My son had a total waste of a third grade teacher and he never learned cursive. Now he’s in 5th grade and in a very academically strenuous school.
Should I make an effort to teach him cursive? I’ve heard some people says it is a waste of time. What do you think?
It certainly can’t hurt, and it will improve his fine motor skills.
I don’t know if you want to do it or hire a tutor or if he is in a different school talk to his teacher and see what she thinks is the best way for him to learn.
Does he have trouble reading cursive writing?
I would recommend learning to touch-type.
Yes, he should learn cursive.
Learning cursive will help develop and refine his small-motor skills.
For most people, it’s faster to write/take notes in cursive or some sort of modified cursive. And I expect a zillion people to chime in here stating that it’s not true for them. But even if people’s fast handwriting is “printing,” learning the fluid motions required for cursive probably helped.
And it’s a wonderful thing to be able to create an attractive handwritten document. Your son’s cursive skills may never develop to the point where his cursive looks really beautiful, but it would be a shame to deprive him of the opportunity.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
FWIW, I learned cursive in 2nd grade, was required to use it until 5th grade, and haven’t used it since (just graduated college). Wait, scratch that. On the SAT (when I took it), you were required to copy a printed statement saying that you are who you said you were, etc. You were not allowed to print this statement - you HAD to write it in cursive. It was ridiculous, but there you go. I think I couldn’t remember how to do a capital “I”, so I just made it up. The one benefit of scripting is that you supposedly can write faster, but having just finished a number of lecture classes in college, I can say I never felt ‘held up’ by my printing.
I never felt held up by writing in print either. Plus, it’s way harder to read cursive. I remember reading the Ann M. Martin Babysitters Club books, and HATING the characters who would write their little notebook reports in cursive. It looked pretty, sure, but the prettiest ones were the most impossible to read.
Look at it this way, your son is probably the last generation to even be given the chance to learn cursive. Want to deny him that?
I think it’s a useless skill for most people, like being able to operate a horse and buggy. But harmless if he has no unusual difficulty
I’m another cursive proponent. Then again, even at age 33, I’m a total dinosaur since I still write letters to a few of my friends. I’d third the fine motor skills and writing faster comments. I’d also say that fine penmanship seems to be dying out. I guess it doesn’t matter unless you’re sentimental like me, but it seems a shame that it’s going the way of the dodo - I loved that my mom and I could address my wedding invitations and it looked every bit as beautiful as if a calligrapher had done it. Although I guess most men don’t generally address wedding invites - not sure how that works anymore. I only got married four years ago, but things seemed to have drastically changed even since then.
It may not have been your child’s teacher. Many schools have removed cursive writing from the curriculum because of the availibility of computers and typing. (This was as of one of my education classes in 2003.)
It’s more important to have legible handwriting than cursive handwriting, IMHO. I wouldn’t stress about your son not knowing it unless it’s a requirement in his current school.
I have- not to toot my own horn- gorgeous, fluid cursive handwriting.
I haven’t written anything in cursive since before college, though- a good 10 years.
This is as good a reason as any I can think of to have him learn. It may not do him any good, but it certainly won’t do him any harm, and you never know just when down the line he may find himself being required to write in cursive for some arcane reason.
Or you could teach him calligraphy. Send him to school with an ink well and a quill. It may take him longer to write his notes, but at least they’ll look pretty 
(Oh, and ditto on the touch-typing thing. Even when I was in high school things were switching to an expectation of students typing and printing reports at home. Tell him it’ll give him more time to play video games by getting his homework done faster. Keyboarding was the most useful class I took in high school by a long shot.)
Exactly. Ask. If they aren’t going to require it, I say don’t bother. He will get a lot more return on time invested for learning other stuff.
I moved from a school where you learned cursive in 4th grade, to a school where you learned it in 3rd grade, missing it in both. Later, I learned the letterforms, but never developed the skill.
Today, I write in an almost illegible, sloppy print. My signature looks like that of a five-year old. Writing a note that I want someone else to be able read, such as an absence note to my kids schools, is a such a miserable process that I will fire up the computer, compose the note and print it out, unless there is a power failure.
And, yes, when i took the GREs, we had to copy the statement in cursive, and it took me at least ten minutes - while the entire rest of the group sat around and waited - the slowest had been done for at least five minutes.
So, YES! YES!! YES!!!
(I am quite literate, and am considered to be an excellent writer and editor. However, had I grown up in pre-word processor times, I would be severely handicapped in this regard.)
I took a touch-typing class in school, and learned almost nothing except where the colon key was. I learned to type by using AOL Instant Messenger, and now can hit 70 words per minute on a good day.
IOW, he won’t need to be taught how to type. He’ll learn.
I had absolutely no idea that cursive was going out of fashion! :eek: I write in it all the time, especially inside greeting cards. Color me shocked.
I guess it’s “useless” in the sense that if you can print, that will be sufficient for whatever writing you need to do. However, I don’t think being able to write a handwritten thank-you note or sympathy note in nice cursive writing will ever go out of style.
My school made me learn cursive. It would take me an hour to two hours to write out a single printed page of text and my hand would hurt like hell when I was done.
Cursive can just merrily go off and die a tortuous death so far as I’m concerned.
Then, it’s not “cursive” that was the problem. It was the method of teaching.
In real life, letterforms don’t always have rigidly predictable patterns. Even fashions in typefaces change. If for no other reason, people should learn to write by hand so that they know how to read handwriting.
This is one of the strangest sentences I’ve ever had the opportunity to read in my lifetime. Do you think “cursive” letterforms are defined by law? I invent new letterforms nearly every time I write something by hand. That’s how handwriting works.