The Longhand Wave Goodbye
Having come up through Catholic school back in the days when the sisters wielded rulers, yardsticks and pointers with the skill and intent of samurai, I don't have especially pleasant memories of what passed for instruction in some areas. One of those was cursive writing.
Spending portions of some early grades copying letters, page after page, capitals and lower case, from some Palmer instruction guide was tedious and definitely the sort of thing many of us wanted to give up for Lent.
I can only imagine how much worse most of this was for the left-handed students, especially as the angle and direction of tilt to each letter was a matter of great importance to some of these fastidious loop and line nazis. The tortured poses some of these sinister fellows have to adopt in order to achieve the requisite tilt without punching holes in the page with the pen or pencil tip can be something to see.
In my case I can report that the cursive instruction wars didn't do me any good. I started out fine, as best I can tell, but at some critical, early juncture one of the teachers didn't care for the size of my writing, finding it too large for her tastes. Fearfully accomodating, the result was that I slammed it down in the other direction. Worse, as various other things were going on on the homefront that shrinkage became emblematic of my developing approach to life. Trying to make everything about me small, unobtrusive, quiet. As in that Monty Python instructional film, I'd determined not to be seen. Remain tiny, quiet and deep enough in the shadows and most people will be distracted by things larger, louder and more well lit.
While the battle went on for several years, the moment I was no longer required to at least attempt to produce something legible my handwriting almost immediately devolved into tiny, spastic twitches like an EEG from someone both in a coma and having a mild siezure, broken by sudden appearances of printed letters and strange, bastard offspring of block and cursive. I could read it fine, but it was only something suited to note-taking.
As a parent I've come up through aspects of this process all over again, and while there are many disciplines of importance I have been unable to develop the strength of hypocrisy to make writing cursive a primary skill to focus on. Part of being both effective as and surviving the process of parenthood is carefully selecting one's battles.
The ability to recognize and read cursive, much as with our culture's weird fixation on roman numerals, sure, these are necessary, but giving back in kind? No, not something I've stressed, and as I've seen it's not something the schools have consistently been stressing either. One's seldom far from a keyboard these days, and notes carry the burden in the meantime.
So it was that I was less than surprised to learn that schools are gradually dropping cursive writing as anything much more than something to introduce students to in short bursts as more of a take it or leave it tool. The items raised in defense of cursive aren't particularly effective, and I can easily see that the arc of the future will simply be to have students deal with essay questions as part of tests taken with keyboard and mouse.
(The only real chagrin in the piece was in seeing "teacher" Debbie (8 paragraphs in, though - embarassingly - it's also lifted as a bolded quote above the preceding paragraph) using a form of the increasingly idiomatic phrase "we could care less." Someone closer to her please give Deb a helpful slap and remind her that words are supposed to have meaning, and so she meant to say "we really couldn't care less." What she said implies that they do care about cursive handwriting skills. It's bad enough when random people say things like this, but in a teacher it's rightfully seen as a raging infection. Cure her or quarantine her before she infects generations on the rise.)
Granted, I know that the intent of cursive writing is one of utility and speed, as being able to produce an unbroken string of loops, peaks, arcs and dives within a single word is speedier than the lifting and replacement of the pencil or pen tip on the page to form each letter, but for some of us forming acceptible, broadly legible writing just isn't going to happen quickly enough to make this a true utility. The more I think of it the more I believe we should simply be taught shorthand. It isn't as if someone in this age and culture is going to turn in his term paper as something handwritten anyway.
As with everything else, the ones to complain the loudest will be those for whom their penmanship is a prized accomplishment and part of who they are. No one wants his personal stock to drop, so I expect that some impassioned defenses will be raised, but almost certainly to no avail.
Just work on that signature, kids. Make it something that really identifies you, something that's your own, and hold to it. As things stand we're already being rapidly reduced to a number and encrypted ID's stored on magnetic strips. It's really just a matter of how quickly it's happening and whether or not it'll be our social security number (which, under this administration is meaning less and less in any literal sense anyway) or some brand new national ID number. The writing's on the wall, and it's not cursive.
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Comments
It's far from an exact analogy, of course, but, well, I'm deeply suspicious of any movement to cease teaching kids how to write. Which is where this is going. It's not just cursive that will be eliminated; eventually -- not too far off -- kids simply will have no idea how to communicate in writing if they don't have a keyboard handy, and they won't be able to read anyone else's hand writing, either, whether it's printed (as my handwriting is) or cursive.
Now, I grant you, the only time I use hand written stuff these days is when I address an envelope, or have to (grudgingly, bitching the whole time) actually write something down that's on the computer screen because for some reason I can't block/copy/paste. But I'd hate to see the human capacity for actually setting down concepts on paper by hand become completely obsolete. Some day we might need it again.
Perhaps a close analogy is how horrified I feel when I reflect on just how lost most of our contemporaries are at doing basic arithmetic if they don't have a calculator handy. I vastly prefer to have a calculator when I'm, say, figuring out the build total of a HeroClix team, but I can do it on paper if I need to, or even in my head... while the SuperKids simply seem baffled at the very notion of doing it that way. It's frightening. What happens if/when all the calculators stop working? We go back to a mathematical conceptual framework consisting of 'none, one, and many'?
The ability to take and read notes isn't necessarily being ushered out the door, though I certainly see that trend as a possibility if we develop classroom environments where everyone is working on a laptop. People will go with whatever's easiest.
For now they're still teaching the skills, and no one's (at least that I've read) eliminating the use of pencils and pens, and a great deal of time's still being spent in the earliest grades on printed letters.
Meanwhile, the curriculum is forcing more and more writing (composition) out of the kids. In my estimation if leaving the clumsy, if simple and reliable, pencil and paper behind as something of a relic means that people are learning construct thoughts in words and effectively communicate, then it's not a bad trade-off.
All that said, I do share some of the trepidation, having seen exactly the same thing when it comes to calculators.
In the end, it's all a matter of trade-offs. Our lives are built around technology allowing us to do things we wouldn't be able to do, or at least not well. Just think about all the physical ground we've lost simply to the automobile in terms of ability to travel distances and take items with us.
T: It's definitely something being pressed even more quickly out of the system by the stress on standardized testing skills -- something that's increased markedly in this era of No Child Left Behind where schools are having to worry about their budgets based on the results of standardized test scores.
Writing compostion is still a core skill. We spend a great deal of time on writing portfolios in ALL grades, at least in Kentucky. And now with the new GE Math and Science Grant, Science has finally been given a bigger piece of the pie again.
One of the hardest things about being a teacher today is that "they" keep adding more and more to our day, without adding more time. There simply aren't enough hours in the day. And I will tell you that the MAJORITY of the teachers I work with are incredibly concerned with educating their students, not just passing them on. If the public at large knew how much work teachers do above and beyond the required, they would be astounded. Most teachers are very dedicated. Lord knows, we ain't in it for the money.
Thanks for an insightful and thought-provoking post. It's always good to read your stuff.
J.
Along with the hours it demands I haven't known a teacher yet who didn't end up reaching into his or her own pocket or otherwise calling on personal resources for classroom materials because it was the only way to get necessary materials in a timely and reliable fashion.
The GOP in particular, having long since decided that they can't court teachers' votes as a block, continue the union-busting tactics and applying the approach of Free Market to the school system. Things aren't bad enough that we have to start taking a mix of low-bidder contract awards for the masses and pay as you go private schools for both what remains of the middle class and every family that can work themselves to a nub to buy a future for their children.
These are not signs of a compassionate and enlightened society.
One size fits all education gets to be a problematic thing, though, once one gets beyond basic skills, and even what constitutes basic skills is under revision as we continue to technologically change our environment. It's spending long stretches of classroom time with instructors who obviously are not well-versed in pieces of software and operating systems attempting to teach the same that bothers me. I've been seeing that happening with both kids here.