What skills or knowledge that other people deem important do you not care if your kids learn?
One for me-writing cursive. Although I have lovely cursive I can’t think of the last time I used it. My kids can read it (although just barely) but I think they’d be hard pressed to write a proper letter in cursive. Couldn’t care less.
With DS 19, I would say penmanship. Though legible, his is awful, and always has been. He is lucky to live in an age where word processing has largely replaced handwriting.
Cursive is making a comeback: https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/12/us/cursive-is-coming-back-trnd/index.html
Kids seem to not know anything about cooking these days. I never pushed it with my kids, though I certainly made them help me chop stuff for dinner. Hey presto, they are both interested in cooking now. D moved into a summer apartment yesterday and immediately baked a loaf of bread. Son is the unofficial cook whenever he spends a weekend at a friend’s lake house.
It’s hard to think of what you don’t think is important. I’ve been trying, then I find myself thinking “actually, that CAN be important.” ?
How to change a tire.
Handwriting (cursive or print) CAN be important. I teach AP classes - and every year I have kids that I worry won’t score b/c while they are remarkably intelligent - their handwriting is so difficult to comprehend. I always tell them that I have to TRY to figure it out… but the CB readers don’t…
@toowonderful : We are on the same page with that concern.
I wonder how the noncursive students will write their signatures. My Indian mother-in-law prints her name in our alphabet. Cursive may be learned a certain way but most of us outgrow the childhood letters and make our unique takes on letters. It is faster to write cursive, the reason for its existence. My own evolved writing includes printing and cursive, eliminating extra curlicues I was taught. I often use printed letters when starting a capitalized word. I must have missed the class on poor handwriting in medical school, btw.
Societies are forever evolving and what seems important to some becomes archaic- thankfully in some cases. One example is manners. We trained our well mannered male friend to not open doors for us in college, for example. It was the Women’s Lib era. There are many other sexist manners that did/should go by the wayside.
I can understand if the kids are not being taught to write in cursive as they are too busy learning programming or some other useful skill instead and there is just not enough time but at least in my son’s education that has definitely not been the case.
I’m going to get slammed on this board, but … Calculus. Unless you’re in a STEM career, you will likely never use it. (Yes, I took it both in high school and in college. No, I have never used it since that college class.) I do, however, use cursive most days, but that may be because it’s my go-to form of writing and I still jot down grocery lists, calendar entries, to-do lists and meeting notes.
Not to slam you but for students good enough in math that senior year the available math class is calculus I think it is a wonderful offering. It explains so many equations used in physics. I will always remember the speed-acceleration connection- it makes so much more sense than memorizing the two formulas. A learning, even if forgotten details, of calculus enriches one’s thinking. Of course, many students not into STEM forgo this as part of a well rounded education.
I do the hand written grocery lists. Perhaps my slow typing skills and not using my smart phone except for calls when away from home contributes. I find it too much work to do the work required (open app…) to type into a phone. H and I can still remember and joke about how one of his medical office ladies typed out a silly post it note on her typewriter instead of just hand writing it.
Driving. I subscribe to that great philosopher Miller in Repo Man:
My boss in a former job would say, why did you go to the trouble of typing this note, you could have just written it. He thought typing was difficult, writing is easy. But for me the opposite is true. I have always had difficulty writing and learning cursive was a special form of hell. Now I’ll always type instead of write. And those particular chickens have come home to roost in that my son is entirely dysgraphic and can barely form letters to this day. (He types just fine.)
Kids still need to know how to READ cursive writing.
The skill I think is a waste…anything that is only memorized and not interpreted or understood.
“We trained our well mannered male friend to not open doors for us in college, for example. It was the Women’s Lib era. There are many other sexist manners that did/should go by the wayside.”
I don’t find holding a door sexist. I think it’s common courtesy. I hold the door for anyone closely behind me and I appreciate when anyone does it for me. If a person does not hold the door for me, I just think it’s rude and gender never enters my mind as to why or why not. Maybe we just need to get back to being polite and stop making everything about gender or everything being “sexist”.
As for cursive, I worry that we are going to have an entire generation that will not be able to read historical documents. That includes maybe finding a handwritten card or letter from your parents or grandparents and not being able to read it. How sad is that. Cursive is also very important for eyehand coordination and brain development. I find it very sad that schools are not wanting to teach cursive.
I think cursive should be taught. It got a bad rap because of too strict teachers when it came to penmanship. Bad memories haunt too many people.
I can’t think of any “useless” skills off hand.
We were taught early how to do research in the library, how to find materials from multiple sources. Now it’s all internet but it’s still useful to learn where to look (it even translates to internet searches).
I have argued that calculus is the poetry of math. Of course most people don’t need it, and few read poetry as adults, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth learning.
One thing I realized we never taught our kids is the rules of many sports. They don’t know what a first down is, or how many points you get for a touchdown versus a field goal. They’ve never watched a hockey game, basketball game or a baseball game that I know of either. I think I learned more about the rules of the various games in school, but also my Dad watched a lot of sports on TV on the weekends. My husband and younger son used to go watch the local soccer team and usually watch the World Cup, but otherwise, we don’t watch sports.
They both had a summer of tennis lessons, took sailing lessons a couple of summers long ago, and played soccer through about sixth grade. Younger son is in good shape (Navy) at least. Older son doesn’t drive so does more walking than the average person.
As for cursive, they were both taught, their handwriting is terrible though! I still come across a lot of spiral notebooks with younger son’s notes from his last job. I actually think it’s interesting that so much was handwritten, but I think it was easier than writing on the phone and he was running around a lot so laptop presumably seemed bulky. I think historians need to read cursive, but do others? I think you can get hand eye coordination through learning reasonable printing.
Cursive is just faster—much better for note taking.
It’s a little late now, but standardized test taking. I hate what these have become.
My kids all know cursive as we insisted on it. It is still the format of choice for handwritten notes.
I think my kids had higher SAT/ACT writing scores because they have beautiful penmanship. Cursive writing in a neat and tidy way makes them seem smarter.
I’ve met lawyers who can’t read an old deed that is written in cursive (not to mention reversed white/black imaging). They have to ask a secretary for help. I worked with a guy who couldn’t write a list that was legible to anyone else. “Does that say ‘blueberry’ or ‘Cleveland’?” We told him that he’d perish in the wilderness as he couldn’t write out S.O.S. or Help in the dirt or snow. And we weren’t kidding. He wasn’t that good at typing either.
I had a friend try to teach me to change my own oil. I told him I’d never do it so it was a waste of time to teach me. I understand the concept and the need to do it, just don’t want to do it.
I think it is important to learn to do almost anything - sew, iron, cook, ride a bike, swim - and then if you choose not to do it, it is a choice. I have a left handed kid who struggles with a lot of basic skills, but she has beautiful handwriting because her second grade teacher insisted she could do it and made her work at it.
Memorizing dates. I hated that in history. I could tell you that something happened in the early 1860s but I found learning the exact date and year of most things a huge waste of my time. I would rather have a strong concept of a timeline. This before that, etc. with a general sense of when (within a few years) and understand more about why things happened or how they happened. The emphasis on dates just drove me nuts.