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Reminds me of the long battle I had with my teachers trying to make me write the weird cursive "4", when I was trying to write the "4" I had always seen up to that point in the keyboard of the ZX Spectrum :)
There's a cursive 4? I didn't even realize numbers _had_ cursive forms. Next you'll be telling me that I should have been capitalizing the first numbers of my addresses.
Starting in 1st grade, I'd get straight As - except in "handwriting" - always a B there - and it kept me from ever getting "First Honors."
It was arbitrary and unfair, and it made me hate school. And cursive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surprisingly, institutions do at least sometimes check that there's something on the signature line. I had a car registration renewal returned recently because I forgot to sign it. Given that my signature is a totally illegible scrawl, I don't see what good it does but we still pretend that what might as well be just an "X" for a lot of people actually means something.
And it can indeed be just an X. It displays intent. You placed a scrawl on the line to signify your intent to agree to/abide by whatever's on the paper. Without that intent, they assume you made a mistake. I think it's better than blindly taking any paperwork without "signatures" on them.
If I need to sign something official, I'll pull out an stamp pad and a bottle of ink, soak the pad, press my ring into it, and then slam my hand down on the paper ring first.
Personally I (30 years old now) went to Catholic school (K-12) and learned cursive somewhere around 2nd or 3rd grade and was forced to write in cursive until I graduated 8th grade. Most of the time as a kid I hated it and wished I could write in block letters and once I hit freshman year of high school I never looked back. Fast forward through four years of high school and three gap years when as a freshman in colleg…
And instead of teaching people pure block letters, teach them some form of italics or D'Nealian. That offers some of the aesthetic advantages of cursive without the unreadability.
(interestingly enough, my elementary school in the early '90s taught D'Nealian and cursive, but no pure block letters)
(a) The particular “cursive” styles taught in American schools are often pretty crappy and overly ornate and slow/difficult to write, evolving out of writing which was intentionally slow for the sake of uniformity, ornament, and legibility, because it dated from an era when all business communication was handwritten, later simplified so that it would be easier for children. It also was originally designed for quills or dip pens, which are pretty much never used today. Students are seldom taught that the writing style appropriate for a 6-year-old student just learning to hold a pen is probably not appropriate for a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old student.
(b) No instruction in handwriting should rigidly force students to all exactly follow the model instead of allowing for individual variation and comfort. In particular left-handed students need very different instruction than right-handed students, but everyone has individual anatomy and preferences. Much of the handwriting teaching materials from decades past was aimed as much at enforcing discipline and punishing unruly students as at writing per se.
(c) The most important aspects of teaching handwriting are to teach a comfortable posture, help students find a comfortable pen/pencil grip, and help students learn to produce writing which is fluid and legible and fast enough, without too many strokes per letter and without too many awkward movements, but also which matches the student’s own personal style.
(d) What type of pen students learn to write with makes a big difference. #2 pencils and ballpoint pens are not very good tools for learning to write, IMO.
But with that said, teaching “print” writing (i.e. strictly separated letters that look like printed letters – usually except for a and g, which are more like upright versions of italic letters) is pretty stupid. It’s slow, usually devolves into something uncomfortable and illegible in adulthood, is typically not taught in a way such that students understand where the beginnings and ends of strokes for letters should be or have a sense of the logical construction of their letters, and usually isn’t taught any better than joined-together writing styles. (For example: I was never really taught handwriting, and we were mainly encouraged to write with a strictly separated letter style. My pen grip was uncomfortable and my writing was slow and not terribly legible all the way through school. After every long written high-school exam my hand would hurt. Some judicious instruction and better practice at age 5–8 could have saved a lot of grief.)
There are a wide variety of efficient and legible handwriting styles based on italic or cursive writing. Students should aim for joining letters together in groups of 2–4, putting joins and breaks where comfortable (not strictly joining every letter, or strictly separating every letter). Students should be allowed to tweak whatever writing style they are taught by their personal preferences, and not graded or punished on how strictly they can follow the model. Handwriting teachers need to have great powers of observation and great empathy, to see what kinds of posture, pen grips, letter forms, etc. are working for students vs. which ones are causing problems which will plague the students throughout their lives.
> So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade. Even in France, a quarter of the French pupils who were taught cursive exclusively and were still mostly using it in the fourth grade, had largely abandoned it for a mixed style by the fifth grade. I was shocked at how c…
I ended up developing something like that in 2009. By that point, I'd long since forgotten everything I was taught in elementary school and just wrote everything in all caps. But I was starting to develop an interest in typography, and I wanted to improve my handwriting. So I started studying italic serif fonts to see how I could do something similar by hand, with the restriction that most letters should be written in one stroke. I found out that my attempts at replicating serifs in handwriting without increasing the stroke count actually had a technical term: semiserif.
What I came up with looks kind of like D'Nealian, but with some significant differences. The biggest one is that I put semiserifs on the beginnings of letters and not just on the ends. Another is that I use a two-story g (and I wrote it with an ear for a while before eliminating it). And my z is particularly swashy.
I can't name any specific reason to practice cursive though.
It seems like there's value in rote practice of tasks for improving focus and discipline. I'd argue that's part of why learning piano helps kids so much. I can't name any specific reason to practice cursive though.
My son is 11, and was never taught cursive in public school. His print writing is legible, but not neat. He just learned cursive (it took him less than two weeks at the private school we just put him in, where all the other students learned it years ago). His writing is much neater, and more legible.
It seems like there's value in rote practice of tasks for improving focus and discipline. I'd argue that's part of why learning piano helps kids so much. I can't name any specific reason to practice cursive though.
Cursive is the most efficient method for writing by hand. Also, for many, it's much easier for them to write in a readable fashion with cursive. My son is 11, and was never taught cursive in public school. His print writing is legible, but not neat. He just learned cursive (it took him less than two weeks at the private school we just put him in, where all the other students learned it years ago). His writing is much…
I think people only think this because they have the most practice doing it.
For instance, shorthand is more efficient.