Pen to Paper

If there's one thing that education has dealt with recently--and there have been plenty of other things as well--it's the debate over cursive writing. Last weekend on the NPR podcast A Way With Words, a caller asked the question as to why cursive writing wasn't taught in schools anymore. This question was first raised to me about a year ago while I was at karate camp, after it had been a featured debate in the newspapers when the Common Core Standards were introduced with cursive having been replaced with keyboarding requirements at an earlier age.

First, I will say what frustrated me about this. Until this Common Core Standard was settled, no one even mentioned it. As a teacher, people disagreed with me if I didn't require them to use cursive and people disagreed when I'd make the kids write in cursive. So the fact that, as a fifth grade teacher, I'm not required to require cursive writing, allowed me to just say, "Write however you want." What I did do was have my students pass a cursive writing test before they were allowed to choose.

Honestly, as a teacher, when I'm grading the kids' papers, whether it be a long-form writing piece or a spelling exercise, I just don't notice whether they wrote in cursive or not. I'm more concerned with whether things are spelled correctly or the quality of the writing itself (not the handwriting, but the other kind of writing). Many students come to me unable to write in cursive for various reasons, and some of them just need to work on their handwriting period. Unfortunately, we aren't really supposed to give a grade on handwriting, more of a pass/fail. Most students don't have handwriting bad enough to fail in my opinion, so normally I would try to leave it blank, or fill it in with my judgement on the A-F grading scale. I've been accused of being pretty lenient!

What the hosts of the program came up with was that it's hard to argue with the Common Core Standards in the fact that keyboarding will better prepare the children to be successful for their future careers in adulthood, but that it was sad that we are cutting ourselves off from the past when we do this. Many families have letters from their grandparents to each other or different people in the past, and not being able to read those is a true loss.

Playing devil's advocate here, we have been more and more cut off from the past as the years have gone on in this sense. We've all seen pictures of the actual Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, and doggone it if any one of us can read that without squinting to translate. If you think you have a hard time doing it, your kids just look at it and instantly give up. So did I when I was their age.

Back to not playing devil's advocate now, I wholly agree that it is a beautiful art form. People used to take very good care to make sure their handwriting looked amazing. My mom's handwriting is really nice looking, and I remember her saying that, when she was a girl, she tried to write like her grandmother. The idea that kids could one day look at their handwriting like they look at Thomas Jefferson's...well, that's painful to think about.

Honestly, I'm not sure what to think. I agree that keyboarding is best to get the kids ready for their careers (you don't know how many times we hear the words "21st Century Learners" in a given school year), but this... I don't know. Not to get overly dramatic, but it's kind of sad that we're seeing it go by the wayside.

Anyone who has ever seen my signature knows that it is not recognizable as even being letters. But it's mine! I'd hate to think we're letting go of that as well.