So, They've Killed Cursive in Indiana Schools
Which, um, sad? But honestly, it's like teaching people how to make quill pens, not in a "weekend at Colonial Williamsburg" way, but actually devoting months of curriculum time to it. Typing: the wave of the not-even-the-future.
There's always the "but what if we have a nuclear apocalypse and all the computers disappear" school of thought, but, again, printing, you know?
Also, this is that thing you secretly worry about with vibrators, where it's all, what if we get too used to Japanese Engineering Mastery, and then we enter a new climate-change-induced ice age in which electricity and battery power disappear, etc., and we can't cope and become hysterical?
It's not going to happen. You're going to be just fine. And if it did, you could always try using a quill, right?
Photo via Flickr
But when they grow up, how will the youth – the FUTURE – of Indiana sign their vibrator credit card receipts?
asdfjkl;
this article made me sad. not everything is done by computer. how will they sign checks?
@becky@twitter Checks are gonna be around for another five years, tops. There is literally no chance that it's going to come up for the Indiana third graders.
@Nicole Cliffe how will they know the romance of a letter written in cursive? how will they sign, ANYTHING?! captcha ≠ cursive.
@becky@twitter As a lefty, who spent third grade coated in smeared pencil, I was sort of hoping we'd go back to just "making our mark" with a big, wobbly X. And maybe a PIN number instead.
@becky@twitter I wish I had something more amusing to say, but you can teach a kid how to sign her name. It would take a week, and that'd be it.
Ъℯςķч αℸ ℸωίℸℸℯ╓
@Patrick M yes, patrick darling?
@Nicole Cliffe They will still need to sign the back of their credit cards.
@becky@twitter They can print. I use a mixture of both cursive and print, because even with months of teaching I never quite got it, but just because you don't know cursive doesn't mean you can't write.
@becky@twitter I really wish people would stop using checks. Especially in front of me at the grocery store.
@spates Those darn women!!!! Always writing their checks!!!!!!!!!
@theharpoon ladies write checks like THIIIIIISSSS
As someone with atrocious penmanship, I applaud this decision.
@Josh is like Germany Ambitious and Misunderstood Aww this makes me sad! I'm 30 (gasp) and I worked at a place where you had to sign your name when you came in. I was DISGUSTED by the fact that a 18 year old came in and didn't know how to sign their name in cursive. How do you not know how to do your own signature? Even if your penmanship is gross…you should at least know how to sign your name! Also this kills me because I think handwritten notes are awesome and I dread the day I get a typed out thank you note….kills the romanticism of it.
(I also might be a little dramatic in my reply but ack!)
@swxnw thank you. i was beginning to feel like i was the only old soul on her old lady soapbox. cursive!
@swxnw What the fuck is a "note"?
@boyofdestiny: In the olden days, they used to write their Tweets on a piece of paper and then a government employee would deliver it to just one person.
@Hot mayonnaise I love you.
This US trend of doing away with cursive is hardly widespread. Some European and South American nations teach it from the get go and in many so-called "developing countries" it is a cornerstone of elementary education. How "we" are really different is in our underfunding of education (creating a climate where choices "must" be made) and in our arrogance that the way things are for some are the way things are for all. A "tying present" has coexisted with a handwritten world for centuries. We may read more than a century ago, and have access to more typed printed word, but the other has hardly gone the way of a replaced technology.
@Francisco I grew up in Holland, and I never learned to print. I was 14 before I moved country and my dad suggested I should maybe start simplifying my handwriting so I could take notes more quickly at my new school. Now I have an odd in-between script, and about three different ways of writing my fs, but I like it, and I can do cursive properly if I concentrate. I find printing more difficult; I can't do a non-cursive lowercase d, for example.
@Francisco I did not grow up in Holland but pretty much do this anyway.
@Francisco When you cant afford A/C or computers in your classrooms the most cost effective thing to teach is handwriting.
Weirdly enough, fourth grade was the year we were taught cursive and had to do all our assignments/homework in it, AND the year that we had Colonial Day, when we dressed up like it was the 17th century and had school as if we were colonists (but with fewer beatings). Needless to say, it still remains one of my favorite days of school EVER.
@Nutmeg That sounds super fun if you're not Native American!
@Napoleon This was a magnet school so they were big on teaching us that everyone can get along despite differences, less so on accurate history (or math, or reading skills)
This gives me the sads. Maybe schools can still offer cursive handwriting, but as part of their art classes instead?
@LastMinuteLulu Unfortunately, they killed art classes years ago. Cursive is the last of the metaphorical blood from the budgetary stone. Or something.
@boyofdestiny Yes, unfortunately I know first-hand that art and music classes are always the first to go. I went to a specialized art high school were we actually had no art classes one semester because of budget cuts. Real. :/
UM AMEN to the vibrator issue. That is actually the exact reason that I've never ventured to use one. What if a regular non-vibrational member isn't enough anymore and during sex I'm all "needs more loud humming noises"?
@Chelsea Dowell@twitter Eating cake doesn't mean you won't like eating pie?
Boo, I love writing in cursive. But I guess the people who want to know can easily find ways to learn. In the meantime, forgery's going to be a bitch for people who can barely print their own name.
Cursive totally ruined my penmanship. Everything I write is a gigantic mess of squiggles and loops. My theory is that if I hadn't been taught cursive, I'd just have learned to print quickly, and when I slow down and print letters they actually look like letters.
Also, I worry that worry about vibrators all the time!
@dakdakdak Ditto. My handwriting has been virtually illegible for many years, and seriously, what was the point of learning cursive? In the 6th grade we had to write our essays in ink in cursive, and I spent way too much time agonizing over that. I remember my 5th grade teacher telling us constantly that people only wrote cursive in the real world, and we had to learn it or we'd be totally left in the dust. Um, what?
But what will they do when they have to write that paragraph before taking the GRE?
Will standardized tests be obsolete? I hate future generations.
@Lucienne I proctor the SATs, and the most difficult part is getting those assholes to write the integrity statement in cursive. I usually have to write it out for them on the board & even then it takes them about 10 minutes to write one sentence. Jerks.
Sandy Hingston has an interesting article in this month's Philadelphia Magazine about the loss of cursive: http://bit.ly/mOxpvO. Apparently it's great for neurological development.
(I also love writing in cursive. Over the years my version has become totally unintelligible, but it's really pretty!)
Very upset by this. I loved learning cursive, and I love writing in cursive. I always thought it was one of those rites of passage, like printing was the equivalent of training wheels, and cursive was how big kids and grownups wrote.
I mentioned this in the last post about the death of cursive and got teased about it, but really, will future generations be able to read cursive fonts, like The Hairpin logo? A lot of my friends are graphic designers, and I wonder about what this means for the future of design and fonts in general.
We "become hysterical" over the loss of vibrators?
I see what you did there.
@area@twitter Yaaaaaaay. Super-topical allusions FTW!
@Nicole Cliffe I had to read that line a couple of times before the coin dropped. Very clever, Mr. Bond.
@area@twitter Thank you for pointing that out! But why were you re-reading that line in the first place? Were you slowly contemplating the horror of that post-apocalyptic scenario?
So, in the future, there will be no one who will be able to read original source material – letters, government documents, handwritten manuscripts, etc? The English major nerd in me is weeping for the loss of direct access to original materials….
There will always be English major nerd-types to remember cursive and Latin and things so they can roll around in original materials to their little hearts' content.
@Bebe Not yet there won't, I love reading handwritten works, my problem is the cursive that is either so close together it looks like some abstract barcode, or so far apart there are no discernible letters, just a giant squiggle. Though, I'm a rarity in my generation, so yeah, eventually it'll just be us literary nerds.
@Bebe Nah, historians and whatnot will learn to read cursive if not write it. People can still read olde timey Fraktur (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraktur_%28script%29) even though they phased that out after WWII.
Edith might just as well start tagging these sorts of posts with "Yes, Bittersweet, you are old." Sigh.
I feel like at one point I read or was told that different methods of writing (whether it be typing, printing or cursive) cause your brain to function differently and thus for your thought patterns to change and adjust. Cursive writing obviously allows for different thinking solely for its fluidity and ease compared to printing and typing is another beast all of its own.
Cursive can help dyslexic children learn to read because it has no letters that are the same forwards and backwards. But whatever it's obviously valueless in this digital age, or something.
@brigidb You've made a mistake: cursive "f" is a backwards cursive "J" … And there are many other reasons that cursive was and is infuriatingly frustrating for many dyslexics (of whom I am one).
@Kate Gladstone@facebook "can help" being the operative phrase. Sorry to have made that mistake about F and J. As a dyslexic myself, I read a lot about dyslexia education and some educators have found that learning the cursive alphabet (not learning to write it, that's a different skill set) is easier for some dyslexic children.
I apologize if I offended you as cursive seems to have.
I've been teaching college freshmen who graduated Indiana high schools for seven years. None of them have been able to read my very neat and reasonable cursive the entire time.
Not that we ought to let the monkeys run the zoo, but apparently they've been teaching it badly forever anyway.
(Though my mom, here in Indianapolis, is very worried about this, so maybe I'm being too cavalier.)
@Better to Eat You With Oh, and everybody who's fretting: It'll just be the kids from *Indiana* who can't read anything. Since the governor is hell-bent on destroying our educational system, it's not like kids here are going to be gainfully employable in another generation or so, anyway.
@Better to Eat You With: Wait. If you don't learn to *write* cursive, that means you can't *read* cursive? Mind blown.
Cursive is good for neurological and fine motor development. In Montessori school we teach cursive first – it is easier for children to write, because they don't have to pick up their pencil and then figure out where to put it down.
I don't think it is anachronistic to teach children to write well.
@hallu That's how it is (or at least was, when I was a kid) done in many countries in Europe, too.
I will miss you, cursize zed.
@leon.saintjean I do that zed when I print, so.
When I bought my first place, they made me write out my full name in cursive on about 56 documents. I have a signature that I can do very quickly, but it's my first initial and last name. So for the house, they insisted I write out my first and last name completely. It felt soooo awkward after all these years and took forever!
Curse cursive!
I think that printing is just fine for any purpose. I did my SATs in print and didn't feel like my writing was illegible or that I was going too slowly. I can't think of one person under the age of 60 that writes consistently in cursive. Most people's cursive is lazier than their printing anyways (cursive you can just squiggle the pen a little aaand… wait, is it an N or an M..?)
When we learned cursive, I raised my hand like the good little kiss-ass I was and asked how to write cursive numbers. I'm still embarrassed and enraged that numbers don't come cursive style.
Handwriting matters … But does cursive matter?
Research shows: the fastest and most legible handwriters avoid cursive. They 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. (Citation on request.)
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.
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.)
Kate Gladstone — CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
Director, the World Handwriting Contest
Co-Designer, BETTER LETTERS handwriting trainer app for iPhone/iPad
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
@Kate Gladstone@facebook
That's exactly how I write now. I print some letters and join only certain ones. I also use print capital letters for some of them. When it comes to taking notes, I created my own shorthand in college, which stood me in good stead. I could take dictation as fast as somebody could talk. However, I also learned typing by age 12, and now that I can take notes on a laptop keyboard, it's much faster. When I go into meetings with my laptop, everybody lets me take the notes, which I usually can get down verbatim, and then emails me for a copy :>) A little job security there…
I'm 19, never learned cursive, and yet somehow I can still sign my name? THE FUTURE IS NOW.
I TRAINED myself to write cursive.
It's how grown-ups write and seeing as every other method of growing up that I've tried (i.e. having babies, learning to drive, going to college, having a job, getting married) seems to have failed I was forced to resort to it.
Some dyslexics can find that writing cursive can help with spelling as words go into muscle memory rather than, well, memory. I'm not sure how this works but it seems to make sense.
I find cursive very difficult to read, as many people seem to use it as an excuse to write sloppily. But then again, I can't really remember the last time I hand-wrote something that wasn't my name or had to read a significant segment of handwriting. I'm 21 and a college student.
No need for signatures in the future, not even for checks and credit card receipts. Because the concept of currency will be abolished and everyone Left Behind will just use their Mark of the Beast to pay for everything. Which makes me wonder, how do we tip the pizza guy after the Rapture?
@Chelsea Dowell@twitter I stopped writing in cursive as soon as teachers stopped requiring me to use it because my cursive was always sloppier than my printing. Now, the only thing I can write cursive is my name (which is why it was so hard to sign my new name when I got married).
As @Kate Gladstone@facebook said, I sometimes join letters, especially with common words like "the".
Cursive is incredibly valuable in training neurological pathways for memory, accurate spelling, and hand-eye coordination.
I believe one of the reasons we have a hard time remembering *and* learning new information in general is because we aren't writing things down in long form. Typing doesn't tell your brain anything because the keys feel the same–writing it down *does* because every letter and word has a unique shape and form.
And?
Shitty handwriting is a total turn-off.
This depresses the hell out of me. I am 22 and was taught cursive in my small-town school starting at age 8 (essentially once we all were comfortable printing). We were told state tests/high school papers/anything, really, would be required to be done in cursive.
Then I moved across the country, and cursive wasn't taught at all. Nothing was required in cursive except for a copied-out statement on all state tests saying that we weren't cheating, signed our names, etc. Even as a sophomore in high school, I remember my peers having trouble with that, and just doing a connected swirly script.
I understand people who want to type out notes, and I won't argue that keyboard skills are a necessity in today's day and age. But when I'm in a classroom, I absorb SO MUCH MORE when writing things out by hand, to the point where I don't really have to study much if I handwrite notes, but always end up cramming with typed notes. I think it also has something to do with remembering what color pen I used/where on the page I wrote it, and being a pianist and using kinetic memory often.
Another question: did anyone learn a style of cursive where you started your letters with little loops? I especially remember this on B, D, and T, and on 2s and 3s.
@eringthatsme@twitter Yes. E's were the worst. We had to put little loops on capital C, D, E, F, H, K, M, N, Q, R, T, U, V, W, and X.
Don't tell me cursive saves time. That shit is just ridiculous.
Wait, does everyone but me sign their name in cursive? Why?
I remember being forced to write my name in cursive when we were forced to write everything in cursive (in grade school). But as soon as they let us write however we wanted, I changed my signature. My first name starts with an S, which is the stupidest letter in cursive, so I changed it to a big swirly printed S and the rest of the letters soon followed, changing from strict cursive to a joined-print style.
Cursive is the work of the devil. My kids needed OT to try and learn it and still had tremendous problems throughout elementary school. They were marked down a trillion times for having bad penmanship. I've been advocating teaching keyboarding instead for at least twenty years.
O America…we've had this conversation before and I know I asked about it last time there was a post about it but I still don't understand what you are all talking about.
I'm 63 years old, and I grew up in the Midwest, in Minnesota. Cursive was a total fetish with our teachers, and we were graded brutally on the perfection of our writing. If a paper was intelligently written but the handwriting was not up to par, we would be graded down severely.
I shaped my letters reasonably well, but I was forced to stay after school to perfect my cursive; this was in 4th grade. The whole experience was a nightmare. As soon as I could, I taught myself to type and started typing my papers. At that time, typing was considered a very exotic skill. The teachers didn't know how to handle that at first, but eventually accepted it. Because I could type very fast, I never lacked for a job and was able to put myself through college as a medical assistant and transcriber.
I can no longer write cursive very well, thanks to a lifetime of typing, but I still think it should be taught. Some say that creative writing (I am a professional writer) by hand uses a different part of one's brain than typing does, and the result is more "artistic." I don't know about that, since some of our greatest authors typed — others, like Colette, wrote in longhand. But for me, longhand is just too slow and difficult to correct. I'm so accustomed to the lightning fast response of a keyboard, I could never go back.
And then there is the difficulty for the reader. When I worked as a secretary, I had to decipher some very unintelligible handwriting from my bosses. It ate up my time and was not reliably accurate. So maybe it is time to move on. I always worry, though, what if there is a power failure; what if we are forced to go back to longhand… we should know how to use it. Today, I use a combination of printing and writing for optimal legibility. It's not elegant but nobody has trouble reading it.