Posted on 06/02/2014 9:24:43 PM PDT by windcliff
Does handwriting matter?
Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.
But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.
Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.
“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
My handwriting went from bad to worse. Not much lost.
Keyboards are way easier and faster. They have the added advantage of me being able to read what I wrote.
My grandsons think I’m a real meanie. Every year at Christmas they have to sit down and write a note inside each Christmas card which goes to friends and relatives in other cities. They also have to write thank you notes for their gifts all in cursive.
Cursive is the new hieroglyphic.
-PJ
Same with me. I've had life long eye coordination issues and cursive writing didn't help matters. Teachers dreaded seeing my work. If I write something important I want read like a note around the house I print it.
But here is something to consider. How come a person who has the best skill of hands {doctors} also usually have the worst handwriting skills? LOL.
We had penmanship for years at St. Mary’s. Tracing over cursive printed stuff, over and over.
My handwriting always sucked. Big fingers holding little skinny pens was incredibly awkward for me.
My fingers can type faster than I can talk or even think sometimes. They’re like a blur on the keyboard.
The history of families are handwritten on the flyleaves of Bibles and passed down from one generation to the next. What a pity for many to be unable to continue that tradition.
I think it is in the mind not in the hands.
Good grief: I didn’t learn proper cursive until the 3rd grade! In Catholic school. We were too busy learning proper letter forms, spacing, with tense, gender, adjectives and proper nouns for dessert.
Beautiful post bump.
I was talking with a young lady at a store recently while I waited for a prescription to be filled and somehow the subject of handwriting came up. I inquired as to whether she (who appeared to be in her very early 20s) had been taught cursive writing in school. No, she said. I asked as how she was able to sign her name when required. She said her mother taught her how.
What a changed world we live in.
They’ll just use their thumbprint.
Did you never receive nicely written notes and letters from girlfriends in your school days?
I suppose the modern equivalent would be phone texts... how sad.
“Did you never receive nicely written notes and letters from girlfriends in your school days?”
Uh, it wasn’t notes and letters from them that I was interested in ...
No, they won't. You are right.
It reminds me of how the Progressives, at the beginning of the 20th century, gradually convinced everyone that Latin and ancient Greek were "dead" languages and had no place in a modern, democratic curriculum.
That accomplished, no longer would Americans be able to read, in the original, the long 2,500 year history of those ancient civilizations that led to European civilization, the Enlightenment, and, eventually, the United States. Our ties to the past were lost.
Quite by design.
These were probably same progressives that told me I’d never be able to get by in America without learning the metric system.
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