Posted on 07/07/2011 7:52:05 AM PDT by newzjunkey
Oddly enough, there are actually people who learn Esperanto, and congregate with each other, and speak it amongst themselvs, and think themselves therefore something special. My grad-school thermodynamics professor was one such. He also bought a Volkswagen "Quantum" (car) simply because of the name.
Of course, there are also folks who learn Klingon, and ...
Well...I DID learn shorthand...but didn’t use it, so lost it....I write VERY fast in cursive and it’s readable ....and, I think typing is useful too....whatever works for each person. I just don’t remember what I type as well as what I write...
Bet you don’t remember a word of what you typed, though, do you?
Remember it? Of course. Writing/typing is much slower than reading.
Since I am a retired secondary math teacher, I agree. It is really sad when they do not have the reasoning ability to tell if the answer they got on the calculator is not a good one.
OK, I’ll admit, I also hate the thought of something that I did so much of earlier in life disappearing or becoming rare, like vinyl records.
Would probably quarrel with you on that one. In an increasingly wired world, not sure how you get away from keyboards.
But if you teach the kids DVORAK in the school they won’t have DVORAK keyboards to use away from school, so they’ll learn QWERTY out there, or annoy their parent by figuring out how to reconfigure the family computer to DVORAK. And the big punchline is there really doesn’t seem to be that much gain. I was poking around the google on this and the general consensus seems to be that taking a refresher typing course will increase somebody’s typing speed by about the same as them learning DVORAK and takes less time. It seems that DVORAK is one of those theoretical improvements with little actual improvement. Probably because once people get used to the layout they just go, the more you type the faster you’ll be even if the layout is a little less than perfectly efficient, muscle memory and dexterity seem to have a bigger effect than keyboard efficiency.
My oldest who will finish his masters in accounting in December, **thanked** me for taking the time to teach cursive. He feels that his professors appreciated getting exams that were more easily graded. It also helped **him** see things more clearly and made achieving accuracy more predicable.
I once had an office assistant, in the days before computers, who wrote an excuse note for a patient that had visited the office. The owner of the patient’s business called the office because my assistant's handwriting was so poor she did not believe that it had come from an educated person in a medical clinic. The patient’s boss thought he had written it himself. After that I would always have a potential employee writing something in cursive. Poor handwriting was a reason for me not to hire them.
Finally....There are times when handwriting is needed. Having legible handwriting is appreciated by those who must read it. It is an indication of refinement and education.
Please read my post #149.
I would certainly support teaching good typing habits as early as possible in the elementary grades. Inefficient typing habits are hard to unlearn, and with the social networking we have today, even children in kindergarten are using keyboards. They might as well get off to good start in using that keyboard.
Handwriting can be taught as part of spelling, so there doesn’t need to be any wasted school time in learning this skill. The muscular action of writing out a word in correct cursive is very helpful in memorizing how to spell it.
And...While legible cursive is far less essential today, it is a nice skill to have. It is an indication of education and refinement.
What is “teh”?
Your predecessors lamented the loss of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ as well as ‘thy’ in general communication as well. :P
‘Teh’ is a common typo. I won’t bother trying to defend ‘b4’ because that annoys me as well.
A common typo for ‘the’ - among other usages.
Focal hand dystonia is a very real condition in about 5% of the population. Cursive is a theory with them.
Let's see, I bet you can fix a wagon wheel, shoe a horse, mill grain, build a home, build a cistern, an outhouse, and push a plow until your hands are blistered. Yeah you are a hell of guy. /s
Way to complete and deliberately miss the point. Let’s look at some of those sentences you deliberately skipped:
Evaporating skills are not society getting dumb, they’re society moving on. There’s other skills we’ve had to learn in the new modern world.
So of course I don’t have those skills you listed entirely to be argumentative, because our society has moved on. But I have other skills, like installing an OS and then using it, because those are the skills needed in a modern society. Every time somebody lists skills off that we no longer have they carefully ignore the fact that we don’t need them anymore either. Necessary skills don’t fade from the societal set, the skills that fade are the useless ones. Like cursive.
I certainly believe that is possible. It would be like any other motor skill such as not being able to dance, for instance.
We know that eventually someone will work out a "remote" that allows us to think to control and we'll dispense with keyboards and control units.
I would imagine such a device will allow us to write in whatever cursive we need. I will use German script of the early 1800s ~ even people of that time were unable to read it well.
Cursive handwriting is a simple skill that is quickly learned by children. If coupled with another school activity it doesn't need to take time from other subjects. My homeschoolers learned cursive and they were learning to read and they used it when practicing the spelling words. Writing words out manually helps in memorization.
I simply don't see this as an “either learn this skill but not that” type of situation.
Finally....When I ask people who are dead set against teaching cursive to children, I find that they never fully mastered the skill. It was a source of frustration for them in school because they were IMPROPERLY taught the wrong strokes in printing and they very understandably had a very hard time reversing the direction of the strokes in cursive.
Given the extremely **minimal** amount of time it takes to teach children cursive ( if done properly when children are first learning to print), it is worth the **minor** amount of effort. It is nice skill, and many see it as a sign of refinement and education. Now how could that hurt on the job or anywhere else in life?
By the way....Knowing a little bit of calligraphy is sometimes useful as well!
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