We, two granddaughters and I, were at the kitchen counter investigating their great grandmother’s recipe cards. We wanted to bake something new for us. Each recipe was written on a 3 x 5-inch index card and stored in a lidded, wooden box not much bigger than the card. There were more than 150 cards, and each brought back to me wonderful memories of main dishes, cookies and pastries, home made ice cream and cakes, and breads. My memories were not only in the words of the recipes but recalled tastes and smells. The girls did not have such memories.
The three of us each held a couple of cards, but I was the only one reading. “What recipes do you girls have?”, I asked. Silence. One granddaughter, a junior in high school, National Honor Society member, with more than a 4.0 gpa, asked reluctantly, “Is this cursive writing? I can’t read cursive.” Her middle school sister, also a 4.0 student, shook her head as well. “No entiendo”, she said. She can read, write, speak, and understand Spanish, but not cursive.
“Can you write in cursive?”, I asked. Each said “nope”, a universal response meaning “can’t do it, Gramps”.
With a little Googling, I asked them to read a copy of the Declaration of Independence in its original hand-written form. “Nope”. This was not without trying. I did not let them off with a quick “no can do” but asked them to concentrate on the first paragraph. Still a “no can do”.
What did they learn instead of cursive?
I knew the answer as to why they could not read these recipe cards or one of our nation’s fundamental documents. Retired from school administration as I am, I recall installing the Common Core Standards 20 years ago with these two English/Language Arts benchmarks.
- By first grade, a student shall print the letters of the alphabet.
- By fourth grade, a student shall type a full page of content in a single sitting.
My granddaughters are Common Core students. We taught children to print in block letters. Then we taught them to use the keyboard. We did not teach them to write in longhand, in cursive. This is not to say that a few elementary teachers didn’t keep their cursive letter cards attached to the wall above their white boards as a reminder of days gone by. They did, but we did not include cursive writing in our required curriculum.
Just to check, I read the introduction to the Declaration aloud to my grand girls and asked them write what they heard. They did so in neat, legible block letters, upper and lower case. They stylized their letters a bit, but they did not write in cursive.
Is the loss of cursive important?
The “reading wars” and a return to phonics-based reading instruction is not yet a done deal, but almost. A solid phonic-based instruction in Wisconsin requires the teaching of nine components, including phonemic and phonetic awareness, and the use of phonics to interpret letters into sounds and into words.
The program also includes the ability to communicate by encoding sounds into letters and words that portray meaning and the ability to create written communication. And children must have an adequate background knowledge from which to meaningfully communicate. Many original documents are part of their background knowledge, and they are in cursive. “No entiendo” to reading cursive shuts children off from accessing important background information.
A second loss is in thought processing. When I use the keyboard, I am thinking and typing simultaneously. What I think appears on the screen. The thinking processes are quick time with little to no consideration of quality. Auto correct flash’s spelling and grammar errors. But nothing auto corrects my thinking. Garbage in and garbage out because everything I do on a keyboard is draft work.
Cursive on the other hand is thought about, considered more slowly, and more slowly put to paper. When writing in cursive I think about what I want to write because writing by hand is an effort and takes time. I see more exactly the words and ideas coming out of the tip of my pencil or pen and as longhand becomes sentences and paragraph, I am more aware of what I have written than when I keyboard. Right now, I need to read the lines above to know what I tried to write. For kicks, I will write the next paragraphs in cursive and then keyboard them.
Yep, cursive, for me, is more metacognitive. I am more into writing when I do it in longhand. The downside is that in the 70 years since I learned cursive, my penmanship has suffered – badly!
It was not just the common core.
Penmanship. Teaching and practicing penmanship were laborious for teachers and children. I was taught the Palmer Method. My grandmother was certified as a teacher of the Palmer Method using her right hand and her left hand. Children in other schools learned Spencerian, D’Nealian, or Zane-Bloser. Today’s cursive includes New American Cursive, combining these older styles only making it more legible, easier to use, and faster to write because there are fewer loops.
No matter the method, cursive takes time. No matter the method, almost all children write it differently depending on how they hold a pen, how they move their hand across the page, and, of course, their small muscle motor skills. We can type much more rapidly than we can write in long hand.
And no matter the method, evaluating and grading penmanship grated on teachers and children. What is an A, B, or C in penmanship if another person can read it? Each person’s cursive is their own.
Saying good-bye to cursive in schools seemed an easy farewell.
Why cursive now?
Everything in school is speeding up. Speed is attached to our craving for technology and its applications. Quick time derives from our over-the-top curriculum that keeps adding learning to our school day and never reducing it. We must work faster. We accept speed when we teach reading and content comprehension through passages instead of complete books. All standardized tests of reading comprehension require a child to read a paragraph and answer several questions. We reduce the amount children read to get them to selected comprehension skills faster. Every child has a laptop, Chromebook, or iPad. We want instantaneous access and fast productivity.
Whoa, I say. Some of us want to slow it all down because speed also may be the reason today’s student outcomes are not as good as we want them to be. We need to give children more time to intake information, consider and mull meaning, consider best options, and create best answers instead of fast answers. Good thinking takes time. Good thinking takes consideration and reconsideration. Finally, writing to communicate our good thinking warrants the taking of time.
Back to teaching cursive. While printing block letters is slow and typing on a keyboard is fast, longhand is the medium in between. We write longhand faster than we can print but not as fast as we can type. There are many instances in school and in daily living when printing is just too slow. And a keyboard is not available. Cursive provides a better way to take notes, copy something, and send a message.
Cursive writing gives children planning and processing time for the work at hand. Think about it then write it, instead of writing and then considering it.
Cursive is personal. My penmanship is my penmanship, and your penmanship is yours. In a culture of mass production and fast Amazon Prime delivery, we can enjoy and appreciate things that really are crafted and one-of-a-kind.
We also need some balance between life and high-speed tech. While AI and its creative applications truly speed the production of communicative, cursive counterbalances high speed with high cognition.
Every now and again we get a chance to reconsider past actions. We canceled cursive years ago. Now we can correct that decision and help children and future adults write in their future.
https://triblive.com/local/regional/cursive-handwriting-makes-a-comeback-in-elementary-schools