No thread on cursive handwriting in five years. Even then, there were threads complaining it was no longer being taught in many places. Sure, lots of stuff is probably higher priority. Other threads talked about the pleasures of calligraphy, which was a big deal for whatever reason to my teacher when I was ten.
If they no longer teach cursive, are you limiting career options for those who tattoo inspirational phrases onto thugs and jugs? What else is it good for?
Has it been 5 years? Cursive is still useless and I hope they don’t teach it.
I had to learn it in elementary school as late as 1996. In that same classroom I got to view a website for the first time.
Yes, cursive, along with calligraphy should be taught as a option in High School, for those that want it.
I read once (no cite sorry) that teaching kids cursive, just as they are getting the full hang of reading & writing printed slows their reading skills down. Not sure about that but certainly teaching kids how to use a keyboard would be a hundred times more valuable.
I still use it for speed. I use block caps for legibility.
Not in our district…and its started to cause a strange issue…
My youngest is a U.S. History major. And some of the work requires transcribing original sources. And many of the students can’t read cursive. But of course, History PhDs who are teaching and older than dirt don’t understand that cursive isn’t something these kids have really ever come across before…“oh, my grandma writes cards like that.”
I tend towards that opinion, but some familiarity is useful for historical purposes and, well, some people still use cursive, so if you need to read their notes and stuff, good to at least have an idea of what it is and looks like. I wouldn’t spend much time on it, though, as I think there’s more useful things to learn at that age, and more modern skills have replaced it in utility for communication.
How is it “useless” to be efficient?
It is a good idea, but it depends on who will read it I think. If you make notes to yourself, it’s great. But not everybody else can read your scratching. For instance circa 1977, I bought this book.
In it, there’s a little joke about signatures. Chevy Chase’s signature at the beginning is pretty clear—you can make out each letter. After a couple years it turns out to be C---- C-----.
I notice that about my signature. The older I get, the less I recognize it.
Efficient for what? Winning a speed writing contest?
One data point: this year I am teaching twenty students in an algebra class. They range from seventh to tenth grade. Not a single one of them writes in cursive. Several of them write with beautiful clear printing, incredibly easy to read. Others don’t! But except for one or two, every one of them has writing that is easier and more efficient to read than just about any example of cursive I have ever seen.
If their elementary schools didn’t teach cursive, good for their elementary schools.
It’s a requirement here, that NC kids learn cursive by the end of fourth grade. But it’s an unfunded mandate and not tested, so compliance…varies.
When I was in the regular classroom I taught it somewhat–not daily, but over the year we’d hit all letters capital and lowercase. The main motivator for me wasn’t that it was mandated, but rather that so many kids were excited by it. I think that in a curriculum that is so heavily reading comprehension and math skills, they enjoyed having something that felt kind of artistic.
If I had my druthers, though, I’d replace it with origami, which I figure is a lot better for kids’ spatial awareness and reasoning skills. I bet you could inspire more than one kid to a career in engineering or construction with a good origami course in fourth grade.
As a left-hander I have never found cursive to be efficient - it took longer to write and I’d always end up smearing the side of my hand against what I’d already written and making a mess of it. I actively refused to use it as much as possible in assignments (even when it cost me points) and as an adult I only ever use it to sign my name.
Since most of us learned as children in grade school I wonder just how hard it would be for an adult to learn. It seems like something you could teach yourself with practice in a couple of days if you really wanted to.
I don’t quite see the connection between cursive and left-handedness (the smearing issue is separate), and yet I’m in the same boat (left-handed cursive hater). Cursive was always slower than print, and that’s without taking readability into account. If I was careful enough with my cursive that it was remotely tolerable to read, it was much slower than print.
The speed thing never made sense to me. Cursive is far loopier than print. So what if the number of individual strokes is less? Strokes don’t take time; distance does. And the pen moves farther with cursive than print.
You write a bunch of stuff in longhand?
No, you keyboard it.
Studies suggest that cursive is no faster than printing, though a form of print writing is faster than standard that either. (Here’s one study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/240538622_The_Relationship_Between_Handwriting_Style_and_Speed_and_Legibility)
That’s actually what I do – mostly printing, with some joins, and the very occasional cursive-style form where I find it equally efficient to the printed form. I find cursive, at least the Palmer method I was taught, horribly inefficient, with needless extra strokes, backtracks, loops, flourishes that slow me down.
Draw strokes are easier and work better than push strokes. When you are left handed, you push the pen left-to-right across the page: when you are right handed, you pull the pen left-to-right across the page.
If you want to actually do neat and beautiful left handed writing, the method is to rotate the page as you draw the letters. Merely turning the page upside down fixes the smearing, but trying to write letters upside down puts the serifs in the wrong place.
I haven’t written cursive since I began taking engineering courses. Yet, I still wonder, how do people who cannot write in cursive sign their names?
A sequence of letters will have roughly balanced push vs. draw strokes, though. It’s a little more towards the right, but it doesn’t seem like enough to make a difference.
I’m perfectly capable of neat lettering–in my drafting class, the teacher used my work as a (positive) example for the rest of the class. Cursive was just slow (and inherently ugly, IMO).
Not sure what you mean here. Neither typical print letters nor Palmer method cursive has serifs.