Should my son learn cursive

[Full_Metal_Lotus]

I tell you this in fine replyThat a word"s simple shape doth not bely
[FONT=Century Gothic]The hearts desire or wont[/FONT]
As placed in form of graphile font
by hand or machine

Not to put wingdings to lie
Or standard print-on the fly
penned by some long dead great aunt
great thoughts, made insignifigant
by this poor hand of mine

words themself have truth to tell
but their meaning - form over function sell

regards
FML

[MandaJo]

@sunacres

I certainly hope you’re right. I haven’t been at this for very long. I was motivated to start teaching because as a hiring manager in the world of commerce over the past 30 years I was getting frightened by the poor writing and thinking skills of young employees, even those with MBAs and advanced engineering degrees.

I certainly don’t put it down to the de-emphasis of cursive handwriting, and in response to an earlier post I’m afraid I don’t have any data to present to back up my observation about critical thinking skills (but it is crisp enough to me to have changed careers as a consequence). Thirty-five years ago we did indeed teach rhetoric in high school along with a variety of manual arts that built very neatly upon the “fine motor skills” introduced with cursive handwriting. Very sadly, perhaps disastrously, those paths are not longer offered so unless you’re successful in the remaining college-bound academic track you’re shit outta luck.

This trend in narrowing curricula is due to economics. But I’m suspicious that the change (I’m claiming) in critical thinking skills is due more to some shift in parenting that has been initiated by my generation (possibly due to pot smoking, I don’t know). For some reason we’ve been supervising our kids, organizing them, arranging their play dates, telling them where to go and what to do so much that they are losing the instincts to make their own decisions. My son is off to college this year and I am astonished at the programs aimed at me, his parent, that the college is offering so that I can help him get going. There was nothing like that when I went off to college.

If you are new to this, the best advice I have is that teachers tend to see what they expect to see. That doesn’t mean you should be a Pollyanna, but any given kid demonstrates both inspiring brilliance and abject stupidity about five times a day. It’s easy to find evidence for anything, and easy to let yourself become bitter about it if you aren’t careful. Hope and faith can carry you through, and if it turns out that you were wrong, they really were doomed, you haven’t really lost anything by blowing the call.

[sunacres]

@Manda JO

If you are new to this, the best advice I have is that teachers tend to see what they expect to see. That doesn’t mean you should be a Pollyanna, but any given kid demonstrates both inspiring brilliance and abject stupidity about five times a day. It’s easy to find evidence for anything, and easy to let yourself become bitter about it if you aren’t careful. Hope and faith can carry you through, and if it turns out that you were wrong, they really were doomed, you haven’t really lost anything by blowing the call.

Wow, that’s scarier than I’d anticipated! I certainly never thought anyone was doomed! On the contrary, the “opportunities for improvement” are abundant, both academically and socially.

I just finished teaching a section of summer school math - one class of Algebra and one of Geometry. Only students who had flunked their class last year were eligible for summer school (a quirk of how the session was funded by the state). Although this group of students had a higher-than-average instance of specific learning disabilities and immature behaviors, my perception was that their raw intelligence was equal to and possibly higher than a random sample of their peers. They were like wild horses, naturally resistant to being “broken.”

My concern about critical thinking skills isn’t a claim that “kids today are less intelligent,” rather that the shifting trends of parenting and the narrowing of publicly funded education are leaving them less skilled. That’s not an expectation, that’s an observation. Perhaps by being “poised for further development” it all evens out by the time they’re 30 or so.

The skill I’m most concerned about isn’t cursive handwriting, it’s how to experience satisfaction and self confidence.

[Acsenray]

@Runs With Scissors

but I think even italic is difficult fine-motor-wise.

I believe I have read that the ball-and-stick writing method taught for “printing” is far less natural and adapted to the human hand than the ovals and slanted lines used in italic writing.

[sunacres]

@Derleth

If this is true (and I’m not agreeing with you here, necessarily) it’s due to one thing: fear. Your generation got afraid of kidnappers and child molestors and drug dealers and that creepy kid down the block…

I agree, that’s a big part of it. There seem to be both a fear of the boogie man and a fear of loss of control. Parents seem to confuse “being responsible” with “making the decisions.”