Posted on 07/07/2011 7:52:05 AM PDT by newzjunkey
...[Indiana] State officials sent school leaders a memo April 25 telling them that instead of cursive writing, students will be expected to become proficient in keyboard use.
The Times of Munster reports the memo says schools may continue to teach cursive as a local standard, or they may decide to stop teaching cursive altogether...
...'The skill of handwriting is a dying art,' [East Allen County Schools Superintendent Karyle Green] said. 'Everything isn’t handwritten anymore.'...
Winning: The key board wins as students will no longer be assessed on the handwriting style in third and fourth grade
From now on, second-graders will be taught cursive. But students will no longer be assessed on the handwriting style in third and fourth grade.
'We think it’s still important for kids to be able to read cursive,' Hissong said.
'But after that, it begins to become obsolete.'
Andree Anderson of the Indiana University Northwest Urban Teacher Education Program says teachers haven't had the time to teach cursive writing for some time because it's not a top priority...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
50 pen strokes
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The whole point of cursive is that there is one stroke per word. except for dotting the “i” and “j” and crossing the “t”.
Honestly...Our ancestors were NOT stupid. In the days before typewriters and computers they figured out that cursive was faster than printing, otherwise, it would not have had universal acceptance.
When we did not have computers, and we had hand entries into our ledgers and patient records, I **DID** check the penmanship of potential employees. And...I did **NOT** hire people who could not write legibly. Believe me, there are plenty of people out there in the world who can not write clearly with either printing or cursive.
I’ve been on Free Republic some time now, and I have noticed a pattern with these threads about teaching cursive to children.
Those who are against teaching cursive are **visceral** about it! Wow! The go ballistic.
Then there are those like me who say things such as:
**Nice but not top on my list of things I would look for in a private school.
** Nice skill to have but not essential.
** Yes, a pleasant and refined skill but completely possible to get along with out it.
** Yes, teach cursive but learning good habits on the keyboard is VERY important. Start early on that keyboard!
So?....Who’s being reasonable here? Who is being unreasonable?
It’s one pen CONTACT per word, not one pen stroke. There’s a difference. Cursive moves your pen around a lot, in printing a t is 2 strokes (the vertical and the horizontal) but in cursive because you have to do the up and down on the vertical it’s 3. Most strokes.
Cursive didn’t have universal acceptance. Cursive was for the elite class that had time to kill on that kind of thing. The writing in universal acceptance was printing. That’s why the printing press mimicked printing not cursive. That’s why even before the printing press anything intended for a pass audience was in print not cursive.
And there you go again assuming that being against the wasted time teaching cursive puts me against penmanship. It’s funny that the person that thinks flourishes in her writing are so important keeps adding flourishes to what she reads. Stop assuming, you’re no good at it, stick to what I write and ONLY what I write, every single time you’ve added something it’s been wrong.
Nobody here is going ballistic. The problem is you keep adding to what I wrote and replying to your 100% bad assumptions, and doing so with rather pathetic logical fallacies. If you could manage to reply to ONLY what was ACTUALLY written the whole thing would be a lot easier. But because you constantly add insulting denigrating assumptions based entirely on the contents of your head you force a certain type of response.
1) As I said, previously, those who are against teaching cursive are **visceral** about it.
2) Those who favor cursive are usually very quick to say, “A nice refined skill to have, but not essential.”
3) Personally, I think a lot of the problems in moving into cursive is the way printing is taught.
4) It is has been my personal anecdotal experience in talking with people who are dead set against teaching cursive that they have terrible handwriting themselves ( printing and cursive). It was an emotionally painful experience for them in school. I will believe you and will agree that you are my first exception.
Oh look more assumptions. I’m not visceral about cursive, what I’m visceral about is your incessant lying about me. I don’t giver a rip about your personal anecdotal experience, and given that you’re assumptions about me have been 100% wrong across the board I’d be willing to bet your “anecdotal experience” didn’t work out the way you remembered, you probably made the same bad assumptions about them you’re making about me.
I don’t have strong feelings about this question, but don’t believe I missed much when I switching to printing when I was in junior high. My handwriting wasn’t terrible. It was always clear. I don’t fit into your category of “those who have terrible handwriting, and struggled in school but failed to learn cursive.”
When I reached junior high, though, I decided that my handwriting wasn’t satisfactory in an aesthetic sense. Perhaps I could have improved it by practicing, but I didn’t think doing that would be worth the time, so I switched to printing. My printing was even clearer, and had traces of elegance (though admittedly it wasn’t as impressive as a really good hand).
Later I did have a need to read cursive (old letters and census records), so the time I’d spent learning to read it wasn’t wasted. The question, though, is how much time is justified in learning cursive — for the average student. I’d say not much.
I’d have no objection to students being exposed to it, and learning to read it (or decipher it, at least) but don’t think it’s a good idea that most students spend years trying to improve the quality of their own cursive. Acquiring a passive knowledge shouldn’t take long. That’s comparable to learning to recognize a serve, forehand, and backhand in tennis versus mastering the strokes themselves and being able to execute them effectively. Of course, individuals would be free to learn to write cursive if they wished. It just wouldn’t be an important part of the curriculum anymore. (As an elitist skill it even might have more appeal to them.)
As you yourself say — and I agree — having a legible and attractive handwriting is an asset, but “not a critical asset or an essential asset” (when there are many other things they might be learning). I favor it for those who can learn to write it without the investment of much time — or who are highly motivated to learn and willing to put in extra time — but I don’t think that others should be required to spend a lot of time on it.
[You say that your method makes it easy to learn, which would decrease the demand on their time, but that’s not something we can evaluate well here.]
I agree with you in not attaching much importance to being able to write cursive, but am skeptical about your claim that printing is faster (for most persons). After I switched to printing I became pretty fast but never felt that my printing was as fast as cursive. If you think yours is, maybe you’re just unusually skilled at printing.
> “Cursive moves your pen around a lot, in printing a t is 2 strokes (the vertical and the horizontal) but in cursive because you have to do the up and down on the vertical it’s 3.”
That statement gave pause for thought. Your claim about the average number of strokes in the two ways of writing seems to be true. So why do I feel that my printing is slower?
I think it’s because you continually have to estimate distances in printing, and put your pen down in a precise spot, and that requires more care — and probably, for most persons, less speed. By keeping your pen on the page (with a few exceptions like ‘t’), you can more easily keep track of your points of reference. Also, as a person who used to print a lot, I know that I was continually having to be careful with letters like ‘r’, ‘n’, and ‘h’ (especially in names and unusual words, in which people wouldn’t recognize them from the context). If I make a part of a line just a tad too long or short, the letter may appear to be something else. This is true to some extent with cursive too, but because you’re writing continuous strokes, there’s less difficulty in establishing points of reference, and it tends to be less of a problem.
As I said, you may be unusually skillful at estimating distances and making marks of precise lengths, so printing may be faster for you, but I suspect that it wouldn’t be for most persons (not if their printing is to be easily legible and closely resemble that of books).
Hence, there will always be a market for people who can write cursive. What I foresee is that young people of today will go to a "handwriting service" and have a custom signature designed for them by a "cursive artist." I can see these cursive artists charging thousands of dollars to customize a signature for somebody and people will be willing to pay for it. After all, that signature will be part of their identity the rest of their lives so likely they will want something very distinctive and fancy, sort of like a "John Hancock" signature. Once the signature is designed, it will be electronically encrypted and only accessible to the person it was designed for. They will then be able to electronically affix the signature to all their documents.
It's probably been 20 years since I wrote anything in cursive other than my own name. In fact, I hardly ever even print either and as a result, my handwriting has gotten so poor that I find myself printing in block letters, otherwise, I won't even be able to read it!
Since the early 1990s, I have been writing primarily on the keyboard.
Looking back on my school years, the most important class I ever took was typing. It wasn't called keyboarding back then because personal computers didn't exist for the most part. I took typing for two years, my sophomore and junior year of high school. The first year, we were taught on the manual typewriters, the kind you had to slap the carriage across with your hand when you wanted to move down a line and if you had to erase something, you carefully applied white-out with a tiny brush and typed over it after it dried. It was so time consuming to make corrections that you just learned to be careful and not make any mistakes at all.
In year two of typing, we moved up to the IBM electric typewriters and to us, those typewriters were like something out of the Jetsons. We felt like we were on the cutting edge of technology with those things! I wanted to buy one for home badly but they were so expensive that they were out of reach for my family's budget at the time. So my parents ended up getting me a manual Royal typewriter at a flea market, this typewriter was built sometime in the 1950s and even today, you can pull it down out of the attic and start using it. That's how solid and well-built it is.
I remember getting a lot of grief from my classmates for taking typing courses. Now this was the 1970s and only women were supposed to know how to type so this was considered a sissy course for a boy to take. I was only one of two boys in the class and I was teased to no end about how I was going to grow up to be somebody's secretary and whatnot.
But I'm glad I went through it because of all the skills I learned in high school, typing ended up being the most useful. I figure my ability to type well (I can even today type around 60 words a minute) has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income in my career.
Hence, there will always be a market for people who can write cursive. What I foresee is that young people of today will go to a "handwriting service" and have a custom signature designed for them by a "cursive artist." I can see these cursive artists charging thousands of dollars to customize a signature for somebody and people will be willing to pay for it. After all, that signature will be part of their identity the rest of their lives so likely they will want something very distinctive and fancy, sort of like a "John Hancock" signature. Once the signature is designed, it will be electronically encrypted and only accessible to the person it was designed for. They will then be able to electronically affix the signature to all their documents.
It's probably been 20 years since I wrote anything in cursive other than my own name. In fact, I hardly ever even print either and as a result, my handwriting has gotten so poor that I find myself printing in block letters, otherwise, I won't even be able to read it!
Since the early 1990s, I have been writing primarily on the keyboard.
Looking back on my school years, the most important class I ever took was typing. It wasn't called keyboarding back then because personal computers didn't exist for the most part. I took typing for two years, my sophomore and junior year of high school. The first year, we were taught on the manual typewriters, the kind you had to slap the carriage across with your hand when you wanted to move down a line and if you had to erase something, you carefully applied white-out with a tiny brush and typed over it after it dried. It was so time consuming to make corrections that you just learned to be careful and not make any mistakes at all.
In year two of typing, we moved up to the IBM electric typewriters and to us, those typewriters were like something out of the Jetsons. We felt like we were on the cutting edge of technology with those things! I wanted to buy one for home badly but they were so expensive that they were out of reach for my family's budget at the time. So my parents ended up getting me a manual Royal typewriter at a flea market, this typewriter was built sometime in the 1950s and even today, you can pull it down out of the attic and start using it. That's how solid and well-built it is.
I remember getting a lot of grief from my classmates for taking typing courses. Now this was the 1970s and only women were supposed to know how to type so this was considered a sissy course for a boy to take. I was only one of two boys in the class and I was teased to no end about how I was going to grow up to be somebody's secretary and whatnot.
But I'm glad I went through it because of all the skills I learned in high school, typing ended up being the most useful. I figure my ability to type well (I can even today type around 60 words a minute) has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income in my career.
Hence, there will always be a market for people who can write cursive. What I foresee is that young people of today will go to a "handwriting service" and have a custom signature designed for them by a "cursive artist." I can see these cursive artists charging thousands of dollars to customize a signature for somebody and people will be willing to pay for it. After all, that signature will be part of their identity the rest of their lives so likely they will want something very distinctive and fancy, sort of like a "John Hancock" signature. Once the signature is designed, it will be electronically encrypted and only accessible to the person it was designed for. They will then be able to electronically affix the signature to all their documents.
It's probably been 20 years since I wrote anything in cursive other than my own name. In fact, I hardly ever even print either and as a result, my handwriting has gotten so poor that I find myself printing in block letters, otherwise, I won't even be able to read it!
Since the early 1990s, I have been writing primarily on the keyboard.
Looking back on my school years, the most important class I ever took was typing. It wasn't called keyboarding back then because personal computers didn't exist for the most part. I took typing for two years, my sophomore and junior year of high school. The first year, we were taught on the manual typewriters, the kind you had to slap the carriage across with your hand when you wanted to move down a line and if you had to erase something, you carefully applied white-out with a tiny brush and typed over it after it dried. It was so time consuming to make corrections that you just learned to be careful and not make any mistakes at all.
In year two of typing, we moved up to the IBM electric typewriters and to us, those typewriters were like something out of the Jetsons. We felt like we were on the cutting edge of technology with those things! I wanted to buy one for home badly but they were so expensive that they were out of reach for my family's budget at the time. So my parents ended up getting me a manual Royal typewriter at a flea market, this typewriter was built sometime in the 1950s and even today, you can pull it down out of the attic and start using it. That's how solid and well-built it is.
I remember getting a lot of grief from my classmates for taking typing courses. Now this was the 1970s and only women were supposed to know how to type so this was considered a sissy course for a boy to take. I was only one of two boys in the class and I was teased to no end about how I was going to grow up to be somebody's secretary and whatnot.
But I'm glad I went through it because of all the skills I learned in high school, typing ended up being the most useful. I figure my ability to type well (I can even today type around 60 words a minute) has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income in my career.
I learned to touch-type on my own when I was in college, but never managed to acquire much speed (just enough to be slightly faster than if I wrote by hand). Perhaps I would have done better if I’d taken a formal course.
Knowing how to type has been useful to me because most of my life I’ve worked as a writer. Ordinarily I haven’t needed to type any faster than I can think, though, so not much speed has been required. :-)
Since I haven’t written in cursive in 20+ years I can guarantee my printing is faster.
I think the slant makes cursive look faster, it’s got that cartoon tilt.
I’m not sure when you’re estimating distance. And for where you’re putting you’re pen down I think once you’re in habit you just do. You might pick up some speed by not picking up the pen, but there’s so many more strokes I think you lose it.
I think the r, n, h problem is much worse in cursive, worse enough that I’d include m and double l in the list. That’s the group of letters that’s hardest to read when deciphering somebody’s cursive for the first time, because people tend to turn them just into loops. And the continuous strokes makes it worse, at least in print there’s supposed to be a gap between an r and an n so the reader knows it’s not an m, in cursive they both tend to wind up as 3 lumps in a row.
I don’t do any estimating of distance. It’s all just muscle memory at this point. Maybe I estimated when I was a kid, but at this point I’ve been putting pen to paper in one way shape or form for over 35 years. Much like when I’m typing (which I learned in jr high so 25 years or so) I’m thinking about content not method. The hand knows how to write, the brain is working on other stuff.
I don’t think you need to know cursive to come up with a signature. Really since cursive was invented by not picking up the pen between printed words there’s the basis for a signature. Also given that by age 30 most people’s signature has been reduced to a series of small and large bumps, doesn’t really matter if the person ever could write it neatly.
I don’t think electronically reproduced signatures are going to be that big a deal. yeah people will use them. But they won’t put that much thought into them. If people were really concerned about the appearance of their signatures they would continue to write them carefully, not reduce them to random bumps like we all do.
And...I notice that you are not someone with a visceral objection to cursive, but are taking a very balanced and reasonable stand.
In our homeschool I used a method from the beginning that taught children to print using the same direction of strokes that would be used later in cursive. When we introduced cursive it was a very **simple** matter of connecting the letters. Very easy!
Also...I would encourage the children to use careful penmanship when practicing spelling words ( no lost time there), and writing in their journals ( this was before computers were common in the home.), again no lost time.
But I’m glad I went through it because of all the skills I learned in high school, typing ended up being the most useful. I figure my ability to type well (I can even today type around 60 words a minute) has made me hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional income in my career.
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Once we had the computer in the home, one of the very first programs we bought was a typing program. The children were by then about 8,9, and 10. I was very serious about learning good habits with typing from the very beginning.
> “I think the r, n, h problem is much worse in cursive...”
Well, I suppose there are different types of cursive, but in mine those letters are both easy to make and easy to distinguish.
I gave up cursive over twenty years ago too, but I’m not printing much either nowadays, so my skill in printing has decreased a good bit as well. I doubt that I was ever completely comfortable printing ‘r’, ‘n’, and ‘h’ at a fast speed, though. If I was printing something important, I probably slowed down.
My handwriting is a combination of printing and cursive. I only sign my signature in cursive. BTW both of my parents handwriting was a combo of both too and at times our writings look amazingly alike.
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