The state of Indiana has been in the news recently since it decided to drop the requirement that schools teach students cursive writing beginning this fall. With electronic communication on the rise, the most logical argument against teaching cursive is that the time students spend learning it could be better spent learning something more practical.
After I learned cursive writing in the third grade and practiced it throughout my elementary school education, I notice that it quickly fell by the wayside in middle and high school. Teachers did not force me to write instead of print, and I did not force myself. In college, I once spent a week taking notes in cursive and found that, like Billy Madison stumbling on Zs in his eponymous movie, I had to think about how to write certain letters. Cursive writing was not recursive, and I had forgotten how to write efficiently. More embarrassingly, my notes looked like they could have been scrawled by a third grader.
Few of Beloit College's incoming freshmen last year remember how to write in cursive anyway, and the process of informally phasing it out seems well underway. As more states adopt Common Core standards, which do not require cursive writing, I see longhand becoming a lost art. Moreover, I cannot think of any strong arguments to keep cursive writing as part of the curriculum. The best I can come up with is that students will need to write their signature on documents, but surely that does not demand entire units on the subject. Am I missing something?
Video contains PG-13 humor:
I saw this too, and wasn't surprised at all. I remember Mike saying at some point too, it may have been in my interview, that he doesn't necessarily think kids need to know how to write in cursive.
ReplyDeleteI cannot really think of an argument for them to learn cursive either. To make my life easier, however, I wish students knew how to read cursive writing. I tend to write in cursive because it is faster for me, the complete opposite of my students.
Oh, well. I guess it is easier for me to change my ways instead of all my students. Josh, you are right, though. I cannot think of any other reasons to learn cursive than to sign their own name. So I guess we just teach them their own signature?
Too funny. What about keyboarding?
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