They have the opportunity to learn how on the Internet.
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 ...
You can do lots of rebelling without ever putting pen to paper. Cursive is antiquated and useless, it’s a different letter set that looks nothing like what you’ll see in books or on computers. There’s no reason to teach kids 2 versions of all the letters, there really never was.
I’m far more worried about the loss of basic math and English skills. My job takes me to many schools and I’ve seen a lot of things that scare me.
I’ve been to too many schools where third grade students are “learning math” by moving little piles of blocks around. Kids that age should be learning real math.
At the same time, kids aren’t learning spelling. There are projects all over the walls with uncorrected spelling errors and I’ve been told that teachers are instructed to ignore incorrect spelling and grammar. How is that even teaching?
While I do know many great kids who are doing very well in school, too many think they have great skills because their errors are never pointed out.
As an example, our office has an intern who will be graduating from college in December. She can’t spell, do basic math and was offended when I pointed out errors in the copy she submitted for publication in a newspaper.
If education is going to delivered electronically, it is the point of a school in the second grade to teach students to communicate electronically.
Again, I work with people all day long, who have been exposed to computers a good portion of their lives, who cannot type effectively. It is a huge waste of time and money.
If a person gets to spend a lot of time typing they develop speed even if they don’t have training. Humans learn repetitive things, it’s one of the things we’re really good at. Sure they’re not using “proper” technique, but they’ve learned where the letters are and how to get there their way. Some of the fastest typist I’ve known are using their own method learned the hard way.
They have the opportunity to learn how on the Internet.
You wrote:
“If education is going to delivered electronically, it is the point of a school in the second grade to teach students to communicate electronically.”
1) Education will not be delivered electronically for the vast majority of public schools for years and years to come.
2) Even if it was, what would be expected of second graders would require almost no keyboarding. Instead, iPad like devices will be used on which students can write their answers - much like clay, wax, or chalk tablets centuries ago.
“Again, I work with people all day long, who have been exposed to computers a good portion of their lives, who cannot type effectively. It is a huge waste of time and money.”
And it still has nothing to do with second graders.
Ok.
It is a part of Understanding English. There are thousands of documents, letters, and papers that are handwritten that contain a wealth of art, beauty, and history that can be read in the original and enjoyed. I have an unpublished letter from a Civil War Soldier (Complete with the envelope and stamp) that is written in a lovely hand. The soldier was writing to a friend of his in New Hampshire, and was involved in the Peninsula Campaign. He spoke of Gen McClellan and expected the War to be over by Christmas. Since no copies of this letter exist on the internet or in any history books, it can only be read in the original. I truly believe that if an entire category of knowledge is removed from availability, it is the same as censorship and thought control, like in the “Ministry of Truth”.
Just as when I taught myself Russian years ago, I learned both the print alphabet and the cursive. No big deal.
Now I am attempting to teach myself Hebrew. Guess what? There are too versions of THAT Language too.
Funny, we don’t hear the Russians OR the Jews complaining about cursive! LOL.
Why is it that in the days before computers, kids were quite capable of learning both print and cursive, Long Division and mental arithmetic, figuring out square roots, naming all the capital cities of all the states, and remembering all the dates of important events in the founding of our nation? What will our modern generation do if suddenly there is no electricity to run their computers, video games, or electronic toys?
I LOVE my computer (taught myself html and computer graphics) and use it to create music...but I STILL know how to READ Music, and can write a song out by hand if the situation arises.
I don’t think any knowledge is “useless”.
So I respectfully disagree with you about that. But we can still be FRiends! LOL!
This was in the age of electrics with a hand operated carriage return ~ they were a tad faster than those with the large side key on the right of the keys.
I think I introduced that as "World Class"! My teacher and I had been invited to a world contest in Sweden. However, I graduated. If I'd had another semester or so in highschool we'd had a free trip.
These days I usually mosey along between 100 and 125 ~ otherwise my fingers hurt.
“I’m far more worried about the loss of basic math and English skills. My job takes me to many schools and I’ve seen a lot of things that scare me.”
As well it should. But remember, it’s all INTENTIONAL. They simply want the US to move down a few notches with respect to other countries. The Educational Establishment knows full-well what works - they are NOT DUMB. There are millions of examples, as in home schoolers, and if that’s not enough, there’s also Sylvan and Kumon Learning Centers (no scare quotes required for “Learning Centers” here, because they are some of the few establishments where kids actually do learn).
So, from Everyday Math to “Sight Words”, it’s more than clear that the Educational Establishment wants our kids to fail. Yes, there are (a few) teachers that try to get around it, but the guys pulling the puppet strings know EXACTLY what they’re doing and the VAST MAJORITY of today’s teachers are right on-board with those puppet-masters.
The really sad thing is that if I tell others what I just wrote, people cock their heads at me and politely try to find an excuse for ending the conversation. They are simply UNABLE to comprehend that so many people, working in so many ‘wonderful’ schools, could want the kids we send to them to fail, with respect to the rest of the world.
It’s simply tragic.
Cursive is for writing with a dip pen on paper. It was adapted for later methods, but functionally it is distorted letterforms to make your ink flow without blotting.
It is no more relevant to today’s common communication than pressing cuneiform into clay.
This from a guy who does calligraphy as a hobby. It just plain is not a lifeskill any more. I haven’t used Parker Method Cursive since 7th grade.
At the time I also played saxaphone and clarinet so I had the eye/hand thing down pat. Fortunately you don't have to blow on a typewriter while typing.
Now, how long could I do that speed? Well, 5 minutes, 10 minutes? I know that during sustained periods I had higher bursts but the typewriter had its limitations.
I have a design in mind for a typing system where the keys mean nothing but a laser picks up your finger movements. You could teach the system to respond to your own fastest movements ~ like first knuckle, second knuckle, maybe with an auxiliary for your toes. You'd just think "squeeze" and that'd be all the system would need.
Effective use of the fingers requires they have somewhere to land so they can rebound. A good typist could probably incorporate finger returns or knuckle extension in the repetoir and probably get up to 1,000 wpm with training.
As anybody can tell you EDITING your material as you go is a real drag. There's some software on the net you can use to overcome that. Feeds you random letters, groups of letters, numbers, groups of numbers, and you just learn to type what you see ~ not what you think or what you think you see. A few hours of practice should more than double your current speed while copying text.
There’s always been an exception available. Just claim ‘writer’s cramp’ ~ a diagnosable medical malady.
USPS has machines that can read anything!
And anybody that’s interested in history on that level can go learn cursive. Meanwhile for the general population we can look of the printed translations.
Nobody is complaining about cursive, we’ve just figured out that it’s a pointless waste of time with no reason to be taught to the masses. They won’t be reading anything in cursive, and they won’t be writing anything in cursive (heck they mostly won’t be writing anything by hand). It’s a question of goals, if the goal of school is to teach all kinds of esoteric stuff that rounds a person’s life but probably won’t actually be useful sure keep teaching cursive. On the other hand if the goal if to give them skills that will make them useful adults able to function in society and get jobs and raise kids there’s better things to teach.
Oh there’s tons of useless knowledge in the world. As a person who can name off every single member of over a dozen different band trust me on this, there are vast tracts of human knowledge that accomplish nothing.
My computer has access to several different equally unreadable cursive fonts.
So...If printing is taught properly, the transition to cursive is mere a matter of connecting the letters. It should take the child less than 2 **minutes** to master cursive. It makes me wonder. What on earth are government schools **doing** if they can't find the time to teach cursive? Hey! They should be teaching printing. The transition to cursive should be automatic.
In my homeschool, I first taught my children printing and moving on to cursive was absolutely effortless and took** no** time at all. All 3, as adults, have beautifully legible printing and cursive.
While certainly not an essential in life, being able to leave a clearly readable note ( in cursive or print) when needed is a nice skill to to have, and very much appreciated by those who must read the note. We don't always have a printer in a back pocket or car glove compartment.
One thing I learned as an undergrad science major was that manually writing out biochemical pathways, or long lists of anatomical muscles was very helpful in memorizing massive amount of material quickly. There is something about that tactile connection of the hand to the brain. So....When my kids were in the early grades of homeschooling, I combined penmanship with their spelling exercises. It helped them learn the spelling words more quickly and more permanently and we killed two birds with one stone.
One more anecdote:
I was the owner and professional in a health clinic. One day, my assistant wrote a note for a patient explaining that he was late for work because he had been in my office. A few hours later I got a phone call from the employer. The note my assistant had written had hand writing that was so illegible that the employer did not believe that it had come from a professional office, even though it was on our letter head. (This was in the early 80s before the era personal computers and I was still too poor and too new in my profession to be able to afford an electric typewriter. ) Also... we still had paper charts and all of our financial records were still kept in bound ledgers and entered by hand. After that I only hired people who could print or write **very** legibly.
I have to agree with you. I am of a certain age and well educated. I dropped writing cursive close to 30 years ago. I challenged myself a few years ago to see if, like riding a bike, the skill leaves or stays. It is long gone. I have no regrets that I can’t write this statement in readible cursive.
It is readable and it is the classic way to write that letter.
Gee! Bob, I know the feeling. I get that reaction, too, even here from so-called conservatives on Free Repbulic.
Personally, I consider government owned and run, socialist-entitlement, single-payer, and GODLESS, K-12 schooling to be soooooooo **evil** for the child and such a threat to our nation's continuing freedom, that I will not have a government school teacher or worker for a friend. They are too evil, too stupid, or too much of a Useful Idiot to be a friend. ( I won't have an abortion worker for a friend, either.)
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