Penmanship vs. keyboarding in school

In My Humble Opinion
1

Was wondering if any of you had opinions concerning the relative merits of teaching proper cursive penmanship and/or keyboarding in school. Is one more necessary than the other? Should the basics of one or both be taught in terms of a preferred style?

Our experience is that our current grade school district does a crappy job of teaching either. We moved when my eldest kid was in 3d grade. Our old school district worked very hard on proper penmanship in the 2d and 3d grade. Tripod grip, proper slant, etc.

Our new school does no such thing. They teach printing in 1st, then they expose the kids to cursive in 2d and pretty much abandon it. Apparently with the idea that the kids will start to keyboard - but they never teach that either. They are unwilling to spend their precious computer lab time on typing drills. If a kid is using more than one finger at a time, they say that is “good enough.”

So you end up with kids who can’t write or type quickly and legibly. Really gets to be a bear in middle school when they have to write longer assignments, and the simple act of writing them takes far longer than it should.

And the parents get the fun job of forcing the kids to drill their penmanship and typing, while the schools get to do fun things on the computers like surfing the net for research, doing power point, etc.

I started thinking about this when reading the phonics thread in GQ. Our kids read like mad. But thanks to whole language, they spell like crap, and have no idea how to pronounce many words.

And don’t get me started on “mad minute” math facts.

Damn - I’m starting to foam at the mouth. Shoulda started in the Pit…

2

Typing and penmanship are both very important skills, and should be taught in elementary school.

3

Howdy,
I would have to say that even as we toss aside all things non computer, the skill or penmanship must be maintained. I hate to admit to it, but I was never really taught true penmanship growing up. We were taught the basicshape of the letter and expected towrite our version, but the real key, was to write fast. Writing fast and making it look good do not go together. Today, I hate writing, only because I hate my bad penmanship. I have tried to correct it several times, but it is so powerfully engrained in my head that I must write fast, that I always have difficulty.
Keyboarding is also important, but I would wait on the typing until after the penmanship is taught, but before too much actuall computing is taught.
We already have a digitally dependant society growing within us, but what happens when the power goes out? Calculators and computers are great but they are no replacement for our own brains.

4

Kids need to know how to form letters but I’m not attached to the idea that they need perfect penmanship. I’ve got shocking handwriting and it doesn’t matter in my daily life. I use computers so other people don’t have to try and decipher my hideous scrawl.

I’ve got an eight year old boy with diagnosed dysgraphia. He’s probably going to end up with handwriting like mine at best. At one point it looked like he would never be able to write legibly. His brain and his hand simply were unable to work together to produce readable writing. He’s also dyslexic with unbelievably creative spelling. We made the decision to focus on keyboarding because IMO he would learn those skills much faster than he would learn handwriting. I got permission from the school to supply him with a laptop once he was faster keyboarding than writing.

It turned out he hates keyboarding and it inspired him to work on handwriting ;).

However I’d be very miffed with a school that didn’t teach either skill thoroughly. I don’t expect my son’s school to totally remediate the writing disability (and quite frankly if they put the hours in so he could write beautifully in my considered opinion he would lose more than he would gain)but if he didn’t have an LD, I certainly expect him to learn to write legibly and then learn to keyboard.

5

Penmanship remains a critical skill. Many peoples’ first impression of you will be from your handwriting. The ability to clearly communicate with the written word will continue to be important for many years to come.

In this computer age, keyboarding is also of nearly equal but difference importance. I can only hope that the world at large is not fooled into thinking that spell check will ever obviate the need for correct spelling and proper grammar.

6

I think penmanship is extremely important, in my field most things are communicated via handwriting and the things being communicated are often critical in nature. I’m told I write like a girl, if that means that my writing is legible that’s a good thing.

As a result I have had to add crypotgraphy to my job skills as several of my cow orkers are incapable of writing legibly.

Keyboarding / computer skills are also important and it is only myself and my supervisor who have any skills in this regard. Out tech department which treats most employees like complete idiots has actually freed up unlocked our computer to a higher degree because when things go wrong we are usually able to fix them.

7

The fact that no parents have chimed in with experiences similar to mine makes me even more pissed at my school district. And it isn’t as tho I live in an impoverished area (Glen Ellyn for those familiar with Chicago’s suburbs). It just strikes me that they are emphasizing a lot of the wrong stuff.

Heck, my eldest was bitching about her industrial tech class. She said they are doing something about a CNC machine but not really learning anything. I have a couple of buddies in the business, so I asked her some questions, and she said, “Well, they don’t actually let us touch the machine.” WTF?

We just had this huge frigging referendum for technology - rewire the schools and buy equipment. (Of course followed by needing to teach the teachers how to use the stuff. Instead, they just load them with shovelware.) This in a district where I have to imagine the overwhelming majority of families have multiple computers. And I go in there on open house and start clicking around to see what is on their boxes and my daughter says, “Dad, we’re not supposed to do that!” As far as keyboarding skills, I have been told by teachers and librarians last year that they are satisfied as long as the kid has both hands on the keyboard – even if he/she is simply hunting and pecking with one finger on each hand.

Meanwhile, you will look at 5th grade essays posted during an open house, and it is a very rare exception (maybe 2 out of a class of 25) that has even decent penmanship. I’m talking about not being a mix of printing and cursive, or very awkward looking inconsistently slanted hand with jerky connections between the letters. My 8th grader, who learned to write in another district (Lombard – a neighboring suburb, with lower average income and housing values but greater industrial and commercial tax base), says she is often complimented on her handwriting. Because her current classmates never learned how!

On the keyboarding front, I find it would be very useful when my kids are starting to have longer assignments. They need work on transitions and such to make their work more readable. But I find I am less demanding if my proofreading will require that they rewrite paragraphs of text instead of simply manipulating it on a screen.

For any students – how common are laptops in high schools or colleges for such things as note-taking? Just watched Legally Blonde. It was spot on accurate as far as the student body make up of law school. :wink: Just wondering if it was as accurate with it’s portrayal of a laptop on every student’s desk during a lecture?

8

Dinsdale - i should have mentioned that our son’s school does not stress penmanship the way they did when I was in school.

I don’t know how my eight year old’s teacher deciphers what passes for his writing, when I was in school you would lose a lot of marks if what you submitted wasn’t readily legible.

Yours is not the only school district that fails to stress and teach the inportance of penmanship.

9

I think penmanship is important. Written communicaton is far from dead, and not only does bad handwriting leave a bad impression, it can also lead to miscommunication that is inconvenient, costly, or dangerous. (Think doctors writing prescriptions!)

However, I think cursive is from the devil. Some people have beautiful cursive script, but for many, it’s a ponderous, unnatural, icky way to write.

It’s a myth that cursive is faster. People who do not use cursive can print just as fast as most people write in cursive, and people who “mix” (that is, print with joins) write faster than either. (From “Language by Hand: A Synthesis of a Decade of Research on Handwriting”, Virginia Berninger and Steve Graham, Handwriting Review 1998, Vol. 12.)

I’ve been working very hard on improving my handwriting in the past couple of years. (As I’m sure Feynn knows, any fountain pen nut does this!) I use an italic alphabet with joins, which IMHO is more attractive than cursive–and it’s certainly more legible than my old sloppy uncomfortable Palmer-method script.

So, IMHO, kids should be taught to print legibly, with an emphasis on neatness and constistent letter forms, but don’t sweat it if they don’t know proper cursive.

10

Zenster, I adore you, but…what impression do you have of me from my handwriting? Being your first impression and all…

The only people who see my handwriting are family members and the ocassional close friend. I leave notes for my family, write letters to my grandma, and will sometimes drop a love note in the mail. Half the time I pay my bills online and pay for things with a debit card.

Penmanship is…okay. I would have preferred more of a focus on keyboarding for my own background. My cursive is legible, but was obviously never going to get the big rounded loops my penmanship teachers wanted me to get. My hand is thin, spindly and small. Five lines of it make it look elegant, a page of it makes your eyes water, however artistic the lines are. The hours I spent weeping over poor grades in penmanship would have been put to much better use typing. I still can’t touch type. I don’t have the patience to re-train my “hunt and peck” finger pattern. (Its a full ten fingered hunt and peck finger pattern, its just not teh ‘normal’ touch type one.)

As for the laptop question- I can’t say about law school, but I have yet to see a student take notes on a laptop here at U Pitt undergrad. (And I’m in the engineering school.) For a few of my classes I take notes on my PDA with my keyboard, but my engineering classes require me to have and intereact with handrawn diagrams… its easier to just take notes teh old fashioned way. (That and I can doodle in different colors on a paper notebook. If I had to actually take notes, I could do it all on my handheld…currently I just get too bored in lecture.)

11

Great observation concerning alternative styles, Podkayne. My youngest prints very neatly (she’s still in the dotting-i’s-with-circles stage) but slowly. We had thought that cursive was necessary to speed her up. It is frustrating when your kid takes a half hour on a simple homework assignment that should only take 10 minutes, just because they write so slowly. Your post has certainly given me some food for thought.

Whether she prints or writes cursive, tho, I would imagine she still needs a proper tripod grip, etc. And the damn schools don’t even mention, let alone require, such basic mechanics.

My middle child has a slight neurological impairment which makes managing a pencil very difficult. Which is one reason we have thought keyboarding might help for him.

Many of my engineering friends print very attractively and legibly. Somehow that ability never rubbed off on me in my drafting classes.

My wife and I often discuss the merits of typing vs writing. She believes the manual act of writing in some ways affects the mental processes of learning. She also considers it preferable for correspondence - more personal. And I have heard things like the very act of writing notes during or after a class in some ways reinforces the material. Anyone familiar with studies comparing computer notetaking? She also says penmanship will never be rendered obsolete.

I am less sure. I am a committed slave to my keyboard - the fastest 6-finger typist around! I far prefer to compose letters or documents on the computer, and have no difficulty using it to keep minutes of meetings etc. And you have the added benefit of being able to easily manipulate your notes or work product should you want to adapt the info for a subsequent project.

12

I cherish anyone with good penmanship. I mean legible and attractive, not fancy.

If you also esteem good penmanship, why not have your child practice it at home? If you can’t find penmanship books with lined paper, let him/her copy your own handwriting.

Not that this is at all relevant, but in some countries (1) their language is exclusively cursive, and (2) they are too poor to have widespread use of computers or even typewriters, so students or anyone else desiring to learn anything does so by taking copious notes in his/her own hand. Believe it or not, they all are able to have legible handwriting.

For those of you who don’t like handwriting, what do you do when you need to write a note to your child’s teacher? Do you scrawl it, or do you print it out on your computer?

13

Aha! We may be approaching he crux of one of my main complaints about much of what I see in schools these days as a parent and taxpayer. I see the schools getting farther away from what I consider “the basics.” Instead, they focus on more esoteric stuff, which I think can be lost without the sufficient underlying framework.

Couple of resentments. As a parent, I would rather do the fun and creative things with my kids, instead of just drilling them with flash cards and penmanship drills. As a taxpayer, I resent that I keep getting asked for additional money needed to teach the “wonder technology of the moment,” and then see that the money is being pissed away - spent on flashy technology that the teachers either don’t know how or don’t care to teach.

At an early age the kids get used to using calculators. Then you ask them to add up a simple card score, and they are stumped.

You could probably buy a heck of a lot of writing tablets and pencils for the cost of the single CNC machine gathering dust in my daughter’s middle school basement. Not to mention the fully equipped darkroom, digital video editing facilities, etc., etc. It seems a little bassackwards to be ineffectively exposing them to advanced technology, when they don’t know how to wire a simple circuit.

Luddite checking out now.

14

Good point, Dinsdale, hear hear!

Personally, I’m such a nerd that I would expect my (nonexistent) kids to enjoy practicing penmanship at home.

15

I am speaking from my experience of relearning decent penmanship as an adult, so this may be off-base, but I think adopting the “correct” grip is overrated.

One of the first things I figured out was that I didn’t have a proper “tripod” grip. As my handwriting improved, I found that with the “correct” grip, my writing was very wide, and I didn’t like the look of it. When I go back to the old grip, my spacing is better, my script aquires a natural graceful slant, and I can write longer without fatigue–so mostly I just use the “wrong” grip.

Unless your daughter’s handwriting is obviously being hampered by an awkward grip (like hooking, for example), it might be best to leave well enough alone. However, I don’t know the first thing about teaching handwriting to kids, which I’m sure is quite a different process from retraining adult handwriting.

I definitely don’t think cursive=faster handwriting, particularly for a student who is already struggling with printing. I admit to feeling a pang of envy . . . I can’t write neatly and slowly to save my life–I can start out being slow and patient but inexorably drift toward faster and sloppier. At least your daughter has a good foundation. I’d imagine that speed will come to her with practice.

An exercise she might try is pick a sentence and then write it several times, going faster each time. You can notice which letters and combinations degrade quickly, and give them extra practice so that evenutally you can write them quickly and nicely. You can also see how your writing looks in a more “natural” state, and give yourself permission to deviate a little bit from the perfect, model letter forms.

God, I am way too obsessed with handwriting. Sorry to keep babbling Dinsdale, but I hope some of this is helpful. Good luck to your daughter.

16

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Podkayne *
**

Same here, bro. Which makes it so frustrating, because I’d like to assume that the frigging teachers, being the professionals in this area, would know something about it, yet the appear to abdicate their responsibility. Instead, I have to learn how to teach it.

bluethree those imaginary kids are so much more tractable that the real type. :wink:

Oh yeah - and if I wish her to have good penmanship, the LAST thing I will do is have her emulate mine! (I like to fool myself that it has character. I basically form enough initial letters to convey the sense of the intended word, followed by a series of bumps. Do any of you experience it where if you try to slow down and write legibly, you end up making really dumb spelling mistakes and forget how to form specific letters? Sometimes I even screw up my own name when trying to write it extra-legibly!)

Lately my daughter has been very interested in playing cards - mostly gin and 500. And she hates doing penmanship. So when she comes up to me and asks if I will play cards with her, it is not too hard for me to convince myself that she can develop her math skills keeping score, rather than to have to hunt her down and force her to practice her graceful slants.

Keep up the babbling - all of you. It definitely is helpful.

17

My girlfriend teaches 7th grade. One night I helped her grade tests and I couldn’t believe how bad the kids handwriting spelling was (I couldn’t read most of their names). This was a vocabulary test too! The words were printed at the top of the page for the kids to choose from and they STILL spelled them wrong.

I was horrified. Hopefully I will be able to teach my kids the importance of writing well, and getting them to do so. Not EVERYTHING is done on a computer. How are they supposed to write love letters during class?

Schools should definitely teach better penmanship. But I guess a parent would never let a school hold their kid back because she has bad handwriting, so it isn’t a requirement. That’s the real problem, if you ask me. Teachers don’t have any control over their students’ education. The parents or administrators make all the rules. Like my girlfriend can’t take points off for spelling on the aforementioned vocabulary tests. She’s not allowed. So how is she supposed to teach the kids to spell correctly? It’s not part of her curriculum, so she should just ignore it?

Wow, that turned into a rant. Hopefully I made some sense. I’m glad I didn’t become a teacher, because I wouldn’t have made it very long.

18

Personally, I disagree with alot of what has been said here, specifically by the OP.

I am only 25, and was in school through the infancy of the revision of US education philosophy. Its my steadfast opinion that Penmanship and especially Cursive are complete wastes of class time.

Dinsdale, you haven’t outright said it, and I don’t necesarily think you mean this, but I’ve taken an impression that you expect the schools to teach your kids all the basics and boring stuff. I disagree, schools should teach the things that parents aren’t capable of teaching themselves. Parents today, and even ewhen I was in school basicaly take no responsibility for their childs learning, and any shortcoming in their children is the fault of the school entirely, this is crap.

Keyboarding is an excellent example. It’s not necessarily that its more important than penmanship (although my personal feeling is that it is), but a large percentage of parents don’t have computers from which to teach their children this skill effectively. They all however do have the equipment to teach effective penmanship.

Schools only have so much time, and they must choose what to teach children in that short time frame. I personally think it makes much more sense to spend time teaching children to keyboard and the basics of computer useage than teaching good penmanship and cursive. Ideally I’d like to see both taught, but I don’t necessarily thing there is time for both to be done effectively. The most efficient solution in my opinion is to teach keyboarding and computer skills and rely on parents and ongoing maintence to teach effective (not necesarily perfect, traditional cursive)handwriting. For example, if a kid’s handwriting is so poor that it will inhibit his continued growtha nd learning, then address it on a case by case basis, or suggest he do additional afterschool (supervised, or not, by parents or teachers, whatever) work to improve this. I don’t think every student should spend the greater portion of their first semester in second grade learning precise penmanship. Thats wasted time.

I recall spending long, long hours drilling the shaping of my letters, and being graded on how pefectly round my c’s and a’s were, and how vertical my l’s, d’s, and b’s were. This is useless, and I should have been spending time reading books, improving my vocabulary, and keyboarding.

Frankly, I’d like to see students spend the least amount of time keyboarding and handwriting possible. Instead spend those years with additional grammar and spelling courses. In the computer age, people are much more commonly judged on their ability to converse and email in well formed sentances, and form good complete thoughts and arguements. In the process of learning these skills a student should be submitting enough samples of their handwriting, and practicing using a keyboard often enough to identify any cases where additional work is needed. If a kid types poorly, the simple burden of the work should help and force him to learn to keyboard well. If a kid hands in nearly illegible spelling exams, the teacher should address the problem there.

The world is constantly getting more and more complex, and the time the students spend in class is very limited, so teachers and school must utilize that time with the most pressing needs. Frankly keyboarding and handwriting aren’t the most pressing, and can be easily addressed outside a structured class room setting by parents and teachers alike.

If I were a parent, I’d be much more upset that my child wasn’t taught what a URL should look like, or how to effectively use a boolean search than how to connect a cursive ‘o’ to an ‘r’, or to cross a ‘t’ at the proper height.

19

Some very good points, Omniscient. Of course I have to highlight the beginning of your final paragraph - "If I were a parent …"

Trying not to sound like too much of an ass, I must say I was amazed at how my thoughts about the school system changed before and after I had kids.

Your premises would be more convincing if we were guaranteed that the schools would be effective, or even competent, at teaching “the things that parents aren’t capable of teaching.” (I also note that you did not specify exactly what such things are.)

I attempted to indicate the amazing amount of technology and equipment that is available in my kids’ schools. It is distressing, however, to see how ineffectively such stuff is used. My daughter will have a session supposedly on digital video editing, for example. We can go into as many details as you wish, but I assure you she learned next to nothing from the class. Now if I did not have my kid (a motivated, straight A student, prolific reader, first chair flutist) tell me how boring and worthless this class was, I might say, “Gee, isn’t it neat that these kids are being exposed to all this wonderful stuff that I do not have at home that will spark their interests in so many ways.” Sorry to say that has not been my experience.

Meanwhile, I could take my kid out and mess around with the digital movie camera I already own, buy some software to help her manipulate it, etc. And I would have more time to do so if I did not have to work on handwriting.
I mentioned the CNC machine they were not allowed to touch. One of my best buddies maintains the darned things, and another very close friend has his own machine shop. I can take her into his shop and have her actually machining. Instead, her school does not even teach her what “CNC” stands for.

Another point you may not be fully aware of without kids is the limited amount of time your kid has following school. My kids wake up as early as 6-6:30, get home around 4. They are in bed between 9 and 10. Take out family dinner, musical instrument lessons, and any homework, and tell me how much time there is to teach handwriting and keyboarding in an positive enjoyable manner. Not to mention if you want to give your kid a chance to enjoy a post school snack, unwind a bit, or even spend time being a kid either by themselves or with siblings and friends. Or any additional committments such as scouting, sports, etc.

Moreover, not to slam the entire profession, but teaching, like all professions, has some motivated top notch people, a greater number of decent but average folk, and some dead weight. And you may have little control if your kid gets a teacher who turns an interesting subject into a bore.

I don’t know what your education and experience is, but I experienced a shock the first time I met with a very energetic and well intentioned teacher, who was fresh out of school and had little practical life experience or on the job experience. On the other end of the spectrum, are the teachers who are just putting in time until they retire. No, I am not painting the entire profession with these colors. But these folk are out there in significant numbers. And now explain to me how they are “able to teach the kids something I can’t.”

I have met far too many teachers who seem unable or ineffective at teaching “the fun stuff.” So as long as I am paying their salaries, I would prefer that they emphasize what I consider the necessary basics.

Also, let’s look at the relative ability of schools and parents to teach “basics and boring stuff.” The kids are required to be in school. Therefore, IME being asked to learn cursive, or a boolean search, would be met rather equally. Further, my experience has been that the schools have not excited my kids with exotic topics. I am not convinced they would be less excited about the mundane. Unlike school, at home the kid has more options from reading on their own, visiting a friend, playing games, etc.

Again, please tell me what the teaching profession is uniquely qualified to expose my kids to, as opposed to my wife and myself, both with advanced degrees, diverse interests, and sufficient disposable income and liesure time. In anticipation, I would suggest to counter that some things they MIGHT be qualified to do, is to train developing minds in the basics.

20

To start with, just to add a little context, I did all my pre-college schooling in the Plainfield Public School system, just a short jaunt across Naperville from you. Granted its been 10 years, but I think its relatively safe to say we have somewhat comparable experinces, albeit from the opposite sides of the bookbag.

This gets at the meat of the problem. Its important to accept that public school systems are good old fashion American bureaucracy. While I have no doubt that all the points you make are true, you must conceed that you are in the minority. Public Schools (even in the relatively well-off Chicago Burbs) that were customized to suit your needs would IMO leave behind far more students than any gains you’d see would be worth. With all due respect, I think that while I may not be able to see all the angles as a non-parent, in contrast you a may not be objective enough to balance the real pros and cons of some of your points. You have pointed out that your and your wife (and my cynical side makes me point out that a solid 2-parent household is increasingly uncommon) both have advanced degrees, access to expensive equipment and tools (such as digital cameras, computers, CNC machines etc.) and leisure time. All these factors are rare in most households. Granted my school 10-15 years ago didn’t have any of those things anyways, but neither did my parents, and they still don’t. Were I a kid now, I would have never been exposed to those items since my parents haven’t dipped into the computer age yet. So, when I say “teach things parents aren’t capable of doing” I am refering to things which require resources that aren’t universally available to all kids. Every parent has a pen an paper. Not every parent has a computer, digital camera, or CNC machine. If teaching better penmanship in school means they have to cut that bad CNC lesson, to me its not worth it.

As I said, its not so much in regards to unique qualifications, its in regards to larger resources. Cash money, baby.