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Message in a bottle from Scottish girl found in Norway after 25 years

bbc.co.uk

101–106 of 106 posts

Re: Message in a bottle from Scottish girl found in Norway after 25 years

#101
post #78
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then the zombies happened, and your message to the front couldn't be read, we fell to the hordes because of your lack of skill at cursive thank you the end.

If I want something to be read I will write it in block letters at a perfectly reasonable speed

Truthfully, there is a reason for cursive. Not lifting the pen is a big time save, and cursive is designed to be written without that. EG, F doesn't require a pen lift pause to make the lower bar, in cursive.

The way the letters are written are also for maximal speed, and of course, you don't have to lift pen between letters.

Any skilled cursive writer will tell you, it is many times faster to write legibly in cursive over block letters.

Do we need to learn it any more? Well, I'd say not for the speed benefits.

But discounting the speed benefits, acting as if they are a lie, is silly.

From my side, I see a lot of people complaining about leaning "dumb things" in public school, in these responses. Wow.

Totally don't get the point of it.

And of course if we removed what everyone on this thread complained about, in the public school curriculum, well, there'd be nothing to teach! Because everyone likes different things.

Which is part of what public school is supposed to be about.

Teach the basics, while seeing what you excel in, what interests you.

You know what cursive teaches, outside of itself? Fine finger control. Brain to finger control mapping.

It is an entirely different skill than keyboard pecking.

And while you are learning it, you are still learning grammar, learning to craft thought to speech, and so on.

There is no loss here.

Re: Message in a bottle from Scottish girl found in Norway after 25 years

#102
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got some issues you need to sort out. Don't cut yourself on that edge.

It appears they may already have a diagnosis of oppositional defiant disorder.

I do not, and my public school experience was probably one of the best and happiest I could have hoped to have. Apologies I wasn’t histrionic enough to trip your sarcasm detector. I’m saying ODD and similar labels are fake ideas sold to us by the same people who will accuse a person of having them if that person finds it difficult to exist in extremely inhuman unnatural ways designed to serve a shared economic existence more than a shared human existence. Everyone I know considers it normal because that’s what we all went through too, but the whole thing is kinda fucked up if you stop and think about it.

Re: Message in a bottle from Scottish girl found in Norway after 25 years

#103
post #31

I wrote a message in a bottle when I was young. I still have very dim memories of being excited at the possibility that somebody in another country years later would find it. According to my folks, however, there were some issues. First, I was four years old and couldn't write, and second, I threw the bottle into a small pond. But my parents didn't want to dampen my enthusiasm at the time.

I had a similar experience at the beach around 6 or 7 but it ended with me getting yelled at by some surfers for littering.

In the 1970s when I was in grade school we attached postcards to helium balloons to see how far they could get (some people got responses that indicated they traveled for hundreds of miles). That probably would be even less acceptable today in terms of littering as deflated balloons often get eaten by wildlife to ill effect.

Re: Message in a bottle from Scottish girl found in Norway after 25 years

#104
post #2

Look how neat that handwriting is. None of that nonsense scrawl they introduce in KS2 now (I believe Americans call it cursive)

I don't think it's cursive. In the cursive I learned in the south eastern US, every letter connects in some fashion.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/J-ui6ybQ4gg/maxresdefault.jpg

Re: Message in a bottle from Scottish girl found in Norway after 25 years

#105
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people, including some commenters down thread seem to think cursive is about being fancy. It’s not, it’s an efficiency play for writing faster. That’s of course useless in modern day with so little actual hand writing. So it’s less common in schools

That's a common misconception. It stopped being more effecient when we stopped dipping pens or quills in ink. Lifting the pen from the paper tended to cause splattering too so you wanted to keep the pen on the paper rather than lifting it for every letter.

I believe that’s the major gain. I’m not convinced it’s not still faster with a ballpoint pen marginally.

Re: Message in a bottle from Scottish girl found in Norway after 25 years

#106
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is perfectly legible. Many modern fonts are less legible than that. I am curious about the opposition to cursive script that some people demonstrate, mostly in the US. In Europe cursive script is the norm; block letter writing by an adult is considered a mark of poor education.

"block letter writing by an adult is considered a mark of poor education" Are you sure about that? It isn't uncommon to require it on forms. Also, Europe is a big and varied place - perhaps it is just one part of Europe? Where in Europe were you referring to?

In all European countries, adults are expected to be able to write cursive. Filling out forms in block letters is sometimes a requirement, for example to facilitate machine reading.
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