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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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Can anyone remember when the times were not hard, and money not scarce?
(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