> Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms
Yeah, it always is, that’s just how human societies work.
Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)
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Re: Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)
#12Russian Cyrillic is hand-written exclusively in cursive. Children are never even taught how to write block letters. The author may be right to argue that cursive has no decisive advantage over block letters, "so why teach it?", a more fundamental question to my mind is why bother teaching _both_ forms of hand-writing? If we have to pick one, why privilege block letters over cursive, if both are equally effective? Edi…
Keyboards eliminated the advantages cursive had for input speed in most cases, and I find block characters easier to read. Definitely don’t feel cursive has advantages when handwriting speed is less relevant.
Re: Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)
#13Russian Cyrillic is hand-written exclusively in cursive. Children are never even taught how to write block letters. The author may be right to argue that cursive has no decisive advantage over block letters, "so why teach it?", a more fundamental question to my mind is why bother teaching _both_ forms of hand-writing? If we have to pick one, why privilege block letters over cursive, if both are equally effective? Edi…
For one thing, in English at least (and AFAIK throughout users of the Latin alphabet more broadly), you pretty much have to be able to write block letters as a literate person. Block letters are generally less ambiguous. (Especially all CAPS.)
Re: Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)
#14Russian Cyrillic is hand-written exclusively in cursive. Children are never even taught how to write block letters. The author may be right to argue that cursive has no decisive advantage over block letters, "so why teach it?", a more fundamental question to my mind is why bother teaching _both_ forms of hand-writing? If we have to pick one, why privilege block letters over cursive, if both are equally effective? Edi…
Keyboards eliminated the advantages cursive had for input speed in most cases, and I find block characters easier to read. Definitely don’t feel cursive has advantages when handwriting speed is less relevant.
People who learned block letters first, and who rarely encounter cursive, undoubtedly find block letters easier to read. But you might imagine that if had learned cursive first and used it regularly, you would have no problem reading it.
The point I'm trying to make is that the preference for block letters is an accident of how most of us were taught, and not intrinsic to the writing style itself.
Re: Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)
#15Reminds 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.
Re: Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)
#16Just yesterday the Illinois state senate overrode the governor's veto in order to mandate that all schools teach cursive before fifth grade. Major arguments I heard included "reading notes from grandma" and "preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures). http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-cursive-required-illinois-2... http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinoi...
>"preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures)
lol. as if banks (and other institutions likely to get hit by fraud) do signature checks.
Re: Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)
#17Just yesterday the Illinois state senate overrode the governor's veto in order to mandate that all schools teach cursive before fifth grade. Major arguments I heard included "reading notes from grandma" and "preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures). http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-cursive-required-illinois-2... http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinoi...
>"preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures) lol. as if banks (and other institutions likely to get hit by fraud) do signature checks.
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.
Re: Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)
#18Just yesterday the Illinois state senate overrode the governor's veto in order to mandate that all schools teach cursive before fifth grade. Major arguments I heard included "reading notes from grandma" and "preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures). http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-cursive-required-illinois-2... http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinoi...
>"preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures) lol. as if banks (and other institutions likely to get hit by fraud) do signature checks.
They do. I have been asked in the past to write as in my recorded sample or record a new one.
Re: Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)
#19Seems to ignore the fact that picking up and putting down the writing point is actually harder for small children than just sliding the writing implement along the paper. Also consider the popularity of "Swype"-style keyboards, since continuous sliding a finger across a surface is, for many, easier than discrete screen presses. Sources: personal experience and anecdotes from teachers of 4-6 yr olds (an age range not…
I didn't "ignore" that, it directly refuted it. The article sites studies that claim cursive takes far more fine motor skills than non-cursive and was harder to teach to younger children.
Re: Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)
#20> 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 cursive could be slower than block letters... but then realized that, yes, if you're doing all the curly things on Q's and Z's and F's then, yes it could be slower.
But nobody does those! A "personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript" is how I write, I just call it cursive, or "partial cursive". But it says that is faster, and presumably students wouldn't learn that if they hadn't learned full cursive at first?
So seems like teaching cursive is useful because in the end students do write faster. Except that maybe we should focus on teaching just the "fast" parts of connecting lowercase letters, and ignore all the fancy curly parts that uppercase letters tend to have?