Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter? 857
antdude sends along an AP piece on the decline of the teaching of cursive writing in schools — ramifications of which we've discussed a few times before. "The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019. ... Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, [an educator] said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting. 'I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.'"
Hrrmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wasn't there a very similar story linked to about a month ago called the death of handwriting?
Font (Score:5, Insightful)
You can use cursive writing on a computer, you just have to pick the right font.
Who cares (Score:1, Insightful)
My child (Score:0, Insightful)
Does It Matter? (Score:2, Insightful)
No.
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:4, Insightful)
There might be some inherent value in knowing how to use the underlying skills that make up the essential underpinnings of literacy?
Cursive writing is no more a requirement to literacy than knowing how to operate a printing press.
Now, "any form of writing at all" is important. But curisive?
Gee I don't know, I use a calculator to do all my math at work, why should I learn how to do long division?
Short division should be good enough for you.
No, it does not matter. (Score:5, Insightful)
Cursive writing is no more a useful skill than illuminating manuscripts. Certainly, one should be able to write with a pen or pencil; but cursive letterforms are of dubious advantage with modern writing implements.
Good riddance (Score:3, Insightful)
They should stop teaching cursive in schools, and start teaching typing instead.
I Learned It (Score:2, Insightful)
I learned cursive in elementary school. It was standard practice to write all of your papers in cursive.
It was horrible.
It was very hard to read quickly. It was hard to write quickly. It didn't cooperate with pencils/pens.
It made me hate handwriting in all of its forms.
As soon as I got to the point where I could type papers and print them out, that's exactly what I started doing. The only words in cursive I've written since the 5th grade have been my first and last names.
All of that wasted teaching could have been used to better teach math (something US schools utterly fail at) or even teach a better grasp of writing. It wasn't until I got to late middle school were we given even a little leeway in the content of our papers.
Yes (Score:2, Insightful)
As someone in the midst of grading 75 calculus 3 homeworks written out by hand, I have to say YES. Not necessarily cursive, per se, but writing by hand legibly tends to improve your grade.
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:5, Insightful)
Learning and practicing Cursive writing has as much to do with the underlying skills of literacy, as proper Abacus operation and extensive practice solving problems with roman numerals has to do with the underlying skills of mathematics.
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:cursive vs print ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would it take ages? I abandoned cursive writing as soon as I could, in seventh or eighth grade, since printing was faster. If nothing else, with printing one can write smaller letterforms more legibly, and smaller forms require less hand travel, thus making for faster writing.
And who composes an essay so fast that the limiting factor is the physical act of writing?
Penmenship matters (Score:3, Insightful)
Call me a Luddite, but learning to write without a computer is as important as learning to add without a computer - that is, essential.
Also, I recall a conversation about touch interfaces where
Jesus, cut the cord already (Score:4, Insightful)
I won't miss it (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't remember the last time I wrote anything in cursive. My signature on my credit card doesn't in the least resemble the cursive that we were drilled on for so long in grade school. Cursive can go away and be banished to the deepest levels of hell for as far as I am concerned.
It has no advantage and some disadvantages (Score:5, Insightful)
Supposedly it is faster, however that doesn't matter since typing is by far faster still. Other than that, there are no advantages. Cursive is harder to read, which is who we don't use it as a standard font on computers. Computers these days could do a fine job of making actual cursive (properly joining the letters and all that) if we wanted but we don't. A good proportional block font is much easier to read, so that is what is used. Cursive isn't just a pain to write, it is a pain to read too.
We should be teaching kids to emulate computerized type in penmanship to the extent possible. Make your letters as clear as possible, not frilly. If speed is an issue because you've a lot of text to commit to paper, then get a computer and type it out. Because I don't care how fast your script is, I can type faster. Write for maximum legibility, not for some dead style.
Re:cursive vs print ? (Score:5, Insightful)
> And who composes an essay so fast that the limiting factor is the physical act of writing?
Anyone reasonable writing the SAT essay portion, since time is so limited there and requirements on writing quality so low.
Same with AP history tests, in my experience.
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:3, Insightful)
Always wonder why these articles even show up... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if we want to think this is discussing technology - there is very little of general import to discuss. Is cursive still useful. Yes. Is it less necessary than before? Yes. Therefore it's reasonable to believe that less people will be doing it (or doing it well).
Now on to the fluff.
The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.
The article seems to be about excluding the teaching of handwriting. So what if this test is going to be on a computer (and I'd say that it at least could be argued that this is a *bad* thing). We can assume that the students are both being taught keyboard skills and are using keyboards at home. The writer only has an argument here is if one could be shown as a detriment to the other - and even then one would have to argue the relative merits.
"We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Uh...why would this necessitate that? No answer. In fact if you read Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind" you'll see just how close this parallels the fear-mongering arguments given for computers for ages - without much evidence to support it - "Oh noes if our children don't get exposed to computers by grade three they will lag behind".
Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.
It's interesting because you could argue the same thing about computers themselves. That they distract from the actual process of writing.
Besides, it isn't as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock. No, but Id wager that most of us know what good writing is and could write well when the need arose. In the odd case where I do need to compose formally by pen my handwriting is rather good - if I do say so myself.
Anyway this article doesn't really ask any interesting questions, doesn't cite any interesting research. It's less valuable than water-cooler talk.
ah (Score:3, Insightful)
Well they have a point. If it is faster, cleaner and generally more efficient to type a message, why should they be required not to type but instead produce an inconsistent, generally lower quality hand written version? I suppose if your printer/computer are broken then hand writing is better but that is because you don't have the ability to create a typed copy, same as if you didn't have a pen or pencil to write out a message. Let students use the skills they have to do the best job they can and don't try to force them to learn a skill that the vast majority will inevitably learn poorly. (see previous post about cursive penmanship) Nostalgia for the old days when computers did not exist and students had no other choice is irrational.
Re:Penmenship matters (Score:5, Insightful)
No problem with learning to write, but cursive is not a useful skill as far as I can tell. Printing will get you through life just fine.
If you want a real writing skill that is of some use, learn shorthand.
As far as doing away with a keyboard in favor of handwriting recognition, this is silly. Typing is far faster and easier to implement across all sorts of devices. With handwriting recognition it is inevitable that you will suffer from varying implementations of the recognition program.
Re:Science (Score:2, Insightful)
There are two issues here... (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, there's the decline of paper-and-pen(cil) as a form of getting 'stuff' down. Secondly, there's the decline of actual cursive writing.
The loss of cursive seems more a sign of the social age, rather than of the technology age. We could easily lose cursive entirely, without a single computer in existence. The world could simply shift to printing, and seems to be going in that direction.
On the other hand, there are still valuable places for using a pen, and will be for some time yet. There's no better way to jot down notes in a meeting, or when brainstorming with someone else. Computers just aren't there yet.
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's more to cursive than simply writing rapidly. Developing good handwriting skills takes practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
Re:legal signature? or a computer generated sig.? (Score:1, Insightful)
And what font to you use when you are writing a check out in your checkbook?
And what font will you use when you sign legal documents? Make a bix "X"?
No, no matter what font, you still need a legal signature that is not computer generated?
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:5, Insightful)
A signature doesn't need to be anything readable, it just needs to be something you can duplicate yourself but is hard for others to duplicate. My signature is completely non-legible. But it looks pretty similar to other instances of my signature, and a handwriting expert could verify that, while pointing out how a forgery is different.
It doesn't matter if you're scrawling "Mickey Mouse", as long it's your signature.
And yes, the only thing we need to teach kids as far as cursive goes is their signature, however they want to write it (legible or not).
This is nothing new; you can go back centuries and look at historical peoples' signatures, and see that many of them are not very legible. You might make out the first character or so in each name, and the rest is just a scribble.
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most instances where you will be physically writting something for someone else to read you are explicitely prohibited from using cursive, so I don't see the value in it anymore.
Take the time they used to spend on cursive and teach young kids how to touch type. They still don't offer touch typing classes in my old school system until High School, yet they require 5th - 8th grade students to type their homework on a computer. Touch typing is infinitely more valuable than cursive writting at this point.
Re:De Rigeur - Niche, Same as Always (Score:4, Insightful)
Cursive writing will persist as a specialty skill for those of a historical or artistic bent. My mother did the most beautiful calligraphy when I was growing up,
And that's part of the problem right there: how fast does she write that calligraphy? Probably not very. Cursive-supporters always say how much faster cursive is than print, but if you have to write that slowly to make it beautiful and (more importantly) legible, then it's simply not useful, except perhaps for artistic purposes.
At least bows and arrows actually still have some uses: you can shoot and kill people very silently with them, unlike guns. Cursive is about as useful in the modern world as a stylus, used for chiseling characters into stone tablets.
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:1, Insightful)
OK, I guess I made my own position clear enough in the last sentence. Yes, I still write with a fountain-pen (and sometimes even a quill) on paper in addition to using a keyboard.
There is still a lot to be said for a low-tech approach that is not vulnerable to power blackouts, viruses, malware or spyware.
Re:Illegible Cursive going away? Oh Noez! (Score:5, Insightful)
Cursive deserves to die -- it often results in illegible scrawl.
Drawing tends to result in stick figures, painting often causes people to apply paint outside the lines, playing an instrument results in dissonance, and dancing, well, that just makes people look silly.
If that's your argument, I'd suggest you re-examine your view of the arts. To be fair, though, I suspect you've never seen beautiful handwriting, or its effect on the addressee.
I learned standard cursive in grade school. Typing I learned in high school. Classes in architecture and engineering taught me the value of "printing". In later years, I took up calligraphy (all forms) and modified my own handwriting, moving from "cursive" to an italic.
Throughout all those years, I never questioned the value or the utility of what I was learning, or the work required to master it, typing included. Does that mean I can stick to using a keyboard for all forms of communication? Sure. But I but don't. Life is much richer (for everyone involved) when you don't opt for the lowest common denominator. In that sense, it's a lot like like music. Why learn to play when you can just buy it and have your computer play it?
A handwritten note or letter, irrespective of whether it's to a girlfriend you're looking to woo, a boss you want to thank, an interviewer you want to impress, or to a family member with whom you want to share something personal, is far more effective (and meaningful) than a piece of paper spit out of a laserjet printer.
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you seen this document recently? [wordpress.com] There's more to cursive than simply writing rapidly. Developing good handwriting skills takes practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
Developing good handwriting skills is calligraphy, not cursive.
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you seen this document recently? [wordpress.com]
I'd bet that many people wouldn't understand that document even if it were typed up in Times New Roman due to the differences in language from then to now.
There's more to cursive than simply writing rapidly. Developing good handwriting skills takes practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
There may be more to cursive than simply writing quickly, but developing good handwriting skills is hardly necessary for communication nowadays. The problems with practice and discipline are separate from the issue of handwriting.
Re:Does It Matter? (Score:3, Insightful)
Laconic karma whore.
Cursive = lefty torture (Score:3, Insightful)
How I despise all those loops that only look correct when pushing the line to the left and pulling it to the right, and the contortions necessary to simulate them with with the left hand.
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:2, Insightful)
There is still a lot to be said for a low-tech approach that is not vulnerable to power blackouts, viruses, malware or spyware.
UPS, auto-starting generator, Linux, OpenOffice.org
Re:Ship's logs... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to side with the scumbags, er, lawyers on this one. If you're so dumb that you write critical information in a way that's completely illegible (i.e. cursive), then it shouldn't hold any weight in court, where someone's life or freedom could be at stake. Don't like it? Learn to write legibly (i.e., print).
No one's ever been able to read other peoples' cursive writing, unless they were a calligrapher. All-caps printing is the best for legibility.
Re:It has no advantage and some disadvantages (Score:5, Insightful)
From around 4th through 6th grade, my teachers told the class that we'd have to write all our papers in high school in cursive, so we might as well do it now. By 8th grade, they almost always mandated everything be typed, which continued through high school. Instead of lieing to us, could we have spent that time in earlier grades learning touch typing instead?
Eh, more likely they were just blindsided by the sudden availability of word processors and really did think you'd have to hand-write everything indefinitely far into the future.
Re:Illegible Cursive going away? Oh Noez! (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you seriously comparing the WAY somebody writes something and the way a painter paints? I've read a lot of literature, some great, some seriously overrated, and it was always typed. Even Shakespeare, the god damn grandfather of modern literature, was all conveyed to me through text printed in a uniform manor on some time of printing machine of some sort, not by a human being's strokes on a page.
Some writers might prefer to write their novels with a pen, but they don't submit the story to their publisher that way.
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:5, Insightful)
ASCII Plain Text.
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm always kind of confused by the argument, which continually crops up, that cursive writing is resistant to technological failure. Printing, as in non-cursive writing, is exactly as resistant to blackouts, viruses, malware, and spyware; and additionally it is more closely related to the skill of reading machine-text. It is also open to some individuality. Also, you need a light source to read even during a blackout :).
Cursive writing may well be an artform, but there are a lot of arts that don't get nearly the attention as cursive writing, and it's unclear to me that it deserves such special treatment. I think I had 5 days where we touched on calligraphy for about 40 minutes each day, in my entire childhood. Meanwhile, cursive was a repeated theme. I think even a non-philistine can argue for something other than slavishly fighting the tide of history to maintain cursive as a national lingua franca. It's not like we're saying we'd rather the time be spent making fart jokes.
And I do, in fact, use cursive writing from time to time. It's a matter of encoding specificity -- if I'm writing long-form paragraphs, I naturally go to cursive, because in elementary and high school you'd fail if you print on an essay or paragraph answer; if I'm scribbling single words or interjections in mathematical sequences, or generally if I'm writing on a whiteboard, I print.
Re:Illegible Cursive going away? Oh Noez! (Score:2, Insightful)
If average people were able to consistently create beautiful script, I would be inclined to agree. However, as the article I've linked to shows, even decent cursive results in loopy, unreadable mess.
Perhaps my comment, "deserves to die", was too strong, but the point still stands -- there's a difference between teaching for utility and teaching for art, and it appears that the schools have confused the two.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:1, Insightful)
fire, acid-filled paper, moths, water, no easy encryption, laborious to make copies without electronic machinery.
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think you're confusing cursive with the ability to write by hand -- and neither have anything to do with literacy.
There is definitely intrinsic value in being able to write by hand and the death of that would be embarrassing. The death of cursive, however is fairly irrelevant. The point of cursive is that it was constructed to make writing smoother, faster, and less painful for the hand. For anything of great length, we now use computers.
It's odd to comprehend a world without cursive, but it has served its purpose. If it moves on to the eventual world of enthusiasts the way caligraphy has, it's no huge loss.
Also, a calculator makes the process more efficient for someone who knows the underlying fundamentals of what they're working through, but is essentially a useless tool if you lack that knowledge. A
Re:As someone who can write cursive. (Score:5, Insightful)
I spent most of my youth writing in cursive, because it was supposedly faster.
It isn't faster, it's easier. They may not have called it anything more than "writer's cramp", but RSI existed much longer than the common medical term of today. Remember that it wasn't the speed with which they wrote that was the problem, but - having fewer alternatives - a clerical job meant you were writing for bloody ever, day after day.
Here's an experiment someone could try if they wanted. Take a day's work, steady writing by hand, and copy it out using printed block style hand print. Do the same thing (after a good rest, or whatever other controls you can add) using cursive writing, connected ascenders and descenders and all. Track each effort with a wristband (or IR thermography, whatever works best) that measures the amount of heat your fingers, wrist and forearm generate over the same amount of time. Add this to subjective feelings - which was easier on you, at the end of the day? Cursive, every time. That's what it evolved for.
However, it's also quite clear that things that evolved from purely utilitarian uses become cultural artifacts, and very beautiful. Check BoingBoing or DarkRoastedBlend sites for some recent photos of restored or old rusted equipment. With the right perspective it becomes art.
I'm a calligrapher sometimes.
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:legal signature? or a computer generated sig.? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, for the longest time my 'signature' was merely a scrawl of my initials. Now it's simply a series of scrawled loops.
Cursive is the Morse code of the 21st century. (Score:3, Insightful)
Cursive is the Morse code of the 21st century. A quaint, but nearly
useless skill needed only to satisfy an outdated definition of proficient.
Re:How is this news? (Score:1, Insightful)
Especially on /.?
50 replies on how a paraplegic rat regained the function in its legs, and 250 replies on how cursive writing is a fading skill. Really -- slashdot?
Re:cursive vs print ? (Score:1, Insightful)
And who composes an essay so fast that the limiting factor is the physical act of writing?
You can write faster than you can think???? What sort of brain retarding drugs are you taking?
Re:EMP? Impending poverty? (Score:3, Insightful)
Completely untrue. I know several people who write exactly as in the document shown, and it is closer to cursive than calligraphy.
Hell, writing without any spelling or grammatical errors in itself is a skill -- it makes sure that you think through what you're planning on writing before putting it down on paper. But hey, no need to bother with that today, given with our ADD ridden society.
Developing good handwriting skills is part of basic communication - after all, we still take notes in notebooks, write on whiteboards and scrawl on post-its.
Re:Font (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:3, Insightful)
There is still a lot to be said for a low-tech approach that is not vulnerable to power blackouts, viruses, malware or spyware.
Not to mention quicker. If I have to write a note to someone, or have to make a grocery list, or write a smallish letter to someone, it's more often than not quicker than printing it.
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:5, Insightful)
> Yes, I still write with a fountain-pen (and sometimes even a quill) on paper in addition to using a keyboard.
I just want to throw this out there: Left handed people cannot easily use these implements, nor the common (i.e. right handed) stoke patterns and techniques.
Fountain pens generally only function on 'pull' strokes; when pushing, the nib neds to catch on the paper, and there is minimal ink flow. This isn't a major issue when writing right-handed because the text flows to the right, just making the average stroke a 'pull'. Left handed writers, naturally, are 'pushing' most of the time. There are other problems as well, such as smearing the fresh ink, etc.
Of course, with the proper training (e.g. rotating the paper at an odd angle) and tools (e.g. nibs cut at opposite angles), these can be overcome. However, it is still significantly more difficult for a left hander to learn, and at only 10% of the population, there's not enough incentive to teach them in a mixed environment (e.g. school).
Point being, you can count the better part of all left handers saying "doesn't matter to me" simply because they are ill-equipped, not because they are "philistines".
Re:Illegible Cursive going away? Oh Noez! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It definitely matters (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, the parents of the future are the kids of today - they ones that can't write anymore. If anything, this makes things easier for the future children.
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a travesty of education that we're turning out college students who have studied cursive for years and will never use it again, yet who have to hunt-and-peck on the keyboard.
Whoa. In the Hungarian school system, you read and write cursive before they let you in second grade. What do you mean by "studied for years"? It's not a fucking PhD.
Reality (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thinking/learning tool vs shallow thinking? (Score:3, Insightful)
I doubt that cursive writing will go away anymore than concept sketching will go away. The neuro-motor connection is valuable in enhancing learning and understanding. People will still write in notebooks and journals that don't need electricity
The neuro-motor connection is just as present in printing as in cursive. Your argument is for the persistance of handwriting in general, not any particular mode of it, such as cursive.
A few months ago a lawyer friend of mine mentioned that her son couldn't read an analog watch. He wears one, but it doesn't tell him the time. There is a whole level of understanding about the world that came from learning to tell time.
I'm sure he can tell the time. Give him a digital watch and see. You seem to be complaining that losing a specific technique implies the loss of a general skill.
In my field, I have already been all but replaced by people who are called programmers, but can't do Boolean Algebra or Assembly language.
Why should programmers need to know assembly language, unless they are working in a field that specifically requires it? Understand the general concepts, maybe, but they don't need to be able to sit down and hack it out. Boolean algebra, I'll give you, but then, it's a general skill that can usefully be applied to any number of specific situations.
They rely, as they should, on solutions painstakingly solved by the programmers of my generation which have been combined into large complex systems and placed in books and repositories.
I doubt that's particularly programmers of your generation, but rather programmers of your class. In practice, there's a lot more demand for application developers than there are library developers (which is essentially the distinction your drawing). As the IT industry grew, application developers were, of necessity, going to become more numerous than those developing the underlying tools. But there are still people writing low-level libraries, and improving the ones written by "your generation". I doubt that those developers are going to become extinct when everyone born in the 20th century shuffles of this mortal coil.
Cursive penmanship did give us a common ground for understanding the ideas of other people.
No, it didn't. Penmanship gave us common ground; cursive penmanship reduced stress for people required to exercise penmanship for large periods of time, a class of people that are now all but extinct. For most people, I think you'll find cursive penmanship retards comprehension.
Linguists tell us that the actual understanding of written communication is tremendously difficult, even if the communication is simple and clearly presented.
Which, given the nature of most cursive, means its death will result in a win for communication. I'm not disputing your underlying point that a lack of emphasis on the fundamentals appears to be undermining many modern students' grasp of the complexities, but many of the examples you present - particularly cursive - just aren't representative of this.
Re:Hrrmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
And as I said in that article, what the hell are you all talking about?
Comparing cursive to an abacus? Sorry, but there's one little thing you forgot to consider: abacus->calculator represents an increase in efficiency and speed, cursive->print is the opposite.
I pity people that don't write in cursive, it's far more natural than the illegible mess most people make out of print. When I look at other people's personal notes, if it's written in print, they've developed their own little font/writing style in order to speed it up.
And you know what that style resembles? cursive. The difference? It's not standardized, and it's almost impossible to read.
I write in cursive. My fastest speed is still perfectly legible to others, not just myself. It's very natural, just because the rest of you are products of the public school system where you abandon something the moment the test is over doesn't mean the style is "slower" than a printed one.
It may be slower FOR YOU, but that's only because you've butchered the style you're SUPPOSED to be writing in so that outsiders can't even read it.
Re:Hrrmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Font (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, but icons (like in the car's idiot light example) are standardized, which means you don't need to change them for different markets, which means cheaper production costs, which means more profits.
It's not trying to be cool or modern that's causing it; rather, it's just standardization for the sake of production efficiency.
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:1, Insightful)
While you call this important body of knowledge "valueless," I do not, and can do the things you describe. So therefore if and when the balloon goes up [no idea what this even means--Ed.], my family will eat and be clothed while yours will starve and die naked in the cold. What a pity.
What about correct spelling, punctuation, and idiomatic usage? It's nice that you think that cursive is still important, but what good is it if your accuracy and content is a mess?
Re:Hrrmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh wait, I don't need mod points for that.
Shut the fuck up, you whiny prick.
Re:It's not the students (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're problem solving, breaking down large problems into smaller "do-able" sets, then you're using your calculus and physics. Math and physics as part of a curriculum are there to teach you how to figure things out on your own - and not to be spoon fed.
Re:Hrrmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hilarious. You're mad because you've found people that 'customize' their writing style, making it unreadable to you. Your solution is to use a 'custom' writing style which 1% of the population utilizes. I'd bet that there are at least 10 times as many people who would rather that you learn to print like the rest of us than there are people who wish everyone would switch to cursive just because they encountered one person that didn't know how to write.
"I see that you've made your 'r's look like 'v's in your haste to write down that address. Here, why don't you take a month or two to completely recondition yourself not to write the same way you have since second grade? It would make things easier for me and the other two people on this earth smart enough to read cursive yet somehow dumb enough to fail at using context clues to figure out what a letter looks like or stupid enough to forget the association before the end of the text."
Writing cursive may be faster FOR YOU, but that's only because you were apparently beaten as a child for writing in ugly letters and have diligently trained yourself to write in a self-righteous manner.
Re:doesnt matter to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Not done a humanities exam recently, have you?
I have found this to be one of the great benefits of adult life.
Obsolete technology (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's not the students (Score:3, Insightful)
Cursive isn't a basic form of knowledge, nor is it a prerequisite for a basic form of knowledge. Cursive is a way of handwriting text more efficiently. Given that almost no one writes large amounts of text any more, it is effectively useless.
If you don't do algebra, you can't solve the problems that require algebra. If you can't write in cursive, you just write the block letters that every kindergartner knows and nearly everyone can read.