It occurs to me that teaching people to read cursive is not at all the same thing as teaching them to write cursive, and can probably be done much faster. Learning to recognize the several things which might be a capital cursive F is one problem; learning to produce even one of them reliably and legibly at a reasonable rate of speed is another, and is what I remember as taking most of the time – as themapleleaf describes.
Well then, the question is by which year of schooling are today’s students required to type their assignments. Up until then, they would be getting in at least a few years of penmanship practice, whether it be joined up or otherwise. (And to what extent do teachers care at all about the precise style the kid uses, as long as it be legible?)
This is purely speculation, but I figure the old-school method of teaching students to write with pen and ink was, if you had enough control to be able to write legibly using a crappy dip pen, you could write with anything. Or something like that. Like driving an old car with no synchromesh.
Don’t teachers, particularly at higher levels, have some latitude over what they teach? We had to learn Real Olde English to read the original Beowulf. It was not super hard, but neither is cursive. Cursive is not that useful. But many subjects are not that useful to the average person. It’s been a long time since I used Green’s Theorem or synthesized butanoate esters.
This is really familiar to me, as I went to Catholic school, too. I don’t remember the pen holding corrections, but maybe I just held mine the "right " way. One time we were writing saints’ names as an exercise. For the capital letter P we were doing St. Peter and St. Paul. These are such mindless tasks, that my brain would wander, and I started adding an ‘a’ to St. Paul (and I actually did it in this post in the previous sentence – and I was kinda paying attention!). I flunked that exercise.
We didn’t have crappy drip pens, we had cartridge pens! Ooooo, technology!
I love that handwriting and hope the writer’s life never depends on the legibility of a note he has written. I can make out the numbers though, the writer still has some way to go until he is completely unintelligible.
To quote an old friend, “Hire the left-handed – it’s fun watching them try to write!”
Speaking of Russian handwriting, wow, that reminds me of the accident in 1997 where a technician was building an experimental uranium assembly where the outer dimension of the copper reflector was recorded in the original logbook as 205 mm, but he copied it as 265 mm. This, when he went to assemble it, caused the upper hemisphere to drop onto the bottom, the whole thing to go critical, and he was toast. Sometimes your life does depend on legible handwriting!
Well, I learned cursive in school at a very early grade (2nd maybe?), but thereafter, every time I cursed I got in trouble for it.
My father, who eventually became a history professor but had dabbled in teaching history lessons at the primary level, sometimes had the students carve their own pens out of goose quills and write with those. Technology!
(This was in the 1960s or so, so goose quills were still quite the current technology.)
If younger folks haven’t learned cursive, does that mean they don’t know how to sign their names?
I understand we can print our names, but is that really happening?
Does anyone here see a lot of young folks signatures? Are they really printing their names?
This isn’t a completely either-or situation, even assuming people are signing their names as opposed to using a repeatable squiggle.
Look at this list of presidential signatures. The only thing they have in common is a complete lack of consistency. None look like typical elementary school cursive. They mostly use some type of connected lettering, though often to a very limited extent. Several look like they were written by third graders. Close to a majority are indecipherable without already knowing who they were. They’re all completely idiosyncratic.
Even assuming people want a “normal looking” signature that roughly corresponds to their name (an unwarranted assumption, as per previous posts), they can simply print their name without lifting the pen, maybe adding a loop here and there to make it look better. After some practice, if they want, they might add a little flourish to the capital letters to make it distinctive (and unrelated to any conventional method of cursive writing).
My signature is a consistent scrawl. I’m old enough to have been taught cursive, but probably haven’t used it this century.
Yes, I had people demand I do that. I replied- “You mean- write my name, not my signature?”
When I as signing in to take the GRE back in 2003, there was a paragraph I had to rewrite in cursive. I don’t fully remember, but I think it was affirming that I was who I said I was and that I would not cheat. Does anyone know if the GRE still requires that cursive paragraph? (I’m realizing that a child born that day would likely be graduating high school right about now! 
)
A lot of these standardized tests have gone all-computer. But I can’t speak for ones uncommon here like the GRE.
Wow, that’s definitely the first time I’ve heard Old English be described that way. It’s utterly incomprehensible to me and I’ve learned some of the history of English from the History of English podcast as well as the Seth Lehrer course by the Teaching Company
Yes, my signature is a couple squiggly lines. It naturally devolved from my name being written out in full, in cursive, over the years. There is a basis for the squiggles. Are younger people just faking it?
I learned enough cursive to sign my name before I learned the entire alphabet.
I’ll concur with this. I wouldn’t be able to write a single character in blackletter script if my life depended on it, but I daresay any of us could read an English sentence written in it with little effort.