CAPITALS:
A, G, S (note that most capitals aren’t shown–I’m curious about how it’d handle cursive’s weird capitals like E, F, I, J, N, Q, T, and Z)
LOWERCASE:
b, f, g, j, l, m, n (note that m and n are extra-confusing to new learners of cursive, since a cursive “n” looks like a printed “m” to most kids), q, r (another really confusing letter, especially when you’re trying to teach the difference between “vi” and “ir”–write 'em out to see what I mean), y. I couldn’t find a “z” or an “x”, but those letters are also a bit confusing to kids.
So 10 of the 26 lowercase are significantly different, some of them very different. All the differences, IMO, make it easier to read and easier for a kdit o write who first learned print.
To answer some of the questions from overseas: all the schools I know of teach kids in their first year (kindergarten or preschool) how to read and write print letters. The idea is that they need to recognize print letters in order to read printed books, and you may as well teach them those same letters in their writing. Around third grade, many schools teach students cursive. Here’s a sample of that cursive alphabet. Here’s what it might look like in practice.
East Asians do score a few IQ points higher than Caucasians, and “Complex logographic writing systems have been proposed as an explanation …”:
In art classes, I was told that learning to draw with pencil (charcoal, etc) changed your brain in ways that messing around with graphics program did not – something about the direct interaction of eye, hand, materials, and object being drawn (it’s been a while …).
So actually producing the letter shapes by hand might re-inforce the connection with the sounds that they represent. And writing whole, joined-up words might extend that to their meanings.
All the capital letters in this system are essentially identical to printed letters. Capitals are not joined to other letters. Google “Nelson Handwriting” for some examples. (Nelson is the most common handwriting used in UK schools - in fact it may well be universal?)
Hmmm, OK. It’s hard to wrap my head around the idea of writing words without knowing the letters, though.
This reminds me of when I was in the first grade (1966, to be precise). We spent several days learning “word shapes.” That is, we would print words in mixed case, then draw outlines around them, following the ups-and-downs of the leading capitals, ascenders, and descenders. At the time, I didn’t get the point of it, and my parents thought it was the most idiotic thing they’d ever heard. It was only recently that I realized the purpose was to train us to see words as units, rather than groupings of letters to be sounded out. It was exercises like that that made me such a rapid reader today.
Given the forum, the less said about your state’s legislature, the better.
One anecdote isn’t data, but I’m convinced that typing and editing on computers was a necessary condition to my becoming a skilled writer. As I type, my fingers can almost keep up with my thoughts, something that was never true for me when writing in either print or cursive. When handwriting by any means, my thoughts would be racing on ahead, going down many branches, and the words I put on paper would eventually lag so far behind that the connection would be lost and I’d give up in frustration.
That’s the thing: you can teach cursive, or you can teach something else in the block of time that one would otherwise teach cursive. And I’m sure there are plenty of other things one would like to include in the curriculum that there isn’t time for at present.
So that’s the question that has to be asked: whether cursive is a better use of that time than any of the other things that one might teach instead with that time.
I’d add that as typing on a computer keyboard increasingly reduces the need to handwrite in any form, ISTM that teaching two ways of handwriting needs a much stronger justification than it did 20 years ago.
Uh oh. It’s slanted the wrong way! That means 10 whacks per palm, being sent to the office, 1,000 lines of I will never use my left hand, standing in the hallway all afternoon, a note to your parents and one in your PERMANENT RECORD!
[rant]Has somebody informed your school board that nobody writes a capital Q as the number 2? Even the script F looks ye olde preposterous and the S highly dubious. And what psycho designed their letter G? Sheesh: that design must date from the horse and buggy era. Wiki says that it was published in 1978 and is based on one from the late 19th century FWIW. [/rant]
I had never given this any thought before, but I was taught the cursive as depicted in the link that Left Hand of Dorkness provided. But I don’t write that way now, and I can’t really remember when I changed. My signature provides the last vestige - I use the cursive capital F and A, but that is it. I know I made some deliberate modifications in writing style when I was an undergraduate - to cope with taking notes, especially in mathematics lectures. I deliberately started to cross my 7’s and Z’s. Also avoiding the cursive capitals. Everything was done to improve legibility whilst taking fast notes. I needed all the help I could get having legendarily bad handwriting. Looking at my current note books and the script is a curious creole of cursive and not. For the most part due to ignoring any rules about not lifting the pen off the page, letters that flow together are joined, those that don’t are not. It would greatly upset my early school teachers.
In the end I think the question is not about the difference between keyboard and paper. I write more on keyboard than not, and am pretty fast, but I need to take notes on paper, and I need to do it often in an unobtrusive manner. It isn’t viable to take notes in a meeting on a keyboard. You lack the flexibility to jot down things fast enough, you are limited to a linear flow, with editing and annotating previous ideas causing a massive slowdown in entry speed. Keyboards are fine when you are alone with your ideas, but useless if you are working with people. Pen on paper allows vastly greater freedom, and supports non-linear flows in a manner that keyboards just can’t do. Block printing just isn’t viable in these environments either - you need a form of cursive. But being precious about the niceties of loops and traditional forms is silly at best. Students need to be taught a fast and legible script.
Letters, but we weren’t taught every letter in order, nor taught to write them individually, before being taught to write. Same as our first read sentence was mi mamá me mima, so the first letters we learned to read were m a e i (our second sentence, amo a mi mamá, introduced the letter o; our second consonant was p), our first instances of writing were our own names and sentences similar to that one: they were full words and sentences, not individual letters.
The alphabet got taught as part of “how to use a dictionary”. I understand many schools are teaching it earlier now, but I’m not sure there’s an advantage to it: at least for my nephews they just spit it out as fast as possible, it’s out of context and therefore meaningless.
Printed children’s books here often use the same type of “handwritten-style” letter that’s used in writing samplers; looks like that may be another important difference.
With some minor differences in the capital letters, that’s the cursives we’re taught in France too (and the only kind of writing that is taught. No print letters or such things..)
Eh, for me these capital letters looks really different than the ones I was taught.
I learned these:
(except less slanted)
I still write my capitals like that.
Leaving aside what “research” tells us, let’s just stop for a moment and consider the wisdom of having legislators determining the finer points of what is taught in school. How did these people get into office - on the basis of their expertise in the field of education? Or is this a matter of “I went to school, therefore I know what’s best for schools”? They don’t seem to feel they have the right to tell doctors what types of tongue depressors to use, or how to perform their jobs, but teachers (and students) are fair game. When are Americans going to stand up to these idiots and get them to focus on the things that they are actually in office to do? If you want something to look at to explain the depressing state of affairs in many school, you only have to look at the effects of state and federal laws regarding education. Aggghhh - don’t get me started.
In most countries, textbooks are chosen at the national level. Local control in practice produces a lot of duplicated effort in the US. [/hijack]
Worth bumping to page 2:
So the two key criteria are speed and legibility. In the early 1900s, Sears hired armies of script writers because much of their customer base didn’t like be written to by a machine (the nonelectric typewriter). Those days are long gone. Even the word script has changed its dominant meaning in a business context.
A lot of the capital letters in that sample advance neither speed nor legibility. The lower case “e” and “l” might advance speed. Joined up letters may have some justification.
The only remaining purpose of US cursive is to help you write your signature. That exercise might be left to art class. Seriously: graphic arts are often underweighted anyway. The art teacher should probably post a range of options for writing various capital letters. I’d still leave out the writing of the capital Q as a 2 though: I don’t think I’ve ever seen that presentation in the wild.
I hope you’re not suggesting that we adopt such a bizarre practice. Public schools are essential parts of local communities. Everyone working from the same books across the country would be the antithesis of the one-size-fits-all scheme. It would be one-size-fits-hardly-anyone.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. What gets duplicated, and how is this a problem?
The US has 13,600 school districts each choosing their own special curriculum. England and Wales have something like 174. England has maybe 1/6th the population of the US, so scaling up that’s the equivalent of having about 1000 school districts for the US. But curriculum decisions are made at the national level in Britain - although admittedly there is some local flexibility as to how national standards are met. I retract my textbook claim but maintain my duplication of effort claim. I mean we’re talking about an order of magnitude here.
There’s a middle ground here. Comparing England and the US might work better if you consider that England is about the size, in square miles, of Iowa. Let the states set up very general educational guidelines, listing the broad topics and goals they desire for their students. Local districts would then design their own curricula. That would provide more particular guidance for schools. And then, each school and each teacher would have the latitude to implement the curriculum as they see fit, crafted to the particular needs and desires of the students they are working with, under the larger umbrellas I’ve described.
I never understood that argument. A person today might easily live in a half dozen states and a dozen cities by the time they retire. I have more in common with people in certain parts of cities thousands of miles away than I do with the part of my city that is a half mile from here (cross one street and the Obama Biden stickers become McCain Palin).
I communicate instantly with people all over the world both at a personal level and for business. I really don’t want different ways to call the same mathematical operation. hell, I just had a weird conversation the other day about some kids homework where they were using 2:5 rather than 2/5.
Math, science, and English are universal. Sure we need to teach local history as well, but I don’t want to move and then find my kid is at a completely different level in his various subjects because local school districts just decided one way was better.
