Why do they bother to teach us cursive in school?
Another of the “This nonsense kept me, a bright little boy, from getting straight A’s lots of times, therefore it’s stupid and for doodieheads” camp. It’s probably not an accident that all of the people who’ve stuck for cursive (and whose sex can be noted in their profile, or inferred from their userid) are women. Cursive is taught at a point when lots of boys just don’t have the fine motor control in their fingers to master it with any reasonably degree of ease.
Kids that start learning to read and write have very strange and awkward ideas about how print letters are supposed to be written. They start drawing a letter from the “wrong” side, often inconsistently (leading to mirrored letters), mix up caps and lowercase, and draw the letters as if they are images. I think cursive gives them a better idea of the concept of writing from left to right, which helps in learning to read/write.
You’re right, teece, it doesn’t. It was just a silly passing thought because overall I think this thread is silly. There are a fair number of reasons to learn cursive that have been brought up. If nothing else, it enables you to read other people’s cursive. Clearly, though, many people hate it and nothing is going to convince them otherwise. So I’m just poking. Because it’s silly. Anyway, I’ll stop. It’s rude. But I did teach myself to write with the left-handed slant, too. And we can agree that it is being taught badly. Like most other things in America’s schools. And that does worry me.
I don’t use much math in my career. Does that mean the time would have been bettter spent on reading and writing? While you may not have much use for calc or stat or differential equations, I’m sure that you often use the kinds of math being measured in the NationMaster data on K-12 education Unfortunately, until high school students are treated as generalists, in order to build synaptic connections in their brains and in order to make sure they are well enough grounded in all areas to specialize in an informed manner later on. Right, and what I am saying is that there are better ways to accomplish that end then through cursive. It’s much easier to learn any physical skill when you are young. It’s much easier to learn ANYTHING when you’re young. That is why I think that we need to look at that period of time as being finite, and give priority to activities that will do them the most good in the long run. I would say that on the whole, writing cursive is of little benefit, especially co
One other thing. Communication is an important part of life, and learning cursive writing is part of communication. I mostly print now (most of my writing consists of flow charts and equations – things that don’t really lend themselves to cursive writing) but outside of engineers most written communication is done with cursive (at least in my experience).
