Should students learn cursive writing? Some states say yes.

<p>“… When the new Common Core educational standards were crafted, penmanship classes were dropped. But at least seven of the 45 states that adopted the standards are fighting to restore the cursive instruction.” …</p>

<p>[Should</a> students learn cursive writing? Some states say yes | National & World News | Seattle News, Weather, Sports, Breaking News | KOMO News](<a href=“http://www.komonews.com/news/national/Should-students-learn-cursive-writing-Some-states-say-yes-231934711.html]Should”>http://www.komonews.com/news/national/Should-students-learn-cursive-writing-Some-states-say-yes-231934711.html)</p>

<p>I haven’t researched the issue very thoroughly, other than glancing at a few headlines/first couple of paragraphs of some of the news articles making the rounds. But one question I do have is, if cursive isn’t taught, how will people learn to sign their names? Will printing it suffice? And who will teach them how to read cursive, because in their lives, they’re bound to come across something significant that’s written in cursive that they need to be able to read.</p>

<p>I generally write in cursive, but I’ve found a lot of my foreign students don’t actually know how to read it, so now I’ve been reverting back to printing for most of my comments. :(</p>

<p>Yes, they should. Of course, they should.
I can’t believe this is even a question. First, it’s fairly simple and with a couple of exceptions just a loopy version of 26 letters. Really?</p>

<p>“I don’t read cursive,” is not an okay thing to say when you are handed a piece of correspondence.</p>

<p>I don’t remember the last time I actually had to write in cursive outside of my illegible signature that only makes sense to me. I was taught how to write cursive in middle school, but nothing beyond that and between never using it and rarely having to actually write anything on paper outside of math class for notes, my skills in cursive are pretty much non existent. </p>

<p>That’s alright, I get by just fine without it and I have never encountered a situation where I would actually have to use it beyond my signature.</p>

<p>No, the world is changing and becoming more digital. We may do away with the pen and paper for good in academia really soon. So, let’s move on with this like we moved away from the abacus.</p>

<p>I take notes in cursive. I can’t imagine printing. Do most people no longer take notes? Actually, people have asked me if I’m writing in shorthand. No, That I do not do. It’s just messy. But I do write with a pen from time to time. And I have been handed letters and such in cursive. Now, I don’t think it’s all that mysterious. It just looks like loopy printing to me. Easily decipherable.</p>

<p>My youngest child, 15, was hardly taught cursive at all. She panics when she has to sign her name! My older two kids’ attempts at cursive are pretty pathetic, also!</p>

<p>Flossy, most kids take notes on their laptops now. Not saying that’s a good thing, but just what I’m observing.</p>

<p>In elementary school? Not here, not yet. Either way, it’s very easy and I don’t think pens are going to become obsolete.
Last night, my 19 year old had to sign something and asked if she should do it in cursive. Yes. Go ahead. You can do it. Sheesh!</p>

<p>I don’t think it’s necessary. We spent time every week learning/practicing cursive in my elementary school, and besides signing my name (which is really easy to learn; most of the kids in my school already knew how, since they practiced ‘their autograph’ from a young age), I’ve never used cursive again. </p>

<p>As to the argument that people who don’t learn cursive as a child won’t be able to read older documents: the level of cursive-ability needed to read a document isn’t that difficult, especially for older people (who are already experienced in reading and writing, unlike children) to attain. Schools can teach kids how to read cursive, which should take less time than teaching as if they expect the kids to write cursive extensively in the future; if they don’t, that’s fine. The students will pick it up when/if they have to. </p>

<p>The ability to write strongly in cursive is just not necessary anymore. IMO, it isn’t something elementary schools should be dedicating hours of their time to. Cursive is only getting less and less useful. The students would be better served learning computer skills or something.</p>

<p>@Flossy-- I take notes in print or type. I type all of my essays; the teacher requires it. I don’t know any student who takes notes/writes in cursive.</p>

<p>Most of my notes are on my laptop, I type much MUCH faster than I can write.</p>

<p>Not really a comment, but a funny (and somewhat sad) story about cursive:</p>

<p>We were taught cursive in third grade and only in third grade. We all forgot about over that summer. Last year, it came to bite us in the butt when we had to sign the PSAT honor statement in cursive. It delayed all of the testing rooms (not just mine) by at least 10 minutes while students panicked and tried to forge cursive letters. The teachers eventually told us to just write slanted and loopy!</p>

<p>Exactly, my point. Slanted and loopy is all it is and they think it’s another language.
That’s just silly. IMHO.</p>

<p>Cursive writing is an artifact of the past and is being superseded by the needs and practices of the current day which includes the ubiquitous technology in our lives now. There’s really no practical purpose in using or teaching cursive anymore. It’s just a reality that should be faced despite nostalgia.</p>

<p>Students would be much better served by using that educational time in learning how to type properly and faster, how to use common word processing applications, and other means of ‘written’ conveyance.</p>

<p>Well, they learn that stuff on their own. Any 10 year old can out-text us all. But fine, I give up.</p>

<p>Yes, I think they should still learn it.<br>
I teach an English class and sometimes I have students exchange papers and read them to the class. A student was struggling on every other word of another student’s paper, so I stood next to her to help decipher what I assumed was terribly illegible handwriting. It actually wasn’t bad handwriting at all. It was just CURSIVE. I was disappointed to see that many students can’t write or read cursive. They still need to be able to READ it, at least–but they act like it is a foreign language. (I learned shorthand in school–now THAT is foreign.)</p>

<p>My daughter was taught cursive in third grade and then they did not have to use it again in subsequent years. I was told that cursive is a skill which according to the district was taught and mastered in third grade and therefore not included in subsequent year’s teaching. So, they learned it, quickly forgot it, and never used it again. My argument then was if you teach it then you should require the kids to keep using it so they don’t forget the skill (what good is a skill if it is thrown away right after it is taught).</p>

<p>If you think they should not learn cursive because writing is antiquated and the new technology is to use a keyboard or even just touch a screen - then let’s just throw out the pen and not teach them to write at all!</p>

<p>I have the world’s worst handwriting and my very wise fourth grade teacher (back 40 years ago) told my parents don’t worry she will learn to type quickly (which I did). However, I still need to write to do many tasks in my everyday life.</p>

<p>My main takeaway from this thread is that many students need improvement at rolling with the unfamiliar and working with new things they are faced with. Such as, in this case, reading or writing cursive.</p>

<p>Teaching cursive might help the particular case, but won’t solve the underlying problem.</p>

<p>Mr. Lucas, my sixth grade teacher at Public School # 131 AND Three-Quarters in New York City (I’ve changed the number to protect, well, I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to protect, but it seemed like a good idea) had a plan. We were all going to leave his 6th grade class with absolutely perfect handwriting, and he was going to make sure that it happened his way. You see, he understood that our current state of imperfection wasn’t our fault. It was a result of poor teaching and a lack of attention to detail in the earlier grades, and he, being in charge of us before we made the great leap forward to junior high school, was there to ensure the incoming students from P.S. 131 3/4 were not going to be found wanting. Or least not if he had any say in the matter.</p>

<p>Mr. Lucas was a former military man who fought in North Africa in WWII. One of his preferred activities was to regale us with stories of imbibing diverse varieties of African bug juice, thus making all the girls, including Stacy Schwartz who was already too hot from her new training bra (did they really need to be trained?), extremely uncomfortable. (Would “bug juice talk” now be considered a form of sexual harassment?) So his plan was simple: handwriting was to take place 45 minutes every day. During this time, beginning with capital “A”, we were each to write ten lines of ten perfect letters (100, all the same), in Roman military formation, and once we had accomplished this and had them checked by him, we would be promoted on to the next letter.</p>

<p>Now my last name begins with “A”, which had condemned me to the front-row righthand-side desk near the door for the past seven years, and made it difficult (but not impossible) for me to stare out at my favorite tree in the schoolyard. Occupational hazard, that last name beginning with A, and I was lucky not to have developed a permanent crick in my neck from perennially being forced to look left, or to have been permanently disfigured as a result like a galley slave chained in perpetuity to a single oar on the left side of the ship.</p>

<p>So, anyway, I did my ten lines of ten capital “A’s, all with my Waterman cartridge pen as neatly as I could (quite a trick, as most of the ink used to leak out all over my shirt pocket), and brought my paper up to Mr. Lucas’ desk, behind Johnny LoSassini, the class artist, who was onto the capital “J”s before I could manage his name once without a lisp. Mr. Lucas, pen in hand, began to put big red “X”s (capitals or smalls, I couldn’t tell) over a third of my “A”s, mumbling “Potato-head” or “Looks like a squished pear” or “Needs to go on a diet”, and sent me back to my desk to create another century.</p>

<p>Days, and then weeks went by. At first, I used to approach Mr. Lucas’ desk with some concern, hoping that my “A”s would finally pass muster so I could go on to “B”s. But no such luck. There were always potato-heads or beer-bellies or squished pears and lots of red “X”s on my paper. After about three weeks, with everyone else in my class moving ahead except me and my friend “A”rthur (wouldn’t you know it? and Stacy, still in training, was already on “P”!), I began to become embarrassed, and then ashamed. After six weeks, the shame turned to barely concealed anger, and then, maybe three months into this exercise, I discovered that I didn’t care anymore, and that it was really all right. After all, no matter where you were in the alphabet, you still had to spend your 45 minutes in handwriting.</p>

<p>In four-and-a-half months, and including more centuries assigned in daily homework, I drew a total of 27,923 capital “A”s. The reason I know the count to this day is that my friend Arthur and I started to keep tabs, and wore the number of our red-stained “A’s as badges of honor (I can’t claim to have read The Scarlet Letter yet, but when I finally did, I imagined a black, cursive capital “A” with big red “X” on it. We were, however, deeply immersed in The Red Badge of Courage, which may have been more on point.)</p>

<p>I never would have escaped capital “A”, except that in January, Mr. Lucas, normally a man of iron – a veritable Cal Ripken of the schoolteaching world – who ruled the schoolyard during recess like the army lieutenant he was, and without a winter coat, got sick for two days, and a substitute came in who didn’t quite know the rules. She, rather shapely as I remember, would walk around the room in a haze of cheap toilet water (I told this to my older daughter, and she burst out laughing, and the term still makes me inwardly smile), and as she passed your desk, if you’d hastily scribbled barely a line or two she would check your paper and you were on to the next letter. In two days, I went from capital “A” to lowercase “m”.</p>

<p>I honestly don’t remember if I ever finished the alphabet, but I do know that from that year forth, my handwriting has deteriorated into the inscrutable, and most of the letters between capital “A” and small “m” are a veritable wasteland. Oh, and what of Arthur, my partner in this tale of scrawl? He became a famous Park Avenue cardiologist, and I think he now uses a self-inking rubber stamp for his signature.</p>

<hr>

<p>“Cases of dysgraphia in adults generally occur after some trauma,” reports the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health. Hmm.</p>

<p>My D was lucky enough to experience cursive the way it should be taught, I believe. Due to a long distance move she missed out on cursive in elementary school. (We moved before cursive was covered in the first school system, but after it had been covered in the second). In 7th grade she was assigned a teacher I’ll call Ms Calligraphy for Language Arts class. Ms C. announced to the class that she was a calligraphy enthusiast, she was going to teach proper cursive handwriting, and that all homework all year would have to be hand written, and the handwriting would count for part of the grade.</p>

<p>D. and her classmates were indignant but they had to comply. It mattered for grades. The nice thing about learning cursive in 7th grade is that the students have good fine motor skills by that age, and it really doesn’t take a lot of time to learn. The long term result of this experience is that D. takes very legible notes in class. It’s in a mostly-printed style, which is the kind of handwriting to which most of us tend to devolve, I think. However, it’s neat and legible, plus D has a cursive signature and can read cursive. She thinks in retrospect that Ms Calligraphy did her students a huge favor.</p>