heywood on 10/5/2023 at 16:45
My state of New Hampshire just passed a law requiring the teaching of cursive handwriting and multiplication tables.
When I first heard of this bill, I thought it was weird because they're already teaching multiplication tables, and cursive seemed to come out of nowhere. The public schools around here stopped teaching cursive as soon as it was dropped from Common Core. My 9 year-old daughter learned to print from the start and none of her teachers so far have used cursive in the classroom.
I was quick to realize that this was my Republican Governor virtue signaling to the party because he's planning to run for President. But it has real implications for my kids, especially my daughter who will have 2 years to learn cursive and master it to whatever the state standard ends up being. That's going to take class time away from other things, and it makes me question the worth.
I've read some arguments that learning cursive helps brain development, but the connection there seems very vague, and it's not obvious why printing letters wouldn't trigger the same development. I learned cursive in first grade, and had to use it up to 3rd grade. After that, I haven't had a need to write cursive in any situation I've encountered in life. I don't use fountain pens and don't have to keep the ink flowing.
So, what makes this anachronistic skill necessary for kids to learn?
And a poll for the native English speakers: did you learn to write this way and do you still use it?
Azaran on 10/5/2023 at 17:13
I learned as a kid, and used to write pretty well. As a result of increasing computer and phone use over the last 20 years, my handwriting has deteriorated horribly. I'm actually considering taking a calligraphy course; I've taken quite a liking to 18th century handwriting, and would like to relearn writing in that style
Inline Image:
https://i.postimg.cc/25g13mKV/67865858658765.pngStarker on 10/5/2023 at 20:22
It's faster. That's about it.
Also, some people claim that it looks better, but then again these people have probably never seen my handwriting.
demagogue on 10/5/2023 at 20:30
I'll sometimes use it if I'm pressed for time maybe (you didn't make an option for "sometimes"), but I'll usually write with typewriter-like letters most of the time, which I think just looks neater. I think it's probably important to learn it because imagine living in an English-speaking country and not learning how to read an entire category of the English language.
Jason Moyer on 10/5/2023 at 22:14
The multiplication tables part bothers me more than the cursive part. I don't really care if people learn cursive, but I'd like them to learn math by understanding the properties of numbers instead of memorizing tables and being stupid like most Americans.
heywood on 10/5/2023 at 22:16
To clarify a bit, my daughter can read cursive well enough to muddle her way through an old letter or historical document, but she can't write in cursive. I don't think reading it is an essential skill, but it is highly useful. I'm just not sold on the writing part. For some it's faster, but for me it's slower. It's less effort for me to meet a certain neatness/legibility standard when printing, that's why I left cursive behind as soon as I had the choice.
Sulphur on 11/5/2023 at 02:01
My mom was a schoolteacher, so it was quite beaten into me (okay, not really). Cursive looks prettier, for sure, but I could never be arsed. I settled on printing naturally once I was left on my own, by just doing barely legible enough characters minus the fussy, weird, connect-y bits.
Given a choice, I'd rather type, of course.
rachel on 11/5/2023 at 08:54
I love writing cursive, I still have my fountain pen from high school. Like everyone, with type and touch I have lost some of my ability though, not so much in terms of looks but of endurance, I tire way faster and have to take breaks more often. Can't believe I used to write for a full hour sometimes at school/uni...
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https://www.elanthys.net/px/IMG_4284.pngHit Deity on 11/5/2023 at 10:34
I learned it early on; it was taught really early in school, but I can't remember the specific year.. Guessing maybe 2nd or 3rd grade, which was around 8 or 9 years old, and we used it fairly often. I preferred writing in it, but it was sometime around the time I graduated high school, and early college years (18 to 22) that I switched to a sort of mish-mash of cursive and print, since I was then writing massive amounts taking notes in college class.. but one was faster for some letters.. and now I don't know what I write in. It is a mix of maybe 50-50 printing and cursive and sometimes changes from word to word, which letters I'm writing cursive in and what's printed. So, I'm screwed up at this point!
At work, a case came up a few years ago where, unbeknownst to everyone at the time, one of the young ladies couldn't read cursive, and we finally realized one day when she wasn't telling patients what had been noted on their bags at pickup.. she couldn't read it. We had to then print everything so she could make sense of it; but instead of her letting us know about it at first, she muddled her way through it and then at some point, just decided to not say anything at all about it.. until it became an issue.
It is hard to say, at your daughter's age, how much benefit she will get from it, and I'm not familiar with how difficult it is to learn at a later stage in life. Tough call. Sorry I can't offer much more than, "It will probably help her in the long run."
demagogue on 11/5/2023 at 12:25
There's another side I thought about, although I think it even goes way beyond just cursive into the fact that we've gone from an all-analog to all-digital world, though there might be an analog nostalgia backlash on the horizon.
Anyway, the thing about cursive that's kind of special as far as methods of writing go is that it's also an expression of personality in the thing you're writing. Print can do that too to an extent, but really the whole idea of print to begin with is to depersonalize your writing into standard block letters. Cursive especially always had a personal art to it. There were those girls that would write with giant loopy letters in purple ink and hearts dotting their i's, guys with really small and tight angled scratch, people writing in a medieval style with little variations on the letters, and so many other variations. I remember practicing my cursive, and especially my signature, until it had a form that I liked that I thought fit me well.
There's something to be said for allowing people to have access to that as an outlet of expression. They may not take it up, but it's there if they want that outlet. Granted that's arguably a better argument for allowing and encouraging it and not necessarily for a state mandate. But I think of it in that vein similar to saying that music, art, theatre, and PE should be taught also as outlets for human expression as well.
That's a different kind of argument. Again, I tie it in with the bigger issue that human expression is getting narrowed by the decreasing analog channels. For writing cursive to mean something, people need to be writing notes where they might care about the form of their expression. But wouldn't it be a better world if people were still able to write notes to each other on occasion?
