Another problem with not learning cursive... (high school, teacher, writing, difference)
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A century ago 6th Grade (or maybe 8th) was Senior year for the vast majority of school goers. Those that were left were, almost by default, college bound where Latin, and to an extent Greek, was the lingua franca for a lot of the courses then taught.
Some very recent studies are starting to show that kids who play video games more than three hours a day show better impulse control and working memory than those who either don't play them or play less than the three hours.
That three hours is a kicker, though, compared to the time spent on cursive practice in school, likely half an hour or so.
Yeah but with 30 minutes in school practicing cursive is 30 minutes of school not spent doing something else. That was my main problem with it. It would make more sense to have the kids spending time reading or learning other writing basics like grammar and syntax as opposed to doing cursive drills 30 minutes a day.
As a history teacher, you should know that cursive served the practical purpose of allowing people to write with a quill without having to lift it up more than once for a word as opposed to writing letters individually where you might also have to lift up the quill within an individual letter. Assuming we write with pens now, the pens don’t have that issue.
The point I’m trying to make is that technology changes and we have to move along with it. I haven’t felt like I have lost anything by not learning Latin, and I am fairly certain that kids today who never learn how to write cursive will feel the same way about it.
Cursive was taught in second or third grade and you don't have to teach them to be an expert at it. Just get them so they can read it and that isn't very hard. Although I think it would be easier to teach it by writing it. Then they'd automatically be able to read it.
Just give them the fundamentals or else history is going to be censored and only that which has been translated into printing will be available to them. Yes, history is important. You know--if you don't know history, you're bound to repeat it.
Yeah but with 30 minutes in school practicing cursive is 30 minutes of school not spent doing something else. That was my main problem with it. It would make more sense to have the kids spending time reading or learning other writing basics like grammar and syntax as opposed to doing cursive drills 30 minutes a day.
As a history teacher, you should know that cursive served the practical purpose of allowing people to write with a quill without having to lift it up more than once for a word as opposed to writing letters individually where you might also have to lift up the quill within an individual letter. Assuming we write with pens now, the pens don’t have that issue.
The point I’m trying to make is that technology changes and we have to move along with it. I haven’t felt like I have lost anything by not learning Latin, and I am fairly certain that kids today who never learn how to write cursive will feel the same way about it.
You totally missed the part of my response that was divorced from what I taught and addressed the greater cognitive benefits. My response for that would have been the same no matter what I taught.
As far as Latin goes, once more people went past 8th Grade it was only taught in the college prep classes, which were roughly 10% of the student body at most schools so the vast majority wasn't exposed to it in any case.
I don't know, three hours plopped down playing a video game for roughly the same benefit of a half hour plopped in a school desk. Yes, I know "they could be doing something else" then. The same could be said for the three hours playing games on a screen. Sounds like an inefficient trade off to me.
I don't think I have written and sent a letter in cursive for 15 years -- and probably not received one. It is a lost art. But I am working to preserve my parents' war letters from WW2. There are several hundred letters, all in cursive. They both had good handwriting and since I read it for years as a kid, I was familiar with their writing. I have Civil War letters from a Union soldier in cursive with iron gall ink that is more difficult to read. The worst is cursive writing in pencil on postcards sent 120 years ago. Pencil fades quickly in light after a century.
Why was cursive taught in middle school? What era was this in? It used to be part of gradeschool education.
I was just thinking about the implications of generations growing up not being able to read cursive, OP. Among other things, it means they wouldn't be able to read a handwritten note on, say, a birthday or Christmas card, or a thank-you note written by someone from an older generation in the family. Cursive now is like a secret code only people above a certain age can decipher.
I’ve heard at some post offices that this has become an issue as well.
Just like the pop and soda thing should one relocate to various parts of the US., you’ll learn over the years that people say /will say words that you’ve never heard of yet. Over my years and moving around, I’ve heard both writing and cursive. My only problem with the later, is I can’t remember which one I heard first and from where.
I've seen articles bemoaning the decision to stop teaching cursive writing In school. But it hadn't occurred to me that this means that younger people literally can't read old manuscripts
How will they interpret the past?
No, most of these history students admitted, they could not read manuscripts. If they were assigned a research paper, they sought subjects that relied only on published sources. One student reshaped his senior honors thesis for this purpose; another reported that she did not pursue her interest in Virginia Woolf for an assignment that would have involved reading Woolf’s handwritten letters. In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the way Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...istory/671246/
I taught myself calligraphy, using fancy pen nibs. It was fun.
Perhaps that is why "cursive" is such a "curse."
They should try teaching it in art class, using pen nibs. Switching over to a ball point pen (or pencil) is trivial after one has mastered the skill of making strokes that change thickness.
Why was cursive taught in middle school? What era was this in? It used to be part of gradeschool education.
I was just thinking about the implications of generations growing up not being able to read cursive, OP. Among other things, it means they wouldn't be able to read a handwritten note on, say, a birthday or Christmas card, or a thank-you note written by someone from an older generation in the family. Cursive now is like a secret code only people above a certain age can decipher.
Yes, we learned cursive in grade school. Middle school we were diagramming sentences. When do they learn that now? College? Never?
I’ve heard at some post offices that this has become an issue as well.
Machines sort the letters and amazingly can read most cursive.
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