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Down With Penmanship!  Off With Its Head!

8/23/2015

3 Comments

 
     This post appeared on my Facebook page a few days ago:
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    In truth I was unaware that, in deference to the electronic age we live in, the schools in this country are phasing out the teaching of cursive in elementary school in favor of just showing the kids how to print and then being done with the whole handwriting thing.
    But apparently there are some traditionalists out there who believe that learning to pen those curved, loopy letters as a means of human communication should continue to be part of the standard academic curriculum.
     Not me.  I celebrate the demise of cursive.   And not just for the sake of future generations of young children who might be spared my childhood travails,  but from the satisfaction derived from seeing an old nemesis vanquished.
     Back in the late 1950's to mid 1960's when I was an elementary school student penmanship, or the art of fine handwriting, was an academic subject held at the same level of importance as Reading Arithmatic, History, Geography, Science,  English and every other required field of knowledge or skill.  We were taught the Palmer method,  the goal of which was for us to learn to reproduce on paper  those graceful glyphs which at the time bordered the top of every blackboard in every school in the country.

    Occasionally they float through   the background scenery in my "still-in-school-and don't-have-my assignment-done" nightmares (see post from 9/15/2014 and 9/16/2014).
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     Alas, I could not conquer the Palmer method.  No matter how I practiced - and I practiced a lot - my letters constantly strayed from their axis, listed left and right, dipped above and below the line, the lines separating and the loops closing, the whole mess smeared with the erasure marks or cross-outs of my many futile attempts.
     It would be over half a century later before it would be revealed to me that my inability with a writing utensil was likely due to a congenital weakness in the first joint of the index finger of my right hand.  At the time the weakness in my joint was, I believed, perceived as a weakness in my character.  In any case, I was pronounced sloppy. 
    As with occasional rowdy behavior, boys could better get away with rowdy handwriting;  boys weren't realistically expected to behave all the time or have neat handwriting.  Girls were expected expected to do both.  All the time.  Good girls didn't get into trouble at school and, unfortunately, bad handwriting could get a girl into trouble back then, earning a public reprimand, even a smack on the hand with a ruler, and definitely a bad academic reputation. I believed that my teachers took my bad handwriting and sloppy papers personally.  But they were just doing their job.
    Nor, apparently, was was my experience based on the fact that I went to a Catholic school;  my husband Tom, who went  public school, once told me that in elementary school his handwriting was so extremely beyond the acceptable pale that he was sent down to the principal's office and pronounced (but fortunately, only temporaily) learning disabled.
   But then high school came along for which I went to a private college preparatory girls' school where all of a sudden nobody cared about handwriting anymore.  I marveled at the smart, high-achieving girls in my class whose handwriting was even worse than mine.  I'm sure nobody even knew I had awful handwriting because nobody seemed to notice mine the way I noticed everybody else's.  Classmates, teachers, nobody seemed to care about my handwriting.  It was liberating.

     To this day nobody cares day about my handwriting.
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   And so, in answer to the question posed on the above Facebook post as to whether we should keep cursive writing alive in the schools I say, nay I shout,  "The tyrant cursive is overthrown!  Long live the keyboard!"
3 Comments
Romaine
8/24/2015 02:43:07 am

I myself am sad to learn that cursive will soon be a thing of the past. I can understand your dislike of it due to early childhood experiences. Personally I find the whole act of writing to be an extremely interesting sensory experience. I'm very particular about the pens and pencils I use because each provides a different type of sensory experience as it glides along the paper. I've eschewed laptops for notebooks when I attend meetings throughout my career because I so prefer writing to typing.

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Patti
8/24/2015 02:59:01 am

Well, I can understand that, because you are, after all an artist. I think cursive writing really is more related to art. They should maybe at least keep it in the schools as an art subject. Of course I can appreciate beautiful calligraphy as much as anybody. I guess I should also admit that I write as little as possible anymore so as not to aggravate the arthritis in my hand, so I guess I'm sort of biased towards typing for that reason.

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Marianne
8/25/2015 11:04:04 pm

RomIne, I understand your experience, and another advantage to writing notes is, according to some studies, you remember more of what you wrote as opposed to typed.
I understand Patti's point, and letting go of Palmer makes great sense. I am concerned that schools don't spend time on letter formation and printing: surely kids need to know how to words on paper--I volunteer in a first grad classroom, the kids are supposed to be writing stories but they can't write a legible letter

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