Related to:Education
Some politicians choose to focus on poverty or drop-out rates or foster care or government spending.
But in Idaho, Rep. Linden Bateman is on a different sort of crusade: protecting cursive. According to the Spokesman-Review, he introduced a resolution this morning to make instruction of cursive part of the Idaho Common Core. He's even been visiting with reporters in Boise to show off his penmanship.
As a retired history teacher, he worries that if kids lose their ability to write all swoopy-like, the distance between the past and present will grow even further.
“What will that do to historical research?” he asked. “Family research?
Genealogy? Our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence – kids will
not be able to read those documents in the original. It disconnects
kids from their past – weakens the connection.”
But it may be too late. We're already there. Have you ever sat down with the Declaration of Independence lately? It's entirely illegible. The s's look like f's, making things even more infcrutable. The shapes of letters have changed, and the art of calligraphy has become the province of wedding invitations, not correspondence.
We wrote this article on this exact phenomenon two years ago. Bad cursive is worse than no cursive.
Kathleen Wright is the national product manager for handwriting for Zaner-Bloser, a company whose curriculum has been used to teach handwriting in schools since 1904. “I’m seeing a rise in concern at the university level,” Wright says. Cursive handwriting on essays turned in to college professors is becoming increasingly messy. With standardized test prep panicking teachers at elementary schools nationwide, the amount of time spent on cursive instruction has fallen drastically.
...
And as cursive quality gets worse and cursive usage becomes more rare, choosing to write in cursive becomes ever more dangerous. Something needs to change.
Just ask the ultimate arbiter of truth, the organization that proved the existence of Santa Claus: The U.S. Postal Service. Remember the cursive Q? “The Postal Office asked us to change it,” says Wright of Zaner-Bloser. Postal workers kept thinking it was a “2.”
Expect this trend to continue: As iPads and smart boards become increasingly ubiquitous, cursive still will be taught. But as an elective taken by artists, designers, and history majors.
But it is still faster and easier than writing block letters.
Jan 22, 2013 | Reply to this comment
So someone in cyberland still thinks handwriting matters ... but does cursive matter?
Research shows: the fastest and most legible handwriters join only some letters, not all of them: making the easiest joins, skipping the rest, and using print-like shapes for those letters whose cursive and printed shapes disagree. (Citations appear below.)
Often, cursive programs and teachers strongly discourage such practices. Students learning cursive are taught to join all letters, and to use different shapes for cursive versus printed letters. (These requirements do not align with the research findings above.)
When following the rules doesn´t work as well as breaking them, it’s time to re-write and upgrade the rules. The discontinuance of cursive offers a great opportunity to teach some better-functioning form of handwriting that is actually closer to what the fastest, clearest handwriters do anyway. (There are indeed textbooks and curricula teaching handwriting this way. Cursive and printing are not the only choices.)
Reading cursive still matters — this takes just 30 to 60 minutes to learn, and can be taught to a five- or six-year-old if the child knows how to read. The value of reading cursive is therefore no justification for writing it.
(In other words, we could simply teach kids to _read_ old-fashioned handwriting and save the year-and-a-half that are expected to be enough for teaching them to _write_ that way too ... not to mention the actually longer time it takes to teach someone to perform such writing _well_.)
Remember, too: whatever your elementary school teacher may have been told by her elementary school teacher, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over signatures written in any other way. (Don´t take my word for this: talk to any attorney.)
CITATIONS:
/1/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HANDWRITING STYLE AND SPEED AND LEGIBILITY.
1998: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
and
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer.
DEVELOPMENT OF HANDWRITING SPEED AND LEGIBILITY IN GRADES 1-9.
1998: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
(NOTE: there are actually handwriting programs that teach this way: names on request.
Shouldn´t there be more of them?)
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
and the World Handwriting Contest
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com Jan 23, 2013 | Reply to this comment