I’m not sure if it’s a nostalgia twinge for my elementary school days or if it’s just my own weirdnesses with regards to these, our modern keyboard-centric times, but I’m a little sad to learn that cursive writing might soon be a thing of the past. It’s being slowly phased out in schools. I fully admit that I sound like an old-timer: devoted to horses and bitching about those new-fangled cars. I should open my eyes and embrace all that is Now.
Oof. Can’t do it. I trust pens and paper, not silicon chippy things and keyboards. Seriously: cursive writing? They’re taking away cursive writing? It’s not that I want us all to be wearing impractical clothing and writing perfect Victorian letters to each other. The half-printing, half-cursive handwriting called “italic cursive” is totally acceptable. That’s how most people write, and it’s faster than strictly printing or traditional cursive (which I admit I do not remember how to do properly).
Maybe I’m worried that in a few generations we’ll all be running around communicating only by typing and printing and text messaging. Possibly grunting. Is the end of teaching cursive backward or forward motion? Probably forward but it still makes me sad.
Read for yourself what The Christian Science Monitor had to say about it:
[Cursive writing] is an endangered species given the rise of computers, the growing proportion of class time spent preparing for standardized tests, and the increasing perception that cursive writing is a difficult and pointless exercise.
“You still need to be able to write a signature and a personal thank-you note as well as read cursive,” says Cathy Van Haute, a pediatric occupational consultant. And “you can’t tell me everyone has easy access to a computer.”
Robert Martin, principal of O’Donnell Elementary, agrees. “It’s a dangerous path to go down if the only way you can communicate or record information is electronically or with printed letters. Cursive teaches things like how letters connect and a different type of hand-eye coordination that’s important.”Kate Gladstone is a “handwriting repair expert” in New York. She is not surprised to see cursive going the way of the dinosaur, with only 15 percent of adults using cursive after high school. She’s not disappointed. She disagrees with the idea that students should first learn to print and then to write in cursive.
“You don’t teach someone English by first teaching them Chinese,” Ms. Gladstone says. “We need to decide what the best way to handwrite is and just teach that.”
Gladstone promotes italic cursive, which she says is the fastest, most natural, and most easily readable form of handwriting. It’s also the easiest and quickest to teach children, she says. She also claims it’s the fastest-growing way to teach handwriting: 7 percent of students are learning this method, compared with 1 percent ten years ago.
The Palmer and Zaner-Bloser penmanship methods ruled the day for decades. Students spent 45 minutes every day on handwriting. Penmanship was a separate grade on report cards. Today, handwriting instruction might get 10 or 15 minutes a few times a week. Keyboarding skills are taught much earlier, now.
But in this era of standardized testing, Gladstone says, teachers need to train their charges to express themselves quickly with a pen or pencil. And that means italic cursive, to her.
Posted by Alexa Harrington
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