Posted on 06/17/2012 5:25:54 AM PDT by SMGFan
The bulletin board at the front of Melissa Balzano’s classroom in West Orange is decorated with hand-written lists her students wrote in September, expressing their "Hopes and Dreams for Third Grade." For at least half the children in Balzano’s class at Mount Pleasant Elementary School, learning cursive topped the list. "It’s fancy writing," said Naomi Toms, 9. Cursive was once a mainstay of elementary schools, where children practiced the "tripod" pencil grip and the looping strokes of the letters. But these days little classroom time is spent teaching cursive writing, crowded out of the curriculum by the demands of an increasingly complex world.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
That sounds like adapting. Learning cursive is a waste of time.
They stopped teaching our kids cursive this past year.
The last time I needed to write something cursively I gave up because I forgot how. I haven’t regularly done so since the early 1990s.
“Perhaps this is tinfoil hat stuff, but I feel that, by eliminating cursive, the “Powers That Be” are eliminating a major form of expressing freedom of thought, thus creating an entire generation of drones who are incapable of rebellion.”
Naa. Not this issue. I think, at that age, there’s much better things that can be done with kids’ time in school, such as learning phonics and learning to do math using a pencil and paper (paper, definition: material manufactured in thin sheets from the pulp of wood or other fibrous substances, used for writing, drawing, or printing on...)
Not that the two go together, because they don’t - but they could. More likely their time will now be spent learning how to use condoms, sex positions, why they shouldn’t fear that strange man down the street, or other ‘life skills’ in the opinion of the people that run VIRTUALLY ALL of our public schools (and a fair amount of our private schools too).
“But these days little classroom time is spent teaching cursive writing, crowded out of the curriculum by the demands of an increasingly complex world.”
More time for global warming studies I guess
pretty easy to forge a name that is only printed...
That’s a keeper. Thanks!
Blessings, Bobo
Cursive writing is an important skill. It really doesn't take that long to teach. Educators today have gotten lazy; quite often they're more interested in their pension benefits than they are in teaching children.
My signature is NOT what my 3rd grade teacher taught me. She would not recognize it nor be able to read it and I would be marked down for it. NO ONE could forge it, however.
When I homeschooled our son, he was not physically able to do cursive in 3rd. Few fine motor skills/ it was agony and so frustrating for him. I decided that what I really wanted him to do was think, and that handwriting was a separate skill.
When I teach the boys (late elem/ middle school) they are so frustrated with cursive. I often let them dictate and I’ll keyboard - “You do the thinking; I’ll do the typing” - and then of course encourage them to learn keyboard.
When our son was finishing homeschool/ high school, he asked me - “How do you make capitals in cursive?” We reviewed them but I said that I often use printed caps with my cursive. My husband, a scientist, still hates cursive, and he prints quickly when he is not keyboarding.
Cursive is especially good for letters to grandma...
Where will the post office find employees if none of the graduates know cursive? Maybe USPS will require printing? Maybe that’s why I constantly get other people’s mail?
Think about it. All of our electronic transmissions, whether they be texting, cell phone conversation, blogging, or even posting on FR can be (and probably IS)monitored, stored, and acted upon by the government. Terror suspects are nabbed by Internet “Chatter”. The Secret Service investigates perceived threats on social networking sites.
By the way, I teach music, and I use cursive, but I always ask my students if they can read my writing. Usually they can.
Yes it is. The only time I use cursive is when I need to write a legible signature on forms. When I sign my name on those keypads at the grocery store, I just make a straight line.
I learned cursive in the 3rd grade and stopped using it a couple of years later when teachers no longer demanded it.
Completely useless.
Interesting though, my Russian wife writes exclusively in Cyrillic cursive (yes, they have this). You want to talk about something hard to read!
I won’t argue the monitoring end with you.
With today’s computer enhanced license plate readers, our friendly government can give us our driving histories practically from the moment we leave our driveways - and don’t even get me started on “Smart Meters”.
No one seems to want to believe it...so the databases keep expanding and expanding...
Bull, it should bother me and all employers. The waste of time, money, because someone can’t type functionally, is ridiculous. Easily assign a dollar value to it.
Indeed! :-)
“I made it to 238 WPM in high school.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
WOW! That’s gotta be a typo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute
A signature is not your name written in cursive, it is your name written uniquely.
You wrote:
“Bull, it should bother me and all employers.”
It might, but that doesn’t mean the schools should be worried about it in the second grade.
“The waste of time, money, because someone can’t type functionally, is ridiculous.”
And in each passing year that is less and less of a problem because so many kids have computers at home and learn to type accuarately and quickly with no training whatsoever.
“Easily assign a dollar value to it.”
Still not the point of a school in the second grade.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.