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School Faces Once Etched Are Forever Memories

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The academic year ended at our local school yesterday.  I watched the row of buses leave the parking lot for students’ final trip home.  Teachers lined the sidewalks and waved.  High school students honked their horns leaving the parking lot and the 23-24 school year behind.  Taken as a whole, it was a celebration of success.  Children were graduated and promoted.  Teachers taught and children learned a year’s curriculum.  Tests had been taken, teams had played, music and theater had been performed, and the community had smiled.  Gradually, the sound of cheering, the echo of horns, and the waving arms stopped and there was the quiet of a June afternoon.  Viewed from the perspective of time, it was the moment when memories begin to overtake the present.

The local Class of 24 numbered 40-plus graduates.  During the month of May their photos and post-graduation plans were displayed on the school’s Facebook page.  Smiling faces with pennants of colleges, universities, tech schools, and armed force insignia foretold the next stories in these young lives.  With 100% assurance, I know that each graduate can name the face of every grad in their Class.  They have known each other as classmates for thirteen or more years.  They learned and grew up together.  That was their story until graduation when the road they shared forked, and they all went their ways.

Frozen in time.

Once graduates wander down the post-school paths they choose, they move farther and farther away from the day when they and their classmates shared a common story.  Slowly, faces and names become images in yearbooks, online photo collections, and frames on bookshelves.  They get a glance now and again awaiting reunions and other gatherings.  And, awaiting a moment when memories flicker and old images become important once again.

Picture taking was and is a ritual of school life.  Every year schools take class pictures.  All students, grouped by graduating class cohort, school activity, and individually, have their photos taken.  Most students smile, even those who didn’t smile often in school approximate a grin for the yearbook.  Photos of an entire grade miniaturize faces making it difficult to discern individuals.  Individual portraits highlight the face and name. 

For me, it is in the class photo of Mrs. Meyer’s home room where all 33 children are shown together in rows. Some are sitting legs crossed on the floor, some on chairs, and the tallest are standing.  This is where I see the classmates I knew well.  Combined with two other sixth grade home rooms, we were the Grant Wood Elementary Class of 1960.  On the date of that class photo, we became locked in time, locked in the image of our smile, the way we combed our hair, and how we cocked our heads trying to look good.  I look at the picture of Mrs. Meyer’s home room and 64 years later I know the name of each boy and girl, and I remember who they were in 1960 as clearly as I know anything today.

The same is true of class pictures from the McKinley Junior High Class of 1963 and the Washington High School Class of 1966.  Each school we attended was larger in enrollment and scope of program, but the significance of faces and names and stories remained constant.  Until June 1966.  That was when our roads forked, and we truly became memories and pictures frozen in time.

So, what happened? 

People and friends, they and me, suddenly disappeared from each other’s lives.

Life overwhelms our attention when we are younger adults.  Work, recreation, and a love life are center stage.  We focus on what is directly in front of us each day with little time or option to look backward or too far forward.  Often, we work for pay checks that last only until the next, scrimp to afford vacation and recreation, and if we have children, our life requires 25 hours each day.  We stay in touch with school friends if we live in proximity, work in similar jobs, and our children attend the same school.  But the roads most of my school friends and I took were none of these.  In our 20s and 30s and 40s we chased our individual American dreams of family and/or career into communities far and wide.  Joe was a physician in Atlanta, Bev was a teacher in Ohio, Marianne was a flight attendant, Jack was an institutional exec in New York, Bill was lawyer in San Francisco, and John, we weren’t sure where John was.  Yet, whenever I thought of the Class of 60 or 63 or 66, it was the pictured face and story of a younger life that attached to that picture.  John was still the epitome of a younger Mickey Mantle – blond and rugged, athletic, and confident.  Bev was still the girl in a knee-length dress, Bobby socks, and her hair tied with a ribbon that I thought of as my girlfriend at Grant Wood.  Marianne, aka Mert, was and always will be an Annette Funicello look alike. 

Facebook and the Internet update stories but not memories.

Facebook and its ilk brought us both the wonder of connection and the depravity of bad actors.  I like the wonder.  By “friending” old friends we now share images and stories of who we are today.  My white hair, wrinkles, and jowls do not resemble the face behind the boy in dark glasses in Mrs. Meyer’s home room picture.  However, as much as I do not recognize myself, I immediately recognize John, Jack and Bev and many of the old classmates that use Facebook.  If we saw each other on the street or in a market today, I am confident I would know their 70+ year old faces.  But I could not know the story of their lives in between, and that is okay with me.

Today I appreciate giving and receiving Facebook posts with my old friends on our birthdays.   We recognize that we are still alive, we celebrate another year of living, and, in a small way, we acknowledge that we have a history.  Our history is bifurcated – who we were in the 50s and 60s and who we are today.  We do not have enough years or energy to catch up on the details in between and those details don’t matter much anyway.

This morning another Joe from the Class of 66 posted about his golf game.  Several times each summer we each post about the courses we have played, that rare day when our score and age match, and the joy we have in just being able to play.  But when his face appears I immediately replace it with his yearbook photo or images of him playing basketball or baseball – he is forever young.

Old friends’ faces do not die, they just fade away.

As I paraphrase Douglas MacArthur’s statement about old generals.  In both cases, I think we got it right.  As long as I live, memories of my school friends will be alive.  They are indelibly etched in time.  I suppose my aging frailties may fray my mental capacity.  I do find it comforting that as the aged lose contact with the present, their memories of years ago remain.  Thanks, old friends, for being my old friends.

Gifted Teachers Cause Indelible Effects

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Every adult who attended public school knows the truth of this statement:  there are teachers and there are gifted teachers.  We are taught by the former, but we are inspired and grow at the feet of the latter.  Gifted teachers are extraordinary human beings.  It is the nature of their extraordinary being that makes them gifted teachers.

What do we know?

A school faculty is much like a professional baseball team.  While all pro ballplayers met a high standard of screening to make the team, there still are significant differences between players who hit .250 year after year, the league average, and those who hit .300, a threshold for Hall of Fame candidates.  An MLB roster has 28 players.  A successful team lists an all-star or three, several players with all-star like statistics, and twenty or so who are steady and dependable players.  The combination of steady and dependable players and a few all-stars content for league pennants.

Most teachers in a school faculty are .250 players.  Day in and day out they are present and prepared to teach their assigned curriculum to children in their classrooms.  Day in and day out they don’t make significant teaching errors.  In the same days, they also don’t teach many supernal lessons that light up student learners or cause children to have “Aha” moments.

Some may read this a putdown of many teachers, but it is not.  The strength of public education is the steady and solid work of regular classroom teachers.  They are how we know and understand reading and writing, history and geography, math, art, music, PE, and speak at little Spanish.

Most teachers on a school faculty may be good at several skills sets for quality teaching; a gifted teacher elevates the performance of skills sets because of innate qualities of insight, perseverance, effectiveness of intellectual inquiry, empathy, and friendship.  These qualities certainly lie within regular teachers, but they remain fallow compared to the same qualities that burn brightly in a gifted teacher.

Game changers.

Children know.  They know their teachers who light them up on a frequent or daily basis versus their teachers who turn on the classroom lights and say, “Take out your books”.   A teacher who lights up children is a pathfinder to deeper learning.  Their insights into curriculum and pedagogy are 3D.  They know the sequence of facts and ideas and skills children need to learn to climb Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Objectives, but they don’t stop at Remembering and Understanding.  They push harder with “Tell me more, explain that in your own words, how is it similar to and different than”.  Their students are used to the “so what and now what can you do with this” questions.

I marvel at the fact that gifted teachers, real game changers, don’t know who they are.  They just are.  They are unconscious of the ways they teach and relate to children. 

I am told that mathematics is the creation and use of elegant solutions to explain our world.  Simplicity and insightful are words that few strugglers with trigonometry, like me, understand.  Yet, I watch gifted math teachers help children to patiently unravel a math problem into understandable questions in their native language.  Gifted math teachers teach students to see the math question within the forest of words and digits on the page.  Insight is understanding what one is being asked to learn and the ability to state it in simple terms.  These teachers see problems, not just mathematical problems, differently and they teach children to see and think differently.  It is a gift.

My favorite band teacher is just a boy in man’s clothing playing his horn.  When he wears a tuxedo and waves his baton, his bands make wonderful music.  He is best, however, when he sits beside a child and together, they model and practice, model and practice, model and practice.  He slowly builds musical skills and the ability to read and interpret musical scores until children fit into an ensemble of players and then he gives them more difficult pieces to play.  He personalizes and perseveres and never quits on the individuals who are his band.  He grows musicians through patient and skillful instruction.  It is a gift.

“So what?” and “what do you mean by that” are the kinds of questions that cause many children to hunker down behind the child sitting in front of them hoping not to be called on.  Lots of hands go up when a teacher asks questions about facts; not so many when the questions require deeper inquiry.  A love of intellectual inquiry tolerates children who are reluctant to share and whose sharing contains inaccuracies.  Gifted inquirers know that these can be teased out and corrected.  It is the chase for understanding and reasoning they pursue.  Gifted teachers also know that children can learn in the periphery and listening to how one child sews together a reasoned response helps others with their own.  A gifted inquirer will smile and applaud louder for the unexpected yet slowly developed thinking of a reluctant sharer more than for the quick and always on point response of another child.  Chasing a well-reasoned and thoughtful response is a gift.

Some children come to school to learn to read, others to play an instrument, and others for the joys of recess and athletics.  Every child should have their own “go to” place in school.  I smile now thinking of an art teacher whose empathy for children caused him to seek out all children who had not found their school place.  He caused them to be artists and then to be proud of their artistry.  I remember him in his layers of baggy clothing and Birkenstocks helping a student with charcoal find depth through shading and a student at a potter’s wheel find the feel for drawing a vase out of a lump of clay.  It is easier to teach children who have a sense of who they are; it is more difficult to teach children who are lost in themselves.  His gift was in turning on the lights within wandering children.

Every child is different with a combination of admirable qualities and some things that cause us to shake our heads.  I watched a gifted science teacher who never shook his head because he focused on admirable qualities.  His teacher’s affect was as inviting as new snow and his expectations for student learning were as elevated as snow capped mountains.  It did not take students long into a new school year to know that his reputation was real.  He accepted who they were, found their strengths, and every day helped each child to build their understanding of Biology and AP Biology and computer science.  He was never in a hurry but, with his patience, caused all students to engage and learn.  Like Mr. Rogers of TV fame, he built students up and, in that building, taught them.  It is a gift.

Indelible effects that last a lifetime.

At their 50th reunions, alums invariably share stories about their school experiences and the teachers who taught them.  The passage of time has a way of rounding corners and evening out the particulars alums remember.  It is difficult to assign causation between a student’s schooling and their life at the age of 70.  However, the language and the tones change when alums talk of an exceptional teacher whose insight, perseverance, effectiveness of intellectual inquiry, empathy, or friendship made such an indelible imprint that it lasted 50 or more years.  The ability to cause such lifelong effects is a gift.

Loose the grads!

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There is so much crappiness in the news today that it is easy to let the cynical mind control the keyboard.  Instead, I shut down my media and look down the road in the direction of our local school.  It is mid-May, seniors are finishing finals, all other students are wrapping up their academic year, and the sun is shining.  Loose the graduates, promote undergraduates to their new grade level, and celebrate another year of educating children, I say.

What do I know?

I drive a small, red, two-seat sports car every afternoon to the post office for my daily mail.  Yesterday a herd of first graders was trekking uphill on the sidewalk returning to school from a mid-day, local field trip.  As I drove past, several dozen arms and voices rose to wave and yell, “Nice car!”.  I stuck my arm out the window to return their wave with a wide smile.  In seconds I was past them.  But our town is small and in minutes I was returning home, this time on the other side of the road.  As I re-approached these small fry, I heard, “There he is again!”  Even more shouts and waves ensued and all I could think was “what a great day to be six and seven years old”.    And all thoughts of a crappy world were dissolved.

In my comings and goings, I see these children and their schoolmates dropped off by parents or school buses to engage in their daily education.  I see them at recess and in their on-campus activities.  Our community is proud of our schools and teachers and school leaders whose work annually merits recognition as one of the highest achieving schools in Wisconsin.  And there are schools like ours throughout our state and nation. Thankfully, they are the antidote we sorely need.

At this time of the year our high school celebrates its graduates by posting their post-graduation plans on FaceBook.  Bright faces appear above their declared plans.  Some wear a sweatshirt or hold a pennant from the college or university or tech school they will attend.  Several proudly display their enlistment in the military; others declare their post-high school vocational plans.  A couple of students are yet undecided in what the next year will be for them.  No matter their post-high school plans, these grads are well-educated and ready for what comes next in their young adult lives.  They are ready to be part of the adult world.

Our future lives in the small fry.

No matter a person’s political persuasion, there is reason to be skeptical that today’s leaders will find their way out of the chaos and disrepute they have created.  We are in a train wreck and there are more burdened trains coming down the track.

We have 70- and 80-year olds in positions of power who have difficulty marshaling the smarts of a 5th grader. They talk like they are constantly arguing turf on a child’s playground where the blame game is all that matters. And we have 40- and 50-year old leaders who would rather be sycophants than free thinking adults.

Looking for analogous models I like what happens in a face off in a hockey game.  One player from each team faces the other waiting for the ref to drop the puck.  They snarl and paw the ice with their sticks.  However, if the ref does not like the attitude of these two to battle for the puck, the ref tells them to go away and calls for two other players to do the face off.  What a great model!  When a player is out of line, get another player.  The Class of 24 now is in the line of next players.  And behind them in our 4K-12 schools are the Classes of 25 through 39. 

In the last century, critics of public education referred to the march of children through the grades as a school factory.  Perhaps they were right when most children, graduated or not, were funneled into the industrial complex.  Today that reference is balderdash.  Our graduates are very aware of the chaos and confusion their elders have created.  They are informed and they are spreading out into a myriad of potential careers.  This is not to say the Class of 24 and beyond will not create new problems.   They will, but today I trust them and their potential to do better far more than I trust my age peers. 

Perhaps it is time for term limits and age limits and dope slap limits.  For the sake of our next generations, we need to say to out-of-control and out-of-touch leaders “go away” and call for new faces and newer minds to battle with the issues of our day.

I believe that the Class of 24 and those six- and seven-year-olds with their exuberance and bright minds are our best and perhaps last chances for better tomorrows.  Loose the grads or forever hold your breath.

Adult Hypocrisy About Children and Technology Knows No Bounds

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“My hypocrisy knows no bounds.”  This is a memorable line by Doc Holliday in the movie, “Tombstone”.  In another context Doc’s line is an accurate portrayal of adult perception of children, their cell phones, screen time, and social media use and generational distress. 

This morning, I listened to a podcast conversation.  Three participants, nationally recognizable people, mulled how cell phones and screen time cause depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues for children.  They each told personal and professional stories to support the contention that cellphones, screen time, and social media are root causes of why so many children are distressed.  I heard teeth gnashing and “isn’t it awful” sermonizing about the ill effects of technology, as if only children use technology.

“Balderdash”, I said aloud.  “Just one more case of adults telling children to ‘do as I say, not as I do’”.  If too much time on cellphones, screen time, and social media is bad for children, it is just as bad for adults.  “Adults, your hypocrisy once again knows no bounds!”.

Why do I claim adults are hypocrites?

Adults spend as much time using cell phones, screen time, and online social media as children.

 Consider the following.

  • On average, American adults spend more than 11 hours per day watching, reading, listening to, or interacting with screens.
  • Children aged 8-12 spend an average of 4 hours and 44 minutes per day on screens.
  • Teens spend an average of 7 hours and 22 minutes per day on screens, not including time spent on screens for schoolwork.
  • 69% of American adults use social media sites, spending an average of 2 hours and 3 minutes per day.
  • The average person checks their cell phone about 63 times per day.
  • 29% of US adults say they spend more time on screens than they intend to.
  • 97% of children report using a smartphone daily.
  • 51% of seniors aged 60 or older spend more than half of their daily leisure time on screens.
  • On average, adults consume 15.5 hours of media per day through various devices.

https://gitnux.org/screen-time-statistics

  • “Adults between the ages of 18 and 29 spend the most time on their smartphones, spending an average of 3 hours and 53 minutes per day.”

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/science/parents-spend-three-times-more-time-on-phone-than-what-they-spend-with-children-study/articleshow/106125378.cms#

  • “Three out of five American parents admit they spend more time on their electronic devices than their kids do.”

https://www.movieguide.org/news-articles/parents-spend-more-time-on-phones-than-withkids.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThree%20out%20of%20five%20American,a%20minimum%20of%20two%20devices

  • “While their timecards might say they are putting in a full day, many employees are devoting all of their time in the office to their work.  Many are distracted by their mobile devices, spending hours each day texting, shopping or scrolling on social media.”

https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/10102-mobile-device-employee-distraction.html

No high ground for adults.

Any person can Google information regarding cell phones, on screen time, and the use of social media and arrive at data that may be similar or different.  The numbers may vary but the trending statements do not.  We, adults, and children alike, spend large amounts of time every day using our cell phones and screen devices.  As adults, we chastise children for being on screen too much of their day and night, but we are no more than the pot calling the kettle black.

Of interest, children do not come from the womb with a digital device.  I frequently ask kids in school “Who purchased your phone?”, and “Who pays the monthly bills for your cell phone, Internet, and social media?”.  99.9% say, “My parents”.  Adults pay for their children’s dependence upon digital devices and then adults proclaim online time to be a child’s problem! 

Pogo always is right.

We learned from the “Pogo” comic strip long ago (1948-75), “We have met the enemy, and he is us!”.  We, people of all ages, are heavy users of technologies – cell phone, screen devices, and social media.  Even my Luddite friends who refuse to buy a cellphone spend hours each day in their workplace on screen, Googling for information, and e-mailing.  The only true Luddite today lives in a cave and is invisible to the world.  If too much use causes distress and ill-health, then we all are the enemy and we all are victims of self-inflicted distress.  Is childhood depression different than adult depression?  Do we have entire generations now under a cloud of malaise?  Or shall we honestly admit that life in the epoch of technology is distressing.

What now?

Augustus McCrae taught us in Lonesome Dove, “Yesterday is gone and there is no getting it back”.  However, if we could make some of tomorrow look like yesterday, consider these.

  • Insist children go outside and play.  But is it safe?  Thou shall not fear the neighborhood.  Children are 100 times more likely to be hit by lightning than to be kidnapped.  Yet we do not panic when children play in the rain or get caught outdoors in a thunderstorm.  Encourage them to explore the areas where they live and to enjoy their adventures. 
  • Stop demanding children have cellphones because you worry about school shootings.  “I need immediate contact all the time!”  Since 2012 only .009% of schools in the US experienced a school shooting.  This does not dismiss the serious of school shootings, but most child deaths due to gun violence occur in the home not at school.  Strapping children of all ages with a cellphone in case of a violent event at school gives children license to use their cellphone for all reasons but a violent event.
  • Ask as many children as you are able “What do you think about…?”, and “How do you feel about …?”, and listen.  We need to speak person-to-person not through our screens.  We want to hear and see them speak, note their body language, and accept their emotions.  And we want them to see us doing these things.  Then we can tell them what we think and feel with more credibility.
  • Invite children to “Come with us” and spend more time together.  Proximity breeds personal engagement.  “Let’s do … together” crosses the boundaries of age and differences and every time we do things together makes the next time more likely to happen.
  • Shut down our devices, sit beside a child, and just be.  Let the children fill in the gaps if they choose to.  Stop being the parent all the time; it’s okay to be yourself. 

Another good quote about hypocrisy is “My hypocrisy only goes so far”.  It is time for us to rein in our hypocrisy instead of reining in the lives of our children.

Cursive – If You Can’t Write It, You Can’t Read It.  Let’s Write a Wrong.

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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