<p>I hated handwriting when I was growing up. I guess my fine motor just took longer to develop - like fourth grade, after they stopped teaching it. Around eighth grade, I decided that I wanted to learn to write nicely. End result is that my printing is wonderful but my cursive is a semi-disaster (esp. compared to the printing that has been described as “Arial Narrow”). </p>
<p>A lot of kids struggle with handwriting in the early grades. They grade, but don’t teach it, later. I also really dislike the handwriting forms we learned - they are awkward, overly loopy, and don’t look good. I learned on these forms:
<a href=“http://www.handwritingforkids.com/handwrite/cursive.htm[/url]”>http://www.handwritingforkids.com/handwrite/cursive.htm</a>
The I, F, J, K, M, b, D, G, H, N, R, S, and T are all awkward forms. The b and l are difficult to distinguish. I hate the loopy things at the beginning. </p>
<p>Copperplate reduces some of the manic fealty to having the capital letters connect to those next to them. Most cursive would be much easier to write and read if the writer would drop the pen as needed and start a new letter form.</p>
<p>There is more than anecdotal evidence that removing the graphomotor component, for many people, enhances their overall written fluency. I know some people lament the loss of handwriting in schools, but truthfully, many kids just learn to write more easily when sitting at the keyboard.</p>
<p>Here’s another left-hander who was tormented by teachers who seemed to feel it was just contrariness on my part when I couldn’t get it right because I was using my left. And someone please tell me how your letters are going to slant the same way as a righty’s will if you slant your paper the opposite way as a righty does (which my evil fifth grade teacher insisted I do?) I still have nightmares about that class.</p>
<p>I definitely agree with the idea of some neurological connection between cognitive development and cursive–I think in part this has to do with how your brain is wired and your learning style. For me there’s very much some sort of brain/body connection. As a student the best way for me to memorize anything was to write it down, typically in cursive or my own variation of cursive, a cross between cursive and printing which looks more like printing but has few breaks between the letters (which I still do to this day–not sure I even remember how to make a capital Z in cursive!). I think in my case, this flow of connected letters which became words helped shaped my thoughts better. I could not draft papers with a keyboard and cut/paste but instead I needed to jot down my thoughts a paragraph at a time and then type them up to get out an initial draft. Cut and paste after that but first draft had to be written. So, for me, it was almost like there was a flow of thoughts from my brain through my body and onto the paper. To this day I have to write out lists or make notes to myself in order to remember something, but once I’ve gone through that physical process, the information stays in my head and I can toss the list and notes away (although in my case, I would more likely misplace them - thank goodness it didn’t matter by then since I could usually remember the information!)</p>
So, if learning cursive is in any way related to learning music, what happens when elementary students aren’t taught this skill? I wouldn’t want to communicate without a keyboard, but I wonder about the developmental impact of using WP programs at an early age. I just find this interesting.</p>
<p>I’ll be the obnoxious biologist and opine… I will be surprised if there’s a significant difference between the neurological development that occurs when one learns to write in cursive vs. when one learns to write on a keyboard. In both cases, the brain is doing basically the same thing, from its standpoint.</p>
<p>Same for the music/corpus callosum connection – anything you do that causes the left and right hemispheres of the brain to talk to each other will increase its size; the effect isn’t specific to musical training.</p>
<p>Very cool info, sjmom. My 10 year old son is a lefty, but has cross dominance, and was very, very slow to write. He could not write his name when he entered K. Cursive practice has helped his handwriting legibility, both cursive & printing. He also plays violin & piano, picking up both very quickly. Bats & shoots hockey as a righty. Favors his left in dribbling & shooting hoops. Throws lefty. It took him a bit of adjustment time when deciding whether to learn lacrosse as a lefty or a righty. He was trying to catch it on the right & throw from the left & the coach was scratching his head. It’s better now & he’s able to use both hands well. I’d guess he has a pretty thick corpus collosum!</p>
<p>“Why do you care so much about neatness!” is his rallying cry. His teachers are all very understanding, thank God. Not like the nun who switched my lefty brother to righty. Was it to teach him how to conform? Or to avoid the influence of the devil? Not sure.</p>
<p>molliebatmit: Do you think the fact that cursive requires you to form letters differently based on the letter that follows makes a difference? Having to plan ahead? You’re definitely right about using a keyboard forcing l &r brain hemispheres to communicate. So maybe from a neurological point of view, the keyboard will improve brain functioning?</p>
<p>I think the keyboard issue may depend on whether it’s done through traditional typing method – left forefinger on F and right forefinger on J – for example. That’s not too different from playing piano. But if it’s hunt-and-peck, then the neural connections between left and right hand are handled differently.</p>
<p>Mollie, have you looked at research by Geschwind and Galaburda? In Ellen Winner’s book “Gifted Children” she describes a theory that associates right-hemisphere (spatial) gifts, left-hemisphere (linguistic) deficits, non-right-handedness and immune disorders (like allergies).</p>
<p>I was going to look up research on all this, but then it was time for class. Grad school gets in the way of my fun. :)</p>
<p>I think ultimately the brain is very flexible – and of course it wasn’t “designed” to write or type or play music in the first place. I think it is likely that learning to use language at all is extremely critical for what we perceive as “normal” brain function, but I’m not sure what to say about anything beyond that.</p>
<p>…note that this is why I’m a cell biologist… this kind of thinking is too broad for me! :D</p>
<p>I used to tutor dyslexic kids at my kids elementary school and also all three of mine took piano lessons and one of mine is a lefty, so I’ve got some experience with all of these issues. My lefty has pretty bad cursive, prefers printing and hates to read. My obsessive reader has the best handwriting of the three and ridiculously high test scores. The third one is kind of in the middle.</p>
<p>As for my tutoring kids, they all had terrible handwriting. Because of details I can’t go into here, I was forced to dust off the psychology degree and research how you learn to read in order to teach these children. One of the things I discovered was that there was a correlation between cursive handwriting and reading ability. If children were given lots of cursive instruction and practice along with their reading therapy it helped with the reading. There is some neural connection between the hands and the brain going on and it’s not the same if they print. The Orton Gillingham method (I think) subscribes to this theory.</p>
<p>As for the music, I have seen studies that show that while music instruction correlates to increases in learning math and spatial reasoning, that only applies to learning how to play a musical instrument and not necessarily to just listening to the music (my kids all slept to Mozart tho’ just in case).</p>