{"id":2111,"date":"2006-10-11T19:08:07","date_gmt":"2006-10-11T23:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wordpress\/2006\/10\/penmanship_a_sc\/"},"modified":"2006-10-11T19:08:07","modified_gmt":"2006-10-11T23:08:07","slug":"penmanship_a_sc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/2006\/10\/penmanship_a_sc\/","title":{"rendered":"Penmanship, A Scholastic Dinosaur"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another sign the American educational system is being flushed down the drain.
\n“Cursive writing becomes pass\u00e9<\/a>”
\nOr not. In short, schools are devoting less and less time teaching students to write, particularly in cursive. Many students and teachers don’t care:<\/p>\n

“I can’t think of any other place you need cursive as an adult other than to sign your name,” she [teacher Debbie Mattocks] said. “Cursive — that is so low on the priority list, we really could care less. We are much more concerned that these kids pass their SOLs [standardized tests], and that doesn’t require a bit of cursive.”
\nOlder students who never mastered handwriting say it doesn’t affect their grades. “A lot of kids have just awful handwriting. . . . Teachers don’t take off points for poor handwriting,” said Matt Paragamian, a 10th-grader at St. Albans School in Northwest Washington. Many of his classmates take notes in class on their own laptops and do homework on computers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Unfortunately, I came of age in an era when there wasn’t laptops and we did have handwriting class. It’s not a memory I’m fond of. Usually, once the teacher issued an assignment, my classmates and I raced to see who finish first. I almost always lost. And since I was trying to write too fast, developed bad handwriting in the process.
\nThen it got worse; in addition to print we were required to start writing in cursive. I’ve never liked cursive and have never used it unless required to do so. I never got the point: if cursive is supposed to look nicer or more stylish, well, mine doesn’t. My loops and curls are irregular and jagged. And if you’re supposed to write faster in cursive than print, I don’t.
\nSo although I agree students should spend enough time in penmanship so they can read cursive, I frankly don’t see the point in going further than that. There are more relevant things to learn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another sign the American educational system is being flushed down the drain. “Cursive writing becomes pass\u00e9” Or not. In short, schools are devoting less and less time teaching students to write, particularly in cursive. Many students and teachers don’t care: “I can’t think of any other place you need cursive as an adult other than […]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2111","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"h-entry","8":"hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2111\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brianarner.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}