Posted on 03/08/2017 9:49:31 PM PST by bryan999
NEW YORK – Cursive writing is looping back into style in schools across the country after a generation of students who know only keyboarding, texting and printing out their words longhand.
Alabama and Louisiana passed laws in 2016 mandating cursive proficiency in public schools, the latest of 14 states that require cursive. And last fall, the 1.1 million-student New York City schools, the nation's largest public school system, encouraged the teaching of cursive to students, generally in the third grade.
"It's definitely not necessary but I think it's, like, cool to have it," said Emily Ma, a 17-year-old senior at New York City's academically rigorous Stuyvesant High School who was never taught cursive in school and had to learn it on her own.
Penmanship proponents say writing words in an unbroken line of swooshing l's and three-humped m's is just a faster, easier way of taking notes. Others say students should be able to understand documents written in cursive, such as, say, a letter from Grandma. And still more say it's just a good life skill to have, especially when it comes to signing your name.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Honestly I never new it went away. Of course I am 73 years old and my children are in their mid 30’s. So I guess I am way out of date of these things.
Like, totally.
It was systematically and with malice4 aforethought taken out school - because it s a ‘brain-trainer’ - and that doesn’t fit narrative of ‘dumbing down’....
I love the story of the person registering to vote who couldn’t sign his name. I think it’s absurd not to teach handwriting. Is everyone taking lecture notes on a laptop in school?
That is exactly what happened to my nephew two years ago, and he's no dummy. He was applying to college. I happened on him scrawling repeatedly on a piece of notebook paper, and he said he was practicing his signature. "What?" I said. He said, "I never had to before." Then he said, sort of disgusted, "This looks like a kid's handwriting," and he was right, it looked very juvenile. "Keep practicing, it'll come around," I told him, and it did, and when I asked him later he explained that everything in his young life was either online or only required printing. He can type like a fiend.
"So why didn't they [expletive] teach me how to sign my own [another expletive] name?" he asked me later, understandably a little irritated. I honestly couldn't think of a thing to tell him other than we didn't think of it, which is pretty dang weak sauce, IMHO.
These are nostalgia laws.
Cursive is faster for some, but not all. From a genealogist’s point of view cursive sucks; bad printing is easier to read than good cursive.
What’s hard to read about it? “I Isabell Midford of Longbenton in the County of Northumb: Spinster, being weak and sickly of body ...
The only hard thing about it would be the archaic lowercase “s” that looks rather like an “F” as well as some archaic spelling.
Would you rather that no one would be able to read this will or any other handwritten legal or historical document? What about the Declaration of Independence?
Not if it has people writing illegible scrawls. From what I’ve seen, it would be better if cursive were ditched and everyone went to digital.
How the hell am I supposed to understand those random lines on paper that have no connection at all to the letters as they are printed? Dump it. Ditch it.
Oh, but they are connected. The letterforms are very similar in most cases, with some alteration in order to avoid unnecessarily lifting the pen.
You obviously can't read cursive handwriting. What do you do when you encounter a "digital" script typeface? It's the same thing, I promise you.
Can you read it?
OK,..Cursive, what about Penmanship?
I’m all for cursive being required in schools. Of course, I think kids need to learn how to manufacture buggy whips, too.
“Would you rather that no one would be able to read this will or any other handwritten legal or historical document?”
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While I’m well versed in 1970’s cursive, I use a handwriting guide to help read old documents. Others could use a guide, too, and then we wouldn’t have to make laws about cursive in school.
I had a friend whose 12 year old son had to go to summer school for cursive. Since we homeschooled I looked into the value of cursive and found none, so I did not require our children learn to write it as long as they could read the notes their grandmother wrote.
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