You were cheated. When I was in school, Honor Roll eligibility was based on academic subjects only, as it should be. Even GPA was weighted. Academic subjects carried a full weight, but things like gym, art, music, band, etc had only half the weight of the academic subjects.
I sincerely doubt the former, but I totally accept the latter. In fact, that’s the original main reason for cursive. It’s faster.
I’m confused by this. Did y’all have letter grades and an honor role in elementary school? Did you get graded on your handwriting after elementary school? Both seem really wrong to me.
Yes, to the former. The latter is an indirect and a qualified yes. I was using Microsoft Word in high school, so it didn’t affect me but, for those who wrote their papers, messy handwriting affected their grade. I remember compositions/papers being graded on two major areas; content and mechanics. Messy cursive affected the mechanics part of the grade, as it should, but not dramatically so. An “A” might be reduced to an “A-” or, if it was really ratty, a “B+”. If it was too bad, a student had to do a rewrite. Nobody wanted to do that!
That comes pretty close to what I was taught at school. The serifs on the “I” are superfluous and I mostly don’t bother to do them and I do ligatures where it is quicker not to lift the pen, depending on the letter pairs. My writing is still quite legible after all those years despite my increasing laziness/sloppiness, I think, as opposite to my wife’s. But I don’t remember being taught to write by hand as traumatic at all.
Which brings to my mind the matter of girls and boys writing. There were differences in my childhood. Girls often had rounder letters and made the dots on the i and the j as little circles. I guess it came naturally, by imitation, not by imposition from the teachers. Just as an aside, nm.
Yes to the first here, too. Letter grades started in 3rd grade for us (early 80s.) No to the latter. Honor roll, as well (Catholic school.)
Yes. A thru D* then F, from first grade on.
Honor roll was a thing. As and Bs only.
Handwriting got a letter grade.
- switched to a different school system after 3rd grade where they didn’t give out Ds — instead you could receive an F+. ETA: the letters went with specific numerical averages. That D, or F+, meant your average was between 69 and 60. C grades were 70s (with minus for the lowest 3 and plus for the top 3) B grades were an average in the 80s, and an A for an average of 90 and above.
This thread made me think of my grandpa and how I was always fond of his handwriting, and he never wrote in cursive. I wonder if it’s because he went to a technical high school in the late 1930s/early 1940s. They wanted him to write legibly and did not expect him to write anything verbose perhaps? Right after that he went into the Marines for a minute until the end of WWII and after that he was a snack cake delivery driver.
Grandpa kept daily diaries and still never wrote in cursive. Granted, his diary entries were short (he was fond of food and weather). Maybe he would have written more if he had a more fluid style.
My dad uses the same block lettering as grandpa did. He was also in the military for a short bit and then was a factory worker. I don’t know that he’s ever had to write anything longer than a few sentences, probably not since 1965.
Both of these guys’ block lettering is extremely good, fwiw. Much nicer than mine.
My block lettering is pretty good, too. I’ve been complimented on it.
Me too! I’ve always hated the capital Q.
My cursive writing is very nice, and it is legible. I find it quicker to write something in cursive than to print it.
If you asked me to “print” my name or use “block lettering”, say on a form, you would get something like on Trajan’s Column—all the serifs, no lower-case letters, and no ligatures. However, I do not consider this “cursive”.
People actually trained in engineering and draughting would find it easy to reproduce this style, I imagine:
Still not cursive, though
Come to think of it, I have noticed that using, e.g., a dip pen with a needle-sharp nib versus a Biro does make a difference in what shapes and strokes are more comfortable to write. So what seems like a random loop or serif in one situation may be essential in the other. For instance, a ball point is symmetrical, but with a flexible nib you can (maybe) apply slight pressure on a downstroke but zero pressure on an upstroke.
Engineering technical pens, if you have ever used them, are their own thing—the ink flows through a cylindrical tube which should be perpendicular to the paper.
This is a point (no pun intended) that hasn’t been emphasized enough.
Cursive versus non-running script versus block lettering have relative advantages and disadvantages based on the writing instrument. Nib pens (fountain, dip, or quill) seem to work best with running cursive scripts. Lettering seems to be most effective with fine pencils or technical pens.
Ball point type pens (Biro or gel) seems to have no technical preference.
I’m sure it does not help that writing is used as punishment. I’m sure you’ve seen the opening to the Simpson’s, where Bart is seen writing some phrase on a blackboard repeatedly. That’s real. I never had to do it on a blackboard, but I was forced to fill up many pages of paper with the same sentence. Like so many other childhood punishments, I remember the punishment with perfect clarity but not a bit about what it was for.
As for my writing style, it is closer to the drafting style that DPRK gave, though with a few nods toward speed, such as an 8 in the D’Nealian style (an S that gets closed off with a line, as opposed to two circles/ovals). Of course, when writing quickly I’m nowhere as neat as that example, but I find that sloppy print is easier to read than sloppy cursive.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dullboy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a d ul boy. All work and no play makes Jack al dull boy. All work and no play makes Mack a dull boy. All work an dno playmakes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no palay makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dullboy.
Sure, people can develop whatever “style” - combination of printing/cursive - they want, and after cursive class in grade school, no one will give a damn - SO LONG AS IT IS LEGIBLE! But you will not be able to develop a legible personal handwriting if you are not familiar with the standard forms of printed and cursive letters. Nor will you be able to read other peoples’ personal styles.
For the life of me, I’m not sure what subjects I missed out on while learning cursive in 4th grade. The schools are dropping cursive to teach other things, and because the kids will keyboard. But then they don’t even teach proper keyboarding. What are all of these critical subjects OTHER THAN reading, writing and 'rithmetic?
I learned it in third grade ( and so did my kids) but I don’t remember a whole lot of time that was specifically devoted to learning cursive, and certainly not nearly as much as was spent on teaching us to print. I’m sure there had to be some time spent teaching cursive but neither my children not I got the same sort of practice assignments we got when learning how to print - tracing the letters/words that were written with a dotted line, writing a page of a letter in upper and lower case, copying sentences. Practice in cursive consisted of completing ordinary assignments in cursive rather than printing.
I don’t recall getting a separate grade for handwriting past maybe third grade. Grades for written assignments to some extent depended on handwriting - but all that mattered was legibility and neatness.( crossing out words with a single line rather than scribbling over them etc.) No one’s grades were lowered because their handwriting didn’t look like some “perfect form”.
In California:
- English Language Arts
- Mathematics
- Career Technical Education
- Computer Science
- Health Education
- History-Social Science
- Physical Education
- Science
- Arts Education
- World Languages
Yes to both when I was in public school, though they used different grading systems. That’s how you can have elementary school kids on the honor roll (either all As or all As and Bs). Though, fortunately, your handwriting wasn’t in that. It used a different grading system: Excellent, Satisfatory, Needs Improvement, and Unsatisfactory. I usually got S’s once I got to public school.
But, in the academic subjects, I’d get all As, and I’d never have more than 4 missed assignments or 4 absences per quarter, which meant I qualified for the pizza party. And everyone on the honor roll would get a special card that would let students get deals at local businesses.
Before that, I was in a private school, and there were indeed no subject grades. There were the occasional test grades, but most work required you to just keep doing it until you got them all right. That’s the Montessori method for you. I actually think moving to grades introduced me to the concept of “good enough,” and helped me tremendously with not trying to be perfect.
So, do you have some kind of cite for that because I was told back in the first grade that the reason for cursive was originally to avoid smears and blots from lifting the pen while writing. I really don’t know what it is, but despite the claim that cursive is a faster method of writing I have not seen evidence of that. I’m sure people who rarely print can write faster in cursive, as would be the case if the situation was reversed but it seems to me much more likely that the original reason had to do with early ink pen technology.