got both a content grade and a handwriting grade. He got an A for content and a D for handwriting. Although when the teacher wrote the D in cursive on his paper the top sloped and there was a large gap between the stem and loop on the top. I came close to being very obnoxious and circling her handwriting and sending it back to school.
The fact is as adults very few of us write everything in cursive, we all develop our own hybrid style that works for us and we are able to write quickly (so to argue the point above that everyone would develop their own shorthand, we already do that). And in this day and age, with email, texting, and social media, the younger generation is printing/writing less and less and typing more and more.
I also think it’s a silly notion to say that if you don’t learn cursive in school that you won’t be able to read it. Many characters resemble their printed counterparts and the others can be determined from context. I know how I was taught to write Fs, Js, Ts, and Zs in cursive, but I’m convinced that others were taught differently because occasionally I’ll be reading something and won’t recognize a specific letter, but I can always figure out what it is.
Cursive takes a significant amount of time to teach and the time would be much better spent on developing problem solving skills which are lacking in most school systems.
I went through full blown cursive training in school, and honestly my cursive is barely legible now. I spend so much time on the computer and so little time writing cursive that I have to be very slow and deliberate now to make it readable. I don’t really buy the “fine motor skills” argument. All you are training someone to do is… write in cursive, which no one really needs to do any more. Fine motor skills are learned in many other ways, there is no point in training students in a skill that isn’t needed any more. A printed signature is as acceptable as a cursive one (people can just make a mark and call it their signature if they want to). I will say that my kids aren’t good at reading cursive. Even my mom’s third-grade teacher cursive was a mystery to them. So I think it actually is a learned skill to read it, but it can be covered MUCH more quickly than learning to write it.
It seems like most schools dropped cursive because of standardized test pressure. A couple of years ago I left my daughter a note asking her to walk the dog and she couldn’t read it. My handwriting is bad but not that bad! She cannot read cursive at all and that’s a shame.
Well, it isn’t just standardized testing. Most schools teach keyboarding at the elementary school level now, which is honestly far more essential for our kids than writing cursive. Learning to touch type takes time, and that time has to come from somewhere. It seems perfectly logical to me that writing cursive would be dropped in exchange for that.