i understand the reason for your attraction to electromechanical text generation.
I agree with this; I’m pretty sure my own typing speeds rocketed up not at the point in life when I took typing classes in school, but at the point in life when I started spending lots of time talking to people on the computer.
At my high school, writing any paper in cursive resulted in a 10 percent deduction for an in-class essay. Handwritten essays were not excepted for homework assignments.
I haven’t written anything in cursive since elementary school.
Cursive is at a sweet spot for modern pedagogy, just useful enough to be defensible on the merits but dull and repetitive enough it looks like Real Work to people who, in their heart of hearts, wonder why we don’t thrash the children who can’t recite their Cicero by heart.
Teaching airy-fairy stuff like real mathematics, or art (as opposed to Art Appreciation, which is suitably sanitized into pabulum), or anything else that might actually be enjoyable, is deeply suspect: Having fun in school is wrong for all the reasons enjoying your work is wrong. It is a miscegenation, an unnatural mixing of the weekday and weekend, and cannot long survive in the Real World.
So cursive is in, along with endless analysis of the more obvious themes in Billy Budd and mindless rote arithmetic drills, and heaven forfend we ever change things; the slower [del]teachers[/del] students might not be able to keep up!
What exactly is wrong with reciting that?
with DrStrangelove and Lasciel in posts 18 and 31 respectively, started printing in high school when I was taking mechanical drawing, made note taking faster, more legible, better(insert $6m man sounds here). but kids do need to be taught SOME kind of hand writing skills and system.
Indiana has decided to stop teaching cursive, according to this articleI found on fark.
I have noticed that I can no longer read in cursive. My daughter’s camp teacher sent home a note in very flowery cursive, and it took me ages to decipher it.
My daughter rejected cursive lessons at school and never did learn to write it. I doubt very seriously if she can read it.
I think Indiana has the right idea on this one. I mean, a capital Q in cursive has nothing to do with the price of tea in China. It is just a random, flamboyant number 2 really. Enough of this. Let’s ditch cursive.
We just did this thread very recently. Most people agree with you (and Indiana).
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=612184&highlight=cursive
I agree as well, if only because learning cursive is the only clear memory I have of 3rd grade. And it’s not pleasant.
I liked learning cursive and still write in it on the rare occasions I write by hand. Ah well, I guess I’ll just have my own secret language shared by me and everyone’s grandmas.
Sorry. I did search, but not very well. I am going to request a mod close this thread. No need to rehash. I will check out the other thread.
No prob. I merged this into the previous thread.
I had a quick look at what’s classed as cursive, and I’m glad my (UK) school didn’t get that fancy, especially with the capital letters. We learnt a simple joined up writing, but once the classes stopped it seemed that every girl in the class adopted a style of writing that made letters look like variations on a general theme of rounded squares. The boys stuck with a crappier form of the joined up writing we were taught, on the whole.
I still use joined up writing as I find it much faster than printing - I would never have made it through my university lectures without it (that and my shorthand symbols for Aethel, century and Christianity). When I want my writing to look neat, however, I usually go for capital letters.
Personally, I like cursive and use it occasionally, though my quick/note-taking handwriting is generally a mix of cursive and printed forms.
I don’t really understand the attitude that I’m getting from a few posters that it’s perfectly OK to no longer be able to read something in cursive. I’m not sure it’s something I’d be proud of, personally. I came across it a lot in previous jobs (lab notebooks!) and being able to share information written by several different hands is a good thing. Each of us has created our “own” writing style as we grew up, but I’m willing to bet that most of the forms we all use are either standard printed or cursive letters with slight modifications/omissions.
Besides, one reason it’s taught so often at a young age isn’t necessarily to ram home the shapes of all the letters (in either writing style), but rather to allow a child to fully develop his or her fine motor skills. A 5 year old simply can’t write in small letters; they need to learn the shapes, then learn to shrink them down, and still keep it legible. This takes a few years. I don’t think all that much emphasis should be put on making perfect letters, (which leads to frustration, as a lot of posters here seem to have experienced!) but for a couple of years the repetitive task needs to be done as the brain adapts and grows.
So I think it should still be taught, though perhaps the method of teaching cursive needs to be adapted. And it isn’t a “2” …it’s a “Q” with the left side missing, because there’s no need to draw it because it can’t be confused with another letter either way!
Ohhhh!!!
The arguments for keeping cursive around seem to boil down to the following:
- It looks pretty.
- It’s good for fine-motor coordination.
- You need it for signing your name.
- What if you have to read something written in cursive? What then, I ask you?
To which I respond:
- Who cares?
- So is printing.
- You can print your name.
- A week or two spent on “here’s how cursive is formed” will solve this problem if people really think it’s a big deal. No need to spend a whole year (or more) on practicing writing it yourself.
It’s dead, Jim. Accept it.
…I never learned cursive (I’m 32 years old). The biggest problem is that if you never learn to WRITE in cursive you never learn to READ in cursive.
It’s been problematic on and off over the years. Signatures, hand written notes by older folks, etc.
I can muddle through for the most part.
Another vote to let it recede into the past, along with cunieform tablets, buggy whips and segregated water fountains. Good handwriting is important. Cursive, as such, is not. Most people will use cursive only for their signatures, if that. Our son struggled with cursive throughout fifth grade and no teacher could ever give me a good, persuasive reason why cursive is still taught as much or for as long as it is.
My cursive is highly stylized.
I stopped using cursive sometime in high school (before computers). Drove my teachers nuts but at least they could read my stuff. I can still read and write it, but it’s completely illegible to anybody but me…so I guess it’s questionable whether I can actually write in it.
Balls to cursive. It’s a duplicate script and wholly unnecessary compared to the other things kids need to know that didn’t exist when I was a kid. Even when I was a kid, learning it used up untold hours in which I could have been learning how to better put my thoughts into words. Doesn’t matter if the words look pretty if they don’t say what I mean.
Consider cursive as encryption. It will fool even the most advance TECHNOGEEK. We could use it for sensitive documents and nobody except Asians would be able to read it.