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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday November 02 2016, @08:33AM
from the heading-for-a-new-dark-age dept.
from the heading-for-a-new-dark-age dept.
The New Yorker wonders:
My children know how to print their letters. And they type frighteningly well. Still, I can't escape the conviction that cursive—writing it and knowing how to read it—represents some universal value. I'm not the only one who thinks so. Every year, there are worried articles about the decline of cursive and its omission from school curricula. And there's a backlash, one that I secretly cheer for. When I read that Washington state is now considering Senate Bill 6469, "an act related to requiring that cursive writing be taught in common schools," I gave a little fist pump in the air.
Cursive and handwriting are dead. Communication of the future will be done with pure emoticons.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Wednesday November 02 2016, @08:53AM
Please tell me why you want to force your kids to learn cursive.
Do you think they are unable to communicate via non-electronic means without it? No.
Do you think that non-electronic means will be their primary communications medium? Surely not.
Like someone who continues to teach how to use a typewriter or a quill, your opportunity here is limited.
I am 37.
Literally, I can't remember the last time I used a pen to write anything (even on a tablet!) which wasn't a signature or a brief memo / post-it that would have been just as useful in block capitals.
But no, let's force our children to spend years breaking their hands to write with an inefficient implement that they probably won't use very much at all throughout their adult lives.
And when I do write in cursive, all I remember is my old teachers yelling at me for holding the pen "wrong", smudging my work, telling my friends how they should only write with their right hand, and generally ending up with a scrawl of mess even when forced to write for HOURS AND HOURS AND HOURS for years on end.
And my handwriting is still readable only by myself and those close to me, so I end up writing in block capitals if it's important.
I'm a mathematician. I'll throw you a bone here. You can't write equations on a computer. Well, I can't. I'm sure if you grew up with Maple/LaTeX/MathML as the only way to practically do so it would be easy. But I *must* use a pen to do mathematics. Not because it's a pen, but because the layout needs to be so freeform. A pen on a tablet more than suffices, or even - at a pinch - a touchscreen.
I work in schools. The kids all have their own iPad. They call them "old" because they've had iPads at home since they were babies stabbing at apps. The current intake have never SEEN Windows XP in the wild. They were born after it was already old. Almost all work is online, collaborative, set-online, collated-online, marked-online and returned-online.
Yes, they still have cursive lessons, but I honestly can't figure out why. It is quaintness? Tradition? It seems to be the only reason.
How about we stop caring about how they record information and forcing them to do it in an antiquated and - to them - illogical way (at what point in their lives do they ever CHOOSE to write things down in preference to typing them?), and the shape of their joining-S, and spend more time on making sure the grammar is correct and they have a larger vocabulary at their disposal.
It's a horrendous waste of time. And it's happening because "that's what I was taught at school" instead of for real, logical, practical reasons.
By all means teach them to be able to jot down a note in the absence of technology. They will mostly need it for password resets. But even signatures have gone the way of the dodo, and a scrape on a touchscreen bearing no resemblance to my written signature is considered "good enough" for virtually everything.
But to spend the amount of time it takes to learn cursive - by ROTE for the majority of time - is better off spent elsewhere.
And, no. DO NOT "teach" them typing and the home keys and junk. They have that down within the first few years automatically as muscle-memory of using the tools. You might have had to be instructed on how to do it, but that's because you were taught cursive first. They have grown up with keyboards before they ever enter the school system. And typing speed will ALWAYS beat writing speed, and typing speed comes from muscle-memory, not from the home keys and constricting their hands to fit adult keyboards.
Stop teaching the tool, and teach the information and technique to use the tool effectively instead.
Cursive is the wrong tool nowadays.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @09:22AM
Please tell me why you want to force your kids to learn cursive.
Occasionally people will provide vague reasons like 'It builds character!', but those can be dismissed immediately for being so vacuous. Other times, people will talk about studies which found highly questionable correlations between knowing cursive and some useful skill, but these studies usually lack overwhelming scientific consensus and sometimes haven't even been replicated. So, often it comes down to almost completely subjective reasons for forcing cursive in schools, even if the person doesn't want to admit it or simply doesn't realize it.
I work in schools. The kids all have their own iPad.
Provided by the schools? It's a shame that schools--which are supposed to encourage education--promote proprietary black boxes that do not respect users' freedoms. Schools should not be promoting proprietary software, and Free Software should be required (other than maybe in cases where reverse engineering is being taught).
(Score: 2) by ledow on Wednesday November 02 2016, @09:44AM
Chromebooks are also an option. :-)
But PARENTS insist on iPads because "they look nice and that other nice school has them".
Tell me about it... I have to manage them.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Wednesday November 02 2016, @09:52AM
Oh, and please don't fall into the fallacy of "today's tech is what the kids will learn and be stuck with".
That's not true either.
I was brought up on a single BBC Micro in the back of a classroom, about 2 in the school, and now manage the IT in a school with thousands of devices each of unimaginable speed and capacity for 7-year-old me.
What you're taught to use in school just shows you its weaknesses and provide general groundwork. In the same way that teaching them a PC with Python won't lock them into a platform and a language, but will let them realise why those aren't the best tools. It's actually better to let them use Windows, and iPads, and Chromebooks, and Androids, and Raspberry Pis - tablets and PCs and touchscreens and embedded devices - as it lets them see what's best for the job they want to do, and allow them to join commonalities and distinguish their use-cases.
But isn't that exactly what we're talking about? Letting pupils use the best tools rather than the ones that your grandmother used? I sure wouldn't want their Art lessons to be only 3D-printing, I'd want a paintbrush, some pottery wheels, craft knives, digital pixel art, etc. in there somewhere because that's sometimes the best tool for that job. But cursive? It's not the best tool for any job that I can think of.
(P.S. not in any way suggesting that iPads are the best tool for the job, either, or Chromebooks... far from it!).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:45AM
Yeah, I remember when I had the ZX Spectrum with a nice 256x192 graphics resolution (of course only 176 pixels vertically were accessible by the BASIC commands, as the two lower text lines — 8 pixels high each — were reserved for input) and two colours (out of 16 total, but either only bright or only non-bright colours, as one bit was needed to hold the blinking attribute) per 8x8 block. At one time I thought about what resolution would be great to have, and finally arrived at the idea of 1024x768 with I don't remember how many colours, independent for each point (at least enough colours to consume at least a full byte, maybe several; I remember that different pixels wouldn't have shared any bytes). Then I realized how much memory you would need just to hold the image, and thought "no, that's never going to happen." ;-)
(Score: 4, Interesting) by art guerrilla on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:53AM
i was brought up counting on fingers and toes, and yet *somehow* i soldiered through and done did learnded them computer-brain machine things...
oh, i was also taught cursive, and while i am not sure it is a useful skill in general, i have used my cursive in various artistic compositions over the years; calculus ? not so much...
*waaaaa* why are we wasting kids time teaching them calculus *waaaaa*
damn people for forcing me to learn one iota of impractical info i can't make a buck off of, damn them to perdition ! ! !
/s
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 02 2016, @02:18PM
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Wednesday November 02 2016, @02:39PM
i was always a printing person, even to the point i had to go around in circles with the first bank account i got where they wanted to make me change my all caps signature to something cursivey... it is written in a distinctive manner, not just regular block letters anyone could copy, but being nominally non-cursive signature, they didnt want to allow it... they did...
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 02 2016, @02:57PM
*waaaaa* why are we wasting kids time teaching them calculus *waaaaa*
But seriously, one semester I ended up taking the calc course that was pretty obviously supposed to prepare me for my one programming class, and we kept learning the math concepts a week or two *after* we covered the matching thing in programming.
I think I only ever retook one comp sci course (the first introductory one).
I retook the fuck out of math courses.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:18AM
Because the time spent learning calculus is not wasted if you're becoming a mathematician.
The time spent learning cursive wouldn't be wasted if you're going to be a - graphologist? Calligraphist? Past that I'm struggling to use it.
I also think that counting on fingers is taught WRONG. You know why it's wrong? You get to 10 and then need toes.
However. if you'd started with binary - something easily do-able on the raising or not of fingers, you could get them to count to 1024, divide and multiply by two instantly, and provide information that will be useful in the future (yes, we do have to teach kids binary in most schools by the time they start sitting "real" exams).
You can be as sarcastic as you like, what you're showing is that you spent a lot of time learning something that you never used (do you dig out your fingers to count to 10 nowadays?). At best it was a transitional teaching tool, but counting on fingers doesn't consume years of your primary school lessons. Cursive DOES. I was still being forced to improve my cursive at age 16/17 - if you haven't managed it by then, for what is basically a practical skill you've been doing since you were 3/4/5, then you're aren't going to noticeably improve. And it's not like maths where - after being taught to count - you can learn geometry, calculus, trigonometry. Cursive is cursive and there's no "advanced cursive" - that's what we call calligraphy and is taught as an evening class for craft-inspired adults only!
It has NOTHING to do with money. It has everything to do with wasting the precious few years where children are receptive to EVERYTHING taught with teaching them a skill they will barely use in their adult lives. We're already complaining that they don't get taught enough home economics - how to cook, balance a chequebook (what's a chequebook these days?), read a contract / EULA, etc. but we're still forcing grown-up kids to sit and write on little ruled lines for hours and hours, deliberately SLOWING THEM DOWN compared to just putting a keyboard in front of them.
People say that I talk fast, type fast, send long emails quickly. You know how? Typing. You know how long it takes me to write neatly enough that people can read? Forever. In fact, when I was doing written exams, it was my primary cause of slowdown - it used to HURT to write for hours on end and I couldn't get the words out quick enough and my brain was constantly held back. With typing, it still happens but it's nowhere near as bad. (In fact, I guarantee if you look at my posts you will see things like repeated words in a sentence, where my brain is considering the sentence I want to write and substitutes a word that should be at the end of the sentence I want to write, with the similar one that my hands are typing at that exact second I'm thinking it - you end up with things like "Yes, it's rather climate outside today, it must be the climate." because I was typing "cold" when my brain was actually already at "climate").
The amount of stuff we learn in school that's RELEVANT in later years is already small. Let's not make it even smaller by wasting too much time on cursive. Let's put something more interesting and useful in that part of the brain instead. It's the waste of time trying to get curly-esses that drives me damn insane, especially when you then "don't have time" to cover, say, credit card interest rates and warnings against small loans. Or basic geography.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @11:55AM
That's different. You were not taught BBC Micro, you were taught programming or word processing.
Kids nowadays are not taught word processing, they are taught Microsoft Word 2016 (not to be confused with 2018, which will have the ribbon laid out differently). The older kids are not taught math, they are taught Maple. And so on and so forth.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Wednesday November 02 2016, @02:49PM
But cursive? It's not the best tool for any job that I can think of.
Cursive is the best method for writing quickly and legibly with a quill pen. Outside of calligraphy and art, it is hard to imagine when the quill pen as the best tool for writing. Perhaps after civilization collapses and we return to plucking geese for writing implements we will see a resurgence of cursive.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @03:45PM
If you pluck geese for your quills, you're an idiot.
Let them shed their quills, and collect them in a timely fashion.
(Score: 1) by charon on Wednesday November 02 2016, @11:40PM
(Score: 2, Insightful) by WillR on Wednesday November 02 2016, @01:15PM
Making the kids chug milk 'til they barf would have the same educational benefit and only waste one day of school...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @04:25PM
I spent having to make my hands almost bleed (mostly getting callouses and then a wart on my writing finger! *shakes fist at loaning out a pencil to someone with them!*) The irony of the situation was that I could *PRINT* with a pencil faster than I could cursive at the time, and it was much clearer and easier to read than my cursive (which lead to hours of rewriting reports because the teacher complained it was illegible.) And then after all these years my opinion was proven correct and no teachers actually want to read cursive anymore to begin with (by college only rough drafts were allowed in cursive, or sometimes required just to be dicks. And now 10 years later not even rough drafts are desired in cursive, unless it is in-class testing without digital devices.)
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Wednesday November 02 2016, @09:55AM
Exactly. My handwriting has always sucked. I spent several years having to do extra practice, fairly regularly missing break and lunchtimes to do it and having extra handwriting practice to do after school. My average grade in English was a C+ right up until age 14 when we were suddenly allowed to submit typed work. Then it jumped to an A, often A+, and with a very rare A-. It turns out that the first 10 years of my education not one single piece of written work was assessed based on my ability to form coherent thoughts, but solely on my ability to operate a pen.
Fast forward a decade or two and I now type in a typical day more than I write with a pen in a typical year. I've had four books published, around 200 articles, written undergraduate and PhD dissertations. Not once have I felt the lack of penmanship to be an obstacle since completing my undergraduate degree (where exams were hand written).
By all means, teach calligraphy in art classes, but please move on from a world where we teach one form of written communication in school and then use a completely different one for everything else in life.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by blackhawk on Wednesday November 02 2016, @01:33PM
Well, that sucks dogs dicks as they say over here. I went through Australasian education for 20 years, and although my marks on 'Handwriting' were almost always 'C' or worse, my marks for 'English' were 'A' or 'A+'. You'd have benefited greatly from having sane teachers like we have over here.
(Score: 2) by coolgopher on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:03PM
A C+ average in English? You should have taken a programming class so you could've gotten a C++ there!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:56PM
++C is faster.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by BsAtHome on Wednesday November 02 2016, @09:55AM
If you care about learning and the effectiveness of learning, then taking manual notes is still a lot better than using a computer and typing. There are many studies that show the relation very clearly. Pupils and students typing on their computer retain less of the subject matter and at lower understanding levels than those who take manual notes.
The second problem is that computers in the classroom are a severe distraction. Many cannot control themselves and do a lot of other stuff on the computer in the classroom, from playing games to social media and whatnot. The attention span has been diminishing with the increased use of computers.
The skill-set is diminishing with too many computers. Many of my pupils are not even able to make a sketch on paper anymore. They haven't the faintest clue how a napkin with a few lines on it can change the course of history. They are neither able to do it on their computer, nor are they able to take a pen and put something on paper. The real problem is that the nobody has taught them that the computer is a _tool_ and not the goal. The computer is an _extremely_useful_tool_. But it must be used as such. Once you know the backgrounds, then you can use the tool to increase both knowledge and productivity. That is what we call a win-win. Currently, it is a lose-lose situation.
Or maybe we are only here to be educating fools who have fewer skills and less knowledge, such that they can be controlled more easily... It is our choice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @12:02PM
Actually, that depends a lot on the individual. That it applies to everyone is a myth propagated by those who do learn better taking manual notes. Tests that show it to be true are tests performed on people who are already taking hand-written notes. If you were to test a bunch of students who never wrote hand-written notes, you'll see them struggling to keep up.
And some of us can't take notes and learn at the same time. All the way through school I took notes in one class (I honestly don't know why I did that). That was the one class that I learned absolutely nothing. Except, as a test, I tried not taking notes one lesson. I still remember what we learned that day.
(Score: 4, Informative) by BsAtHome on Wednesday November 02 2016, @12:26PM
No not everyone is impacted in the same way. That is why we have statistics and the result is a nice bell-curve. There are always extremes, examples and anecdotes that indicate the opposite. The spread from low-to-high has always been the case, also before the era of computers.
The point is that, on average, there is a very significant negative impact. That should be enough cause for concern. Let the teachers deal with the exceptions to the rule in the classroom. That is what the teachers are supposed to do anyway, regardless which tools are utilized.
(Score: 2) by blackhawk on Wednesday November 02 2016, @01:39PM
This is like saying "people who learnt music theory and an instrument do much better on music tests". Of course they do. The point is that until quite recently everyone was given both printing and cursive lessons when a child. Even recently people were at the least given printing lessons. They are not at a major disadvantage to cursive students when it comes to "learning through writing". Both forms work quite well and better than typing.
You argument might be valid for a generation who had learnt neither printing nor cursive, but holds no weight with the current generation who have had access to teaching for at least one of these, and often both.
Remember, the studies on learning and memory based on hand-writing were performed on university level students - and they definitely had both cursive and print writing lessons, as well as typing (most likely).
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday November 02 2016, @02:50PM
And some of us can't take notes and learn at the same time. All the way through school I took notes in one class (I honestly don't know why I did that). That was the one class that I learned absolutely nothing. Except, as a test, I tried not taking notes one lesson. I still remember what we learned that day.
So what you're saying is you did a rigorous experiment :P A sample size of one, nice.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @09:03AM
Proving that every sheep is white requires checking every sheep in the world.
Disproving that every sheep is white only takes a single black sheep.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @03:08PM
Here's a test you can try on yourself: grab or borrow a Schaum's outlines (about $20) and work through a chapter (which is usually only a few pages, each book has dozens of chapters) using pen and line paper.
Then study a different topic in the same curriculum using a reputable online source such as Khan Academy.
Then go about your life, and check back a week later and see what you've retained.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:29PM
Even if you believe that these social science studies are valid in some way, you realize that it would be utterly absurd to literally claim that this applies to 100% of all people, right? That rarely happens.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday November 02 2016, @01:39PM
I agree there's much to be said for taking manual notes, and it increases dramatically anytime diagrams or any other non-linear information layout are relevant (math springs aggressively to mind). I'm anxiously awaiting the day someone makes a digital pen and tablet that will allow me to write and diagram as nicely as I can on paper, alongside all the wonderful tools computing makes possible.
But what does that have to do with cursive? Even if you're good at it, cursive is only nominally faster than block printing, and generally worse in terms of legibility. If your goal is note taking, why not spend all that time teaching shorthand, which is much faster and more legible, or efficient note-taking strategies? Things that will actually help them learn to take notes more effectively.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday November 03 2016, @05:48AM
cursive is only nominally faster than block printing
I write in cursive. It is much, much faster than any printing. And easier on the hand as well - cursive is optimizing the movements, replacing stop-and-go segments of block font with continuous curves. I have several lab books full of my notes, sketches, drawings, raw data. If you have a pen, you can create any drawing. If you have a computer... it depends on what tools you have, what you know how to use, and how well they behave, and how many hours you can afford to spend on capturing in a computer a freehand sketch that is done with a pen. My lab books are non-volatile, consume zero power, and can be stored for hundreds of years. Who can beat that while making notes in Word, OneNote, or in whatever thingy that the Surface comes with? The most likely scenario is that their notes will be lost forever when that PC crashes and is reimaged. Too few people make backups; even fewer make backups that can be restored; and only a small fraction of those tests their backups.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday November 07 2016, @02:56PM
Eh, I've lost notebooks to water damage and pets before, so they're hardly inviolable, and far more difficult to back up. And with the growing popularity of Dropbox and other online sync services, backups are far more common than they once were.
I agree though that current note-taking software is severely lacking in comparison to pen and paper. I'm actually working on an alternative that combines the best of both worlds, might get serious about it once I can get a tablet that offers decent parity in terms of physical detail and precision.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Wednesday November 02 2016, @01:56PM
If you care about learning and the effectiveness of learning, then taking manual notes is still a lot better than using a computer and typing
I agree with that but I still so no need for cursive.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 02 2016, @02:22PM
If you care about learning and the effectiveness of learning,
That's what block print and short hand is for.
(Score: 2) by BK on Wednesday November 02 2016, @02:51PM
I care about learning...
No True Scotsman, eh?
There was a story on SN just yesterday about a study (funded) by the sugar-beverage industry saying that sugar beverages were great(!).
I'm not sure how cursive would fix that. There are lots of other things that correlate - the decline (and collapse) of corporal punishment in the home and at school for example. The rise of the helicopter parent. The lengthening of the school day. The expansion of the school mandate and curriculum. The rise of blatantly awful clowns. All of these are cumulative of course.
Here is a study for you - test the retention and learning of two groups. Group A - focused doodlers with illegible handwriting (even to themselves) (me in 9th grade) and Group B - relentless players of [insert webgame here]. To make it fair, choose a nice dry topic like the Second Partition of Poland with careful study of each of the participants to make sure that your students gain and maintain the correct focus.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:45PM
Many cannot control themselves and do a lot of other stuff on the computer in the classroom, from playing games to social media and whatnot. The attention span has been diminishing...
I'm not sure how cursive would fix that. There are lots of other things that correlate - the decline (and collapse) of corporal punishment in the home and at school for example. The rise of the helicopter parent. The lengthening of the school day. The expansion of the school mandate and curriculum. The rise of blatantly awful clowns. All of these are cumulative of course.
Back in the day, the lack of attention span often resulted in doodling, with a pen, often cursive doodling.
We used to punish the corporals in our unit on a regular basis.
Blatantly awful killer clowns, luring you into the forest with offers of goodies? Those clowns? Back in my day, the clowns would make us practice cursive handwriting, while we were running with full packs on, in the rain, while being chased by the running dog lackeys of capitalists! With full descenders and ligature! And we liked it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:48PM
the decline (and collapse) of corporal punishment in the home and at school for example.
That's a good observation. People used to be able to smack around their wives a little, which is fine as long as it doesn't leave a bruise or do significant damage. Violence can be used as a tool to make others do what you say, and that's what I want parents and spouses doing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 02 2016, @03:32PM
This is total BS.
Look, I'm all in favor of manual note-taking. I'm an engineer; I take lots of notes on notepads, green engineering paper, etc. I take notes, I draw diagrams, etc.
None of this requires cursive writing.
In fact, cursive is the worst thing to use, because it's so unreadable. All the engineers I remember meeting in school and in work write in block letters. It's simple, neat, and easy for anyone to read. I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I was able to get away with it in school, because it's such a horrible way of writing. People have long claimed benefits of it, but those benefits are as real as the claimed benefits of smoking back in the 1950s: i.e., they're all lies and mass delusion.
Being able to write legibly on paper is still a good skill to have, I won't disagree. However, "legibly" is the keyword here, and cursive is not legible. Just read any doctor's handwriting from the last 100 years. If you want to teach kids how to handwrite, fine: teach them how to write in proper print and block letters. Fuck cursive.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Wednesday November 02 2016, @06:06PM
I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I was able to get away with it in school, because it's such a horrible way of writing.
Wow, it's like you and I are clones. I wonder how many other people here identify with everything you just said.
The only alleged benefit of cursive I ever heard was that it was easier on your hand because you don't pick up your pencil; that was never the case for me.
I do use cursive for writing elegant notes to my wife, because she likes it. And for a few years I used to use cursive letters for variables in algebra because it looked a little more "italic" and made them stand out on the paper to me, but that habit disappeared and I went back to print.
I don't care if my kids learn cursive or not; I think they will probably want to learn it, but I doubt they will want to use it much. I'm for everybody making their own decisions on this.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 02 2016, @09:36PM
The only alleged benefit of cursive I ever heard was that it was easier on your hand because you don't pick up your pencil; that was never the case for me.
That was never the case for me either.
There's only two benefits of cursive I've heard that have any ring of truth to them at all:
1) it's faster. This is debateable, but the physics seem to favor it, but only slightly. Writing neat, legible (sorta) cursive takes more time and effort, just as it does with print. But as someone else here said, print degrades more gracefully: it's easier to read messy print than messy scrawled cursive. So this benefit is dubious at best.
2) This one is likely totally true: cursive is better when you're using an ink pen with a quill (bird feather) or nib which is highly prone to leaking big drops of ink. Since it keeps the tip on the paper most of the time, you're less likely to have ink blobs. This benefit is, of course, completely useless now that no one sane uses a bird feather for writing. Even the nice nibbed pens for fine writing are designed and manufactured so this isn't a big problem, and only people into calligraphy care about those things anyway. With ball-point and felt-tip pens and pencils, this concern is now completely obsolete.
So basically, cursive writing is about as relevant to modern society as having a metal scraper next to your house's front door to scrape the horse crap from the streets off your riding boots. (They still have these things in old cities, but they're completely decorative and historic at this point of course.) It's something that was invented to solve a problem that no longer exists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @12:14AM
You had it wrong. Variables should not be cursive. You should reserve cursive for things like trigonometric functions. How else are you to know if "cos" is the multiplication of three variables or an abbreviation for the cosine? Cursive ties the letters together.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Thursday November 03 2016, @10:57PM
In fact, cursive is the worst thing to use, because it's so unreadable.
<sarcasm>So your cursive handwriting is shit?</sarcasm>
Joking aside, it's horses for courses; if you need to transfer textual information to other people, typing it or block capital writing is the quickest way to make it understandable.
Anecdotally: my partner passed away recently after a short illness and that's obviously had a huge impact on my life and wellbeing. I've taken to writing stuff down - with a cheap (3 quid!) fountain pen(1), no less - in a book in the hope of making it all easier to deal with, simply because I find it easier to order my thoughts that way. Being able to endlessly delete text when using a keyboard perversely makes it more difficult to get the right words in the right order than writing them out by hand, presumably because I have to apply thought before I write rather than while I type. I would also like to improve that handwriting, if only to make it more aesthetically pleasing to me.
(1) It's a Platinum Preppy. I think they're even cheaper in the USA. Thanks, Brexit.
(Score: 1) by i286NiNJA on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:59PM
No. Nothing you say makes up for the fact that cursive wastes at least a few hours of school time per week for multiple years. Do you know the kinda crap you can teach a gradeschooler with 100 hours of instruction across 2 years?
Shit you could train them to be a master of some adult trades.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:00AM
Two reasons:
1) Revenge!
2) Because they failed to learn any kind of calligraphy and yet want a reason to feel smug.
With that being said - other than when in a creative phase (when throughput is paramount - so steganography would have been good to learn) readability is the only important factor for virtually all notes I take (or are given).
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:30PM
Two reasons:
1) Revenge!
2) Because they failed to learn any kind of calligraphy and yet want a reason to feel smug.
[smugness=11]
The best revenge is writing well.. .
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @12:36AM
I think you mean stenography. Steganography's great for spies, but not so hot for throughput.
(Score: 3, Funny) by NotSanguine on Thursday November 03 2016, @01:22AM
That reminds me of when I walked in to Barnes & Noble many years ago and asked the clerk where the 'Cosmology' section was, and she took me to the 'Cosmetology' section.
Even after explaining what I really wanted, this young woman *still* needed to ask for help. Apparently, we live in different universes.
cf. The unwashed masses get only safety pencils and circles of paper [youtube.com].
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday November 03 2016, @06:40AM
Ironically, you'd have already known that you inhabited different universes if could actually find a book in the cosmology section.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:21AM
I can. It was today. And yesterday. And the day before.
OK, I admit, it was not a pen which I used. But I widely interpreted "pen" as "roughly cylinder-shaped utensil with pointed end commonly used for the purpose of writing". In particular given that you mentioned a tablet, where nobody normally would use a pen in the narrow sense.
And no, typing on a virtual keyboard is not a suitable replacement (nor is typing on the number keys of a non-smart phone, for that matter). Typing on a real keyboard is better for normal text, but writing by hand beats crippled typing methods available on mobile devices by lengths.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 02 2016, @10:21AM
I had to read something to an eleven year old child two days ago because he was utterly unable to read cursive. That is why it needs to be taught.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @12:04PM
Это было бы лучше аргумент для обучения кириллице.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @02:22PM
です！
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @08:40PM
In Russian, the shape of italic letters are frequently drawn from cursive (although apparently not for the font used here). If you can't read cursive Cyrillic, you'll struggle with italic printing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday November 02 2016, @12:45PM
This comes up in genealogy a lot. More than a century ago people wrote everything in cursive and it can be hard to read. Pretty much until the cheap ballpoint pen era everything is in cursive, draft records, military records, census records, all of it. Its something to do with fountain pens or quills or something.
To some extent making the genealogy game harder just makes it more rewarding.
Speaking of hard to read, that gets people killed on blueprints or in lab notebooks, and I'm so old they used to track students when they entered middle school and I ended up in science/engineering track and was more or less forced to take drafting or I guess they'd call it "manual hand operated CAD" today, and since then I've hand written everything in my life in block caps blueprint "font". There's a mythology that cursive is faster but clearly they never met a motivated draftsman (probably all long since downsized by now). Fast as a freaking daisy wheel printer, at least.
If we're gonna reminisce about lost arts that retain a residual store of value, I'd suggest drafting. Projecting 3d to 2d in your head from multiple angles and then hand/eye coordinating it onto paper all while following disciplined standards. Hand drafting with pencil and paper is damn near a sport.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday November 02 2016, @04:19PM
Indeed. Drafting 3d objects onto 2d paper allowed me to visualize 4d objects.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Marand on Wednesday November 02 2016, @03:58PM
I had to read something to an eleven year old child two days ago because he was utterly unable to read cursive. That is why it needs to be taught.
I learned cursive in school and I'm still frequently "utterly unable to read cursive" because nearly everyone's handwriting is absolute shit. On top of that, even people with good handwriting tend to have their own little custom flourishes and habits that nobody else uses, which makes it even harder to read because everyone ends up with their own custom "dialect" of it. (Possibly not the right word for it, but I can't think of a better one offhand.)
Printing may be slower and uglier, but it seems to be a lot more consistent between users and generally more legible at the low-quality end. Cursive turns into unreadable scribble a lot easier, and when you need speed you'd be better served using shorthand or typing. If we're lucky, it's well on its way to becoming a quaint remnant of human history along with thees and thous and that weird long S thing that looks like an F.
(Score: 2) by JeanCroix on Thursday November 03 2016, @03:49PM
(Score: 2) by blackhawk on Wednesday November 02 2016, @01:13PM
I can think of only one really grounding reason to learn cursive...it is faster and easier to write than "printing". Cursive letters flow together, and a good cursive script will rarely lift the pen from the paper.
I'm in that older bracket of people online here - the late 40s and above. I learnt printing first, then cursive. The teachers taught that to me in that order because printed letters poorly written by a 6 year old are more legible that much more poorly written cursive letters. Once I had the co-ordination to learn and write in cursive, that's what I was taught to use from then onwards.
Having learnt it, I never wanted to "print" letters again. They took more strokes, more lifts of the pen from paper, and except for legibility under some circumstances offered no extra value.
At the age of 12 I taught myself how to type. It's a given that both my printed style and cursive went down-hill from there. I didn't practice either enough and they are a perishable skill.
To this day, if I want someone else to read my writings, I write it in print, but if I want to read it myself, I use a florid cursive, which not only feels more fluid, but is faster than the block letter (print) style that I am forced to use for legal documents.
Off-topic, I recommend a flat nibbed fountain pen, nothing expensive, for writing cursive - it gives it a beautiful edge to the script.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Wednesday November 02 2016, @01:53PM
+6. I think a lot of geeks can remember being tortured and abused by teachers and peers over handwriting in school.
I homeschool my kids, and I'm all for people teaching their kids what they think is important. If you want your kids to learn cursive, teach them yourself. Mine may learn it briefly but they will certainly not spend the miserable hours I spent, and will certainly never be tortured by their teachers over it.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by mendax on Wednesday November 02 2016, @02:25PM
I don't know what world you live in but that's not the way it is, nor is the way it has been, at least in my experience, in a very long time.
I learned cursive writing in 3rd grade, and that was it. Never had it drilled into me again, never had some fossil of a teacher complain about its legibility later on.
Incidentally, I wrote an 8 page letter IN CURSIVE today to one of my prisoner correspondents. Why do I write by hand instead of type it? Simple. I enjoy writing in cursive, and with a fountain pen to boot! Am I crazy? Nope. I'm better for it. Writing by hand is far more enjoyable than writing with a computer. Furthermore, there is something that writing by hand adds to the creative process. I can't tell you what it is but it is there.
You know, even when the typewriter was ubiquitous, there were people who wrote books exclusively in longhand. Martin Gilbert, Winston Churchill's biographer, wrote the final volumes of Churchill's massive authorized biography in longhand (and with a single fountain pen). Even today it happens. Bill Clinton wrote his memoir in longhand. The man is computer literate, but preferred to write it in longhand and I don't blame him at all, although he used many disposable felt pens. Shame.
There is another reason why using cursive is important. There are always going to be occasions when a person needs to take paper notes. I'm not certain about other people's abilities, but I must write in cursive in order to write comfortably and quickly. I find it uncomfortable to print more than a few words on paper. The only times I do it is on envelopes so that the postal service's OCR software will be able to read it and when I pass notes to people in meetings, so I can be sure they can read what I wrote since my cursive can sometimes be cryptic if I'm not careful.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @11:05PM
Incidentally, I wrote an 8 page letter IN CURSIVE today to one of my prisoner correspondents. Why do I write by hand instead of type it? Simple. I enjoy writing in cursive, and with a fountain pen to boot! Am I crazy? Nope. I'm better for it. Writing by hand is far more enjoyable than writing with a computer. Furthermore, there is something that writing by hand adds to the creative process. I can't tell you what it is but it is there.
Totally subjective and a lot like the vacuous "It builds character!" argument.
There is another reason why using cursive is important. There are always going to be occasions when a person needs to take paper notes. I'm not certain about other people's abilities, but I must write in cursive in order to write comfortably and quickly. I find it uncomfortable to print more than a few words on paper.
Subjective at best. There are countless people who can print better than they can write in cursive; legibility matters.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @03:52PM
>Please tell me why you want to force your kids to learn cursive.
Because without learning to write cursive you'll never be able to read these:
http://www.usconstitution.net/i_cpage1.html [usconstitution.net]
http://www.usconstitution.net/gifs/docs/eman1.jpg [usconstitution.net]
http://www.usconstitution.net/gifs/docs/getty1.jpg [usconstitution.net]
And yes, there is value in being able to read the original documents.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @11:07PM
You can read all of those online, in print.
And yes, there is value in being able to read the original documents.
Unless you can provide an objective reason that reading the original documents is inherently better than reading copies of said documents written/typed in print, I don't buy it. What matters is the content.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @03:54PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @04:23PM
And, no. DO NOT "teach" them typing and the home keys and junk. They have that down within the first few years automatically as muscle-memory of using the tools. You might have had to be instructed on how to do it, but that's because you were taught cursive first.
I was agree with you entirely until you got to this point. This is not something you naturally pick up. My anecdotal evidence (yes, anecdotal, but serves as a counter-example) is that I've seen some very rapid hunt-and-peckers. Granted they were relatively rapid, but pure physics demonstrates how they will not be as fast as touch-typists. There are also considerations of Repetitive Stress Injuries.
Likewise I know people who keep their hands on the WASD keys. This is fine, but clearly not as optimal as traditional home-row typing. If people end up choosing to type a different way that is their choice (such as I type), but children should at least be taught the basics so they don't just accidentally not discover the current optimal way of typing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 02 2016, @04:42PM
I am fine not making the kids learn to write it, I do think learning to read it is still important though.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday November 02 2016, @05:48PM
I think there's actually an interesting argument in favor of still learning cursive here. The existing math notation software *sucks*. If that's all you'd ever used, you'd be used to it and you'd think it was fine. But if you're used to using a pen and paper, the software is significantly harder. And there's been many attempts to fix that situation, with varying degrees of success. But if everyone was used to the existing software, would anyone know it had a problem? Would anyone be trying to improve it?
I still often write notes on scraps of paper. Post-its on my laptop, notebook pages folded up in my wallet or stuffed in a pocket, paper and tablets scattered through my apartment. I'm 27, I can't remember any time in my life when I did not have easy access to a computer. I still prefer paper for so much because I still can't find any halfway decent note taking apps. On my phone everything either wants access to a dozen social network accounts just to write a shopping list, or there's zero formatting so you can't write more than one line, or it takes twenty clicks just to start writing. On a PC notepad usually works well enough, but not being able to sketch a quick drawing of something is an annoyance. If I was used to doing everything on a screen all the time, I'd probably just assume that taking quick notes is just an annoying process in general. I might just assume that it's hard to mix text and graphics, when there's really no reason for that.
Whenever possible schools should teach not just how to accomplish a task, but *multiple ways* to accomplish the same task. Because if you only know one way of doing something, you only have one way of thinking about it. That doesn't necessarily mean they have to spend months drilling how to write a cursive 's' though. So I don't think it needs to be as high of a priority as it is today, but I do think they should at least teach that it exists. Maybe just focus on reading it instead of writing it -- especially since there are still cursive fonts installed on most PCs, and sometimes those get used for signage and such.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @01:04AM
I think there's actually an interesting argument in favor of still learning cursive here. The existing math notation software *sucks*. If that's all you'd ever used, you'd be used to it and you'd think it was fine. But if you're used to using a pen and paper, the software is significantly harder. And there's been many attempts to fix that situation, with varying degrees of success. But if everyone was used to the existing software, would anyone know it had a problem? Would anyone be trying to improve it?
So... you've given an argument for learning to use a pen and paper.
Just one tiny detail: YOU CAN USE PEN AND PAPER WITHOUT CURSIVE. Did you know they make ball-point pens now? and felt-tip pens? You don't have to choose between abandoning paper entirely and using a writing font whose only objective virtue is that it works around the limitations of fountain pens (or really, nib-type pens generally). I'm not sure which assumption is more charitable, but either you're too stupid to tell the difference, or you're deliberately imposing a false dichotomy, because you know cursive over printing is an argument you can't win.
Remember, the people opposed to cursive here simply aren't arguing for the abolition of paper. Kids are already taught printing (before cursive), and we don't want to change that; we just want to quit wasting their time with cursive and let them print whatever written assignments are needed. And some of us are getting just a little tired of cursive advocates implying that anyone who opposes cursive wants to raise a generation of kids who've never used a piece of paper.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @12:01AM
Pencil and paper is the way to go.
First, I see your problem: "pen [...] breaking their hands". Most pens require lots of force, and the rest will form blobs of ink when you pause. Get a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil.
Computers are a disaster for education. They break and get lost while containing personal data. They are used for distractions like games, pointless video, and chat. They are used to cheat.
The ideal of a computer is great. The reality is that they are fragile amusement boxes that very actively distract students from learning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @12:19AM
I work in schools. The kids all have their own iPad. They call them "old" because they've had iPads at home since they were babies stabbing at apps.
And, no. DO NOT "teach" them typing and the home keys and junk. They have that down within the first few years automatically as muscle-memory of using the tools. You might have had to be instructed on how to do it, but that's because you were taught cursive first. They have grown up with keyboards before they ever enter the school system.
So, sometime between age 1 and 5 they got kicked off the iPad and given a real computer with a keyboard? I really hope this is typical, but I fear it's not. I'm happy to be corrected by real-world experience, but my impression is that the window where one could take for granted that kids would have access to a proper computer has started to close in the last 3-5 years; that way too many young adults these days are using tablets in preference to real laptops and desktops, and their kids will be given a hand-me-down tablet rather than permitted time on the family PC. (Maybe I've got it wrong -- maybe now that the adults use their tablets, the kids will be given free rein on the now-unused PC! Or maybe my perception is more colored by corporations anxious to sell tablets than I realize.)
FWIW, I share your lack of faith in that home-row stuff, generally. But I think the correct strategy might be a little training in 1st and 2nd grade (obviously with compact-pitch keyboards), mainly to help those who don't have a real computer at home realize what they're missing with annoying on-screen keyboards.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Thursday November 03 2016, @08:42AM
I work IT in prep schools. (Independent / Private primary schools - I've also worked in state, private tuition, primary, secondary, "sixth form", college, etc. over the last 20 years).
I have just fixed a laptop because a 2-year-old (we're a boarding school, and staff and their families live on-site) naturally assumed that "all screens are touch screens", smashing their finger through an Lenovo Thinkpad display requiring complete replacement. They'd not see a laptop that wasn't touchscreen up until then. They hunt-and-peck individual letters from QWERTY keyboards to play their games, on touch or normal keyboards.
The 5-year-old who is the son of someone who works in an office? He "occupies" the dead time he has before mummy can leave work with logging onto her computer, loading up Chrome, and doing Sketchup using their online website. He makes Minecraft worlds that are the envy of everyone who sees them, and he LABELS EVERYTHING in them.
Other children that age come into school and complain they don't know how to do things because we put classic start menus over the Metro interface that they are used to. They all know how to load word, type up a document and print it, search in Google, find what they are after on YouTube, make Powerpoints, etc.. They've done that not on tablets, but on home PC's when Mummy has been doing work and they've wanted to join in.
Touchscreens are certainly the default assumption for children that age but they are also highly PC-literate. That will no doubt change over time as all laptops become touchscreen tablets that fold over or whatever.
But it's interesting to see, and not specific to prep-school kids (in fact, if anything, they are behind as their parents favour "real education", tradition - and cursive! - over modern fads).
I remember being "the" kid in school who tried hard to avoid cursive and would hand in work as computer-printed sheets. Staff weren't accustomed to it, some took it well, others made me rewrite for no good reason. Hell, I once had an "electronic mail" read out to class (I had to print it out for them to do so!) because I wrote a bit of freeware and someone in Canada sent me an email to praise it, and they were so shocked that you could get things "electronic messages" from Canada that they showed it off to the class! I was way ahead of the curve, apparently - but I wouldn't like to imagine what the equivalent of that kind of kid would be in 20 years time. "Miss, I've done my work as a hologram!" "That's no good, Johnny, redo it as a normal email so I can read it!".