Posted on 09/19/2009 6:07:19 AM PDT by T-Bird45
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Charleston resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader's signature.
"I just assumed she knew how to do it, but I have a piece of paper with her signature on it and it looks like a little kid's signature," Davis said.
Her daughter was apologetic, but explained that she hadn't been required to make the graceful loops and joined letters of cursive writing in years. That prompted a call to the school and another surprise.
West Virginia's largest school system teaches cursive, but only in the 3rd grade.
"It doesn't get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach," said Jane Roberts, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Kanawha County schools.
Davis' experience gets repeated every time parents, who recall their own hours of laborious cursive practice, learn that what used to be called "penmanship" is being shunted aside at schools across the country in favor of 21st century skills.
The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.
"We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, she said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting.
"They're writing, they're composing with these tools at home, and to have school look so different from that set of experiences is not the best idea," she said.
Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University's College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they'll replace it entirely before long.
"I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds."
For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of "a gift."
That fear is not new, said Kathleen Wright, national product manager for handwriting at Zaner-Bloser, a Columbus, Ohio-based company that produces a variety of instructional material for schools.
"If you go back, you can see the same conversations came up with the advent of the typewriter," she said.
Every year, Zaner-Bloser sponsors a national handwriting competition for schools, and this year saw more than 200,000 entries, a record.
"Everybody talks about how sometime in the future every kid's going to have a keyboard, but that isn't really true."
Few schools make keyboards available for day-to-day writing. The majority of school work, from taking notes to essay tests, is still done by hand.
At Mountaineer Montessori in Charleston, teacher Sharon Spencer stresses cursive to her first- through third-graders. By the time her students are in the third grade, they are writing book reports and their spelling words in cursive.
To Spencer, cursive writing is an art that helps teach them muscle control and hand-eye coordination.
"In the age of computers, I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don't have electricity? One of the ways we communicate is through writing," she said.
But cursive is favored by fewer college-bound students. In 2005, the SAT began including a written essay portion, and a 2007 report by the College Board found that about 15 percent of test-takers chose to write in cursive, while the others wrote in print.
That was probably smart, according to Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who cites multiple studies showing that sloppy writing routinely leads to lower grades, even in papers with the same wording as those written in a neater hand.
Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that 26 percent of 12th graders lack basic proficiency in writing, while two percent were sufficiently skilled writers to be classified as "advanced."
"Handwriting is really the tail wagging the dog," Graham said.
Besides, it isn't as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock.
Most people peak in terms of legibility in 4th grade, Graham said, and Wright said it's common for adults to write in a cursive-print hybrid.
"People still have to write, even if it's just scribbling," said Paula Sassi, a certified master graphologist and a member of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation.
"Just like when we went from quill pen to fountain pen to ball point, now we're going from the art of handwriting to handwriting purely as communication," she said.
“One area that seems to be left out relates to fine motor skill development and how that is related to brain development and organization.”
I wonder about this as well; any experts out there?
I think cursive should be modified to make it more of a speed writing script. At present, it has too many seemingly unnecessary squigglies.
My 4th grader is in private school and they require “neat” cursive on all homework assignments.
I guess a thank you note is now outdated?
It isn’t just the kids. My handwriting used to be very good, but now (aside from my signature) its horrible. While some people might bemoan its loss, the truth is that ts an anachronism.
When I was homeschooling, sporadically, my children weren’t in the grades where it was an issue. I have a friend who taught their daughter a handwriting that wasn’t cursive, more of a calligraphy/printing, which was more legible and quicker than cursive. I can’t remember what it was called.
Yes, I probably qualify as reasonably expert in this area (school teacher who keeps up to date on a lot of areas, this one being a particular interest of mine).
There’s little inherent value in learning cursive as a way of writing. Most people are faster printing, most people’s printing is easier to read. Kids master printing earlier and if you are concerned about neat legible handwriting, repeated practice of printing will generally lead to better results in the long term.
But even if we’re not worried about cursive, even if we’re not particularly worried about the style at all, children do need handwriting practice of some sort - repetition of handwriting - to properly develop fine motor skill. Or something similar - colouring will do it as well, but the advanatge of doing it with handwriting is it normally allows for a wider range of other learning to take place at the same time (fine motor practice, while learning history for example).
Also, for some kids - kinaesthetic learners - handwriting greatly increases their skills in both spelling and in written expression far more than typing does. And as modern schools are quite often far better places for visual or auditory learners than they are for kinaesthetic learners, this is important. A lot of kinaesthetic learners are now winding up falling behind at school in comparison to other kids, far more often than they used to in the past. Part of that is probably down to reduced emphasis on handwriting - we’re using a way of teaching that worked for kinaesthetic learners less than we did in the past. That only matters for some kids, but it really does matter for them.
I agree with what you said. I only use cursive for my signature but print for everything else.
And, I am sure this argument has been going on for decades, if not centuries. Think of the lovely handwriting you see in museums. Cursive has been falling to the wayside for a long, long time.
“Experts” got us in the fix we’re in today.
Just saying.....
Well I can identify with this article. I am left handed and when it came to cursive handwriting in school my teachers said in effect that “Well you are left handed just do the best you can”
My son is using a combination cursive-print for his signature.
The authors are clearly right on one issue-our kids are getting exposure to cursive in only about grade three and then for a very short period of time.
The point is made by the first paragraph. How do you sign documents without cursive? Printing a signature is not allowable and if we all write like 3rd graders how do you sign something that is actually unique to you. Cursive should be taught and utilized in schools it is a skill that needs to be maintained. As far as I am concerned it is just part of the dumbing down of America.
My opinion of looped cursive has been well stated by another:
I’m going to push cursive with my kids. My Grandpa, who was not a particularly educated man, had a very elegant hand. I wish I had learned to write in that style. My cursive is an amalgamation of two or three different styles taught during my early public school days, and I hate it.
I’ll admit it... I can’t even write cursive anymore...
I was given awards in early grade school for cursive handwriting skills...
I don’t even do my signature in cursive anymore... I haven’t for decades... It isn’t block, but it isn’t cursive either...
Cursive, worthless
Basic math, worthless
Spelling, worthless
Queer history and inflated self-importance...$10,000.00 per student.
Anti-American indoctrination...priceless
My sons have far better cursive handwriting than I do. And, no, my signature doesn't look like a kid's signature - it's more like chicken-scratch.
“Printing a signature is not allowable”
That simply isn’t true.
I love it when a form insists that you PRINT your signature ... then WRITE your signature right next to it. And they are both alike. :)
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