My gut reaction upon reading the thread title was, “Wow, those kids are going to be missing a necessary skill! Think of the children!” But then I thought about it, and what do I use cursive for in my daily life? Signing debit card slips. Nothing else.
Reading cursive and writing cursive are two distinct skillsets. One is slightly more necessary than the other, but neither is truly necessary in today’s world. Anecdotally, I learned to read the Russian alphabet in high school but couldn’t generate Cyrillic characters nearly as well.
I wouldn’t have a problem with orthography being a separate elective, where kids learn to read and write in cursive, calligraphy, and possibly alternate alphabets for more advanced classes (Middle English, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Farsi, Japanese, Chinese, etc). But again, purely as electives. It seems FAR more important to teach grammar and writing skills in English class (which many kids don’t get as it is). There are only so many hours in a school day…
Remember those empty essay booklets we bought for college tests? Some of my finals were nothing except a few essay questions. You darn well better fill up one of those booklets answering each question too. I know my college still uses them. I was in the college bookstore a couple weeks ago.
My hand would cramp and ache for hours after those exams.
Also, we had to write short compositions in English Comp classes. Teacher wanted to see us writing and make sure we weren’t just turning in someone elses work.
I vote for giving it up. It is pointless in today’s world and I hated the fact, back when I was in school I just finished mastering printing then we switched.
I don’t see why it’s such a bad thing to teach it, even if it’s not used very often outside of school. Few people have much use for knowing what an isthmus is, or a cephalopod, but we learn that stuff in social studies/geography, and biology anyway. Fewer still get much out of reading stuff like “The Great Gatsby,” but we teach that in high school.
Cursive seems like a very minor evil in the pantheon of marginally useful stuff taught in school. At least writing and practicing cursive can teach children a little bit of discipline, which is more than can be said for a lot of academic subjects.
if students could be taught to print characters like was done in manual technical drawing then all you would have to do is teach them to ‘make their mark’ in cursive. if they can’t read cursive then tough.
i think cursive is a good idea it teaches coordination and patience and you can read what old folks have written.
By happenstance, my sister and her husband (both teachers) and I were having this very same discussion last weekend as I was helping my 8 year old nephew with his cursive homework. There’s nothing wrong with kids learning cursive, but I happen to think that there is FAR more value these days in teaching kids how to type instead. I know when I was in school that the only typing we were taught was as an elective course in junior high. If it weren’t for my mother forcing me to learn touch typing, this simple message board post would be taking me ten times as long to type as I hunt-and-pecked across the keyboard. And for kids entering school right now, we’re talking about what they’ll be doing as high school graduates in the 2020s - when colleges will require all students to own an iPad and Steve Jobs will be finishing his third term as President-for-Life as a disembodied head in a jar filled with blue liquid.
Besides that, when was the last time you read something written in proper cursive anyway? I, for one, can’t possibly tell you the last time I saw a capital Q written as a 2, or that funky backwards capital F thing. Even in my own signature, I don’t use the proper form of the capital letters for either my first OR last names. Let kids learn cursive as an elective or at home, and spend all that school time teaching them to touch-type instead - which they will find infinitely more valuable for the rest of their lives.
No, but they really ought to revise their curricula in response to it… (What is the point of spending years drilling and testing kids on how well they can laboriously manually duplicate the work of those ubiquitous calculators? Instead, we should be tapping into the wonderful comparative advantage of letting calculators do the bits of math that calculators are way better at (mindless calculating) and having humans focus on the bits of math that humans are way better at (abstract reasoning).)
I don’t agree with what Indistinguishable says- it is not always possible to have a calculator. Nor should one be required for “simple” mathematical calculations. As an example, getting change from a purchase at a shop. It is not that uncommon for things to be added or input incorrectly and as a customer I will know immediately if the total is incorrect or change does not work out. Total reliance on a calculator will remove that.
Even such things as keeping some idea of how much your groceries are goijg to cost if you only have a finite amount of money with you, or which you choose to spend.
I also realise this is getting away from teaching of cursive.
The intuition as to when a sum or product or quotient seems right or wrong can be just as well developed from years of calculating them with calculators as it can be from years of calculating them by hand. I also don’t propose that no one should ever learn how algorithmic arithmetic of digit-strings might work; I just propose radically de-emphasizing it, so that kids don’t have to spend so many years of their math education (for many, essentially the entirety of it) being drilled and tested on nothing but their ability to memorize and mindlessly execute computer programs consistently without “thinkos”.
I’m also not sure why we should spend much effort drilling and testing on a particular highly standardized form of joined-up writing; better to teach how to read and write print, introduce the simple, general concept of joined-up writing, and then not fret too much whether one student’s capital Q or I is produced in exactly the same fashion as another’s. Beyond this is just standardized calligraphy for tradition’s sake.
We’ll have to disagree. Seeing a machine arrive at a figure with no attempt to understand “how” it arrives at that figure would never convince me that a person can develop an intuition as to whether that answer is correct.
Regarding signatures, I’m definitely one of those that only uses cursive when writing mine. My signature, however, is pretty much entirely illegible. You would not be able to guess my name by looking at it. It’s “based on cursive”, I guess, but I could produce something as uniquely illegible in print, no question. I fall in the “cursive is a waste of time” camp, but feel that some penmanship should be taught… just not in cursive.
I think they’ll learn typing without even having to be taught. I started with computers very young, while home computers were still in their infancy (age 5, in around 1981) and just developed my own typing style over the years. I don’t look at the keyboard at all, I don’t use all my fingers, and I don’t use anything even remotely resembling proper “touch typing”. Yet I type around 100wpm on either QWERTY or Dvorak.
While I’m probably a statistical outlier in that I’ve spent the vast majority of my waking life for the past 30 years in front of a computer, surely with the ubiquity of computer technology nowadays, kids will learn an acceptable level of typing just through immersion.
I’m not proposing giving no attempt to understand how it arrives at that figure; I’m proposing giving that understanding, and then not worrying about how well the child carries out the algorithmic element, so long as they have the conceptual understanding.
I understand very well how to calculate the natural logarithm of 2 to 10 decimal digits. If you asked me to sit down and do it with pen and paper, I would be rather slow about it and probably make a few mistakes along the way… I am not worried about this. If ever in life it was critical that I know the natural logarithm of 2 with any accuracy, I would happily pick up a calculator. That’s the kind of attitude I think we ought to take towards basic arithmetic as well. Students need to know what multiplication means and have some fluency with reasoning about its basic properties (commutativity, distributivity over addition, etc.), but no one needs to be tested on how accurately they can multiply three-digit numbers under pressure, or to do 50 such problems in a row as homework. That’s time better spent on other things.
(On the flip side, a student who is not able to at least slowly carry out the execution of the instructions of a clearly specified algorithm (excusing the occasional brainfart in the execution, and not worrying about memorization of the algorithm) has some serious deficiencies. But I don’t think there are any mentally healthy human beings to whom this applies… At any rate, whatever this ability is, it is not mathematics and oughtn’t be conflated with it)
I just tested myself on multiplying 987 by 486 for fun. I got 478882, but my calculator tells me the right answer is 479682. I haven’t yet been able to hunt down where my error was, but the process confirmed for me simultaneously my theories that A) Multiplying by hand is a chore and I have not had cause to practice doing so in any nontrivial case in many years, B) My understanding of multiplication is not tightly tracked by my ability to carry it out by hand without error, and, C) Calculators are useful.