Posted on 12/18/2006 4:26:57 AM PST by Past Your Eyes
When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
She said they did away with cursive writing entirely. She said kids wouldn't need it what with computers and all.
She was genuinely stunned when I asked her how these kids were going to sign their names on legal documents later in life.
"I guess we didn't think about that."
Thinking ain't her strong suit.
L
I believe cursive should be taught, as the other poster mentioned, for legal documentation. I can write in neat, uniform cursive style, but I always print unless a signature is required, and I wish others would print, too. It is so much more legible. What is the purpose of using cursive for other than legal documentation? It seems to me that it is just based on tradition. (Not trying to knock your opinion; just throwing in my 2 cents.)
When I was in Europe I discovered that they do not teach their children manuscript prior to cursive. They start right off in cursive. My eldest son has beautiful handwriting as a result of his Dutch kindergarden/lst grade experience there. After a bit of research, I discovered that this used to be the policy in the USA until the public school system was organized along Dewey's evolutionary theories. According to this idea, children's learning patterns should parallel how mankind developed through time. Since men first learned to write using symbolic cuniform, kindergardeners should be taught manuscript prior to cursive. The problem is that once children learn to write in this manner it is extremely difficult to get them to switch. It takes more time in the class than the third/fourth/fifth grade teachers have now with all the political correct materials also needing attention. Therefore, cursive is only taught to those students who can pick it up quickly.
I was lucky in having an old-fashion teacher.
ping
I don't sign my name in cursive.
Probably the last time I did was 25+ years ago... Can't remember really...
I rarely write much by hand other than engineering work which is mostly numbers, labels and short notes.
The only other writing by hand I do is writing checks. And that's primarily because I'm building a house. All the normal bills are handled via Home Banking electronically.
I simply don't have much use for it so it has drifted away.
Ditto that for me. Writing in cursive is such a painful chore, and I have to slow down so much to get it anywhere near legible, that printing is way to go for me.
What's the real benefit to cursive with legal documentation?
My block writing is still very destinctive.
Any legal document that amounts to much is notarized. It doesn't matter much what your identifying "mark" is.
My aunt had the same experience, and block printed throughout college, graduate school, and a very successful professional career. My brother once had his handwriting analyzed, for personality and that kind of stuff. The person came back and suggested that he might be using some other part of his body other than his hand to hold the pen. His cursive is that bad (mine's not much better)!
ping
I'm with you. One can actually READ my printing. The greatest advantagefor cursive for me was years ago -- taking notes in college where I had to write extrememly fast (and try to read it later). Nowadays my kids take notes at college by typing on their laptops. ... and the teacher distributes notes in various elements of Microsoft Office.
Which is probably just an indication that 85% of the locations giving the test instructed their children to write in block letters and not cursive on the essay part of the test to ensure that the graders could read the test.
Who knows, perhaps they are using OCR technology to scan in the essays.
Good point. I was imagining walking into a bookstore, choosing an interesting book, opening it, and finding that it was printed in a cursive font. How many of us would reject it based on that alone? I would place it back on the shelf and choose another book just for the annoyance factor of that font. And the computer's cursive is much better than that of most humans.
Thanks for posting.
I had no idea.
I have noticed more and more that young people don't know how to hold a pen/pencil and I see the strangest 'grips' on writing utencils.
The teen down the block was told the
same thing about memorizing the
multiplication tables! The teacher
admitted SHE DIDN'T KNOW THEM HERSELF!
My cursive stinks. I print, too.
I switched from mostly cursive to mostly printing when I was taking notes in college college classes. Reasons being that my notes were easier for me to read, were neater looking and, thus, easier to find key info on review.
From one old fossil to another - The other day I used the word "arithmetic" when speaking to a 2nd grader. She didn't know what that was. Her mother translated it for her - math.
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