I recently noticed that the Washington Post held a handwriting contest for kids. Apparently, while the schools are abandoning penmanship making kids permanent slaves to block print, The Post sees some value to cursive writing. (Only the little ones were allowed to submit print samples.)
Personally, I wonder if this is part of the deliberate dumbing down of students. Studies show that those who write in cursive express more complex thoughts and show more complex sentence structure. So cursive is good for the SATS too.
Check it out here....
I teach at the college level. I have wondered why so few students take notes and a couple of years ago someone said, "They can't write." So I asked my students (I've done this is several classes) how many of you can write cursive.
ReplyDeleteThe typical response is about 1/3 of the class raises their hands. This means that they can't take notes very well. That's sad and you can lay it at the doorstep of the public schools.
I go back to Palmer Method. When I taught RE at Church to 7th - 12th graders not a one could write in cursive. They all printed and did that very poorly.
ReplyDeleteWhat Ray is saying is true. When I tried to teach my RE kids to take notes I quickly realized that if you couldn't write in cursive it was very difficult to take notes.