If students are no longer taught cursive, how do they sign their names?
No longer teaching cursive, as in, some regional thing, or?..
Originally was I just gonna respond with an “X”.
It is possible to learn things outside of school.
They sign their names however they end up signing their names. It’s not something hard to figure out. I didn’t need to sign my name with any regularity until probably a decade after teachers stopped making me write in cursive (which was the only time I or anybody I knew actually used it). I figured it out, even though I doubt I could have written any whole words in cursive by that point. At some point I had to sign something…so I did.
This comes up in every discussion of cursive (another favorite is “how will anybody read the Declaration of Independence?”) and I don’t get why it’s a problem. Most people are not signing dollar bills so nobody cares if their signature is done in prim-and-proper schoolmarm cursive.
My kids school district doesn’t teach cursive in the regular classroom. I was kinda shocked to hear that a few years ago. So, my eldest doesn’t know cursive. My middle daughter learned as part of her gifted class. My youngest is learning cursive as part of her special needs class.
There’s no particular reason a name should be signed in cursive, is there? In any case, cursive is taught in some states, e.g., NC, where I spend many hours of my students’ time teaching them cursive instead of ensuring they have good keyboarding skills.
there’s no legal requirement that one has to sign one’s own name in cursive. I learned cursive in grade school, but it’s been years since I’ve actually used it. my signature barely resembles cursive. Other people’s signatures I’ve seen are little more than scribbles.
edit: ninja’d by Left Hand of Dorkness.
Digitally.
Digital signatures are at least potentially secure, so don’t expect them to be legally or socially acceptable any time soon.
I kinda wish they didn’t bother to teach me cursive. Would rather have learned more math/science earlier. I don’t even remember the last time I wrote anything in cursive. I barely ever even print anything.
Most people’s signatures are so stylized, why can’t you have a stylized print signature? Besides, I think in the sixth or seventh grade, students are still being taught to read cursive, they are just not being taught what used to be called “penmanship” anymore, and it’s about time. It takes years to develop good penmanship, but only a couple of weeks to learn to read recent cursive writing-- heck, when I majored in English, we were taught to read archaic styles of writing and printing. I cannot write any of them, but I can read them just fine.
I’m sure most kids will experiment with writing their own names.
Nowadays, learning to input on a computer is much more important than penmanship.
Sure, but you must have something to be scanned.
I introduced that at work, and it went over well until I said, “And if we want to buy a new school bus,”.
Does this say what you mean it to say?
The OP question is weird. People signed their names with an X for hundreds of years. Cursive is not a useful skill, as we’ve shown in many threads on the topic. Spending dozens of hours of education just so that people have consistent signatures is a strange thing to do. As technology improves, signatures will become increasingly irrelevant.
That is called, “Typing Class”.
I took it to meet girls, but I could type on a keyboard when they first came out.
Were I the King of Education, I would mandate that schools teach knitting or metalworking or some other craft instead of cursive. Give kids a useful version of whatever benefits that fine motor work provides.
I’d also make Calculus and Statistics a required course for all high schoolers: One year, at least, with the calculus being used to support the statistics material first and foremost. Those who take a physics track in college can learn the more “traditional” physics-emphasis calculus there, and those who don’t will learn mathematics as required for their actual major.
I obviously missed those threads. 
congratulations. you’re old. I’m less than a year from 40 years old, and I pretty much never write cursive. most of my “writing” is done via keyboard, either real or on a smartphone touchscreen.
I’m not sure either of you know what a “digital signature” is. Well, I’m certain carnivorousplant doesn’t know, and I don’t know whether Left Hand of Dorkness is confused by that or my very appealing and quite becoming cynicism.
This explains what a digital signature is. I’d provide a brief explanation, but if you could understand a brief explanation, you’d already know what a digital signature is.
Do they still teach Roman Numbers?
If they do, they teach how to read them, not how to do arithmetic with them.
Which is actually a pertinent fact in this thread: When people talk about “teaching cursive”, they usually include teaching penmanship, as RivkahChaya mentions, and, as RivkahChaya mentions, it’s possible to be able to read and (maybe) write your name in a writing system you can’t otherwise use. Teaching penmanship these days is equivalent to teaching how to do arithmetic in Roman numerals.
(And very few places teach all of the Roman numeral system anyway. For example, nobody teaches Medieval Roman numerals, which involve more letters, and nobody teaches the overbar, which multiplies the letter under it by 1,000. Good riddance.)