Tag Archives: Common Core

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

Righting the Second R

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Take a breath, pause, and then jump back into the restructuring of our 3 Rs.  Our modern Thirty Years War over how best to teach Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic is not yet over.  While our national and state-based educational generals have cast their critical eyes on reading and math, the second R, writing, has slipped into the backwaters of school subjects.  We need to correct this.  Said simply, reading is the development of understanding and writing is the demonstration of understanding and more.  As we teach children to be skilled readers, we must teach them to be skilled writers.  We must do what is right by writing.

What Do We Know?

No Child Left Behind and the Common Core focused national educational systems on student achievement in reading and math.  These two initiatives provided a warlike educational scenario.  NCLB was the mandate that made improvement our only option and the Common Core was our dictum.  The reading, ELA, and math Core standards became the subjects that mattered.  If you want proof, check your school’s official state report card.  What gets tested gets taught.  Although writing is appropriately and very well addressed in the Common Core, the two expressive sides of reading, writing, and speaking, get short shrift. 

We finally are back on track in our instruction of reading.  Elementary teachers have slogged through more than thirty years of reading wars.  A resurgence of explicit instruction of reading in the larger, well documented Science of Reading is moving the needle of student achievement in reading.  The two-pronged attack of language comprehension and word recognition are moving all children into the realm of skilled readers.

The Missing Link Between Information and Knowledge

Today we face a “now what” question.  As children become skilled readers, what do we want them to do with the information they read?  How do we use input reading skills and meaningful reading material to generate useful student knowledge?  We teach all children to expose their learning through writing.

All children need a complete education.  NASA does not send astronauts to the moon without having planned for their return to earth.  When we ask a child to read a book, we don’t say “Good.  Job well done.  You can read.  End of story”.  We ask them “to do” something with what they read.  Our something modalities are speaking, performing, or writing.  The first two modalities are predicated on the third – plan what you want to say or how you want to demonstrate it by writing it.  The reading trip is not complete without a child writing about what they read.

 Input skills Become Output Skills

The Science of Reading teaches us five elements that create language comprehension.

  • Background knowledge
  • Vocabulary
  • Language Structures
  • Verbal Reasoning
  • Literacy Knowledge

With learned word recognitions skills, these five building blocks help a reader understand the printed letters.  They interpret letters into sounds, sounds into words, and words into the writing of Shakespeare.  These same five building blocks help students tell us what they think about Romeo and Juliet.  They use verbal reasoning to craft summaries, interpretations, comparisons and contrasts with other works, evaluate what they read, and create their own original written “masterpieces”.  They use their vocabulary and background knowledge to form what they want to write and language structures and literacy knowledge to tell their story.   One does not write well without language comprehension faculties.  Reading skills are writing skills. 

Some educators are attempting to construct a Science of Writing to mirror the Science of Reading.  Unnecessary.  The skills sets are known.  All we need to do is turn inputs into outputs.

When we provide children with exciting things to learn, we also provide them with exciting things to write about.  At all grades and in all subjects, writing is essential for students to tell us and others about what they are learning, the music they are playing, the art they are creating, the experiments that go “bang”, and the difference between “bull” and “bear” markets.  Stephen King tells us “The scariest moment is always just before you start”.  The teacher’s job is to get the writer started.  They will write.

Our To Do

Stephen King, again.  “If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others:  read a lot and write a lot”.  We have launched our students as readers.  Now we need to land them as writers to make the reading-writing connection complete.  If I can be appreciative of anything we received from the pandemic, it is school technologies.  Almost all children have a laptop or IPad for their writing instrument.  They can write anywhere anytime.  They can save, delete, and send.  They can share and edit.  I watch actors in role of Shakespeare use a quill and rough paper to simulate his writing.  Ink-stained fingers and balled up discards abound.  Today’s writers have the ease of technology.  They know how to get information as readers, and we can teach them how to tell us what they know as writers.

Our Not To Do

Teachers: Don’t should thyself with reading everything a student writes.  Writing for learning assessment purposes is only one of many reasons for student writing.  Student writers need to read their own writing many times in the writing process.  They need to reciprocally read and comment on other student’s writing.  Parents need to read their child’s writing.  Other teachers need to read student writing.  Your principal’s need to read student writing.

Once you stop shoulding thyself to read everything, do right by writing.  Write away!

Ernie in the Back Row – The Reality of Educational Reform

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“Hey, Ernie! Yes, you in the back row of the faculty meeting where you have been sitting it seems like forever. Do you remember telling us ‘I’ve seen educational changes come and go. All I have to do is sit here and do nothing. I can teach the way I always have taught. It is all a tempest in a teapot and in the end nothing will have changed.’ Were you right? Have any of the reform mandates of the past thirty years done anything to change your teaching?”

In the 1980s and 90s Dr. Madeline Hunter was nationally active helping classroom teachers better understand the connections between learning theories and instructional design. For many teachers, her insights into how teaching using motivation, retention and reinforcement theories, to name just a few, significantly improved the ability of all children to learn and to repeat exceptional learning year after year. For other teachers, Dr. Hunter upset the applecart. Hardcore veteran teachers like Ernie had been using the same teaching techniques that their teachers had used in the 40s, 50s and 60s in their own teaching for years, if not decades,. Dr. Hunter recognized that educational reform was a process that some teachers would engage in gladly, others would learn over time, and some, not many, would be “Ernies.” Ernie was her name for the veteran teacher who was change oppositional. Ernie believed that his tried and true teaching, generally based upon lecture and rote learning, had worked over the ages and would work for him as long as he was in a classroom.

Needless to say, Ernie has seen an eyeful in the last thirty years. Just the intellectual reforms based upon learning and teaching theories have been amazing. Hunter’s Instructional Design. Outcome-Based Education. Understanding by Design. Framework for Teaching. Assessment FOR Learning. Whole Child Education. And, the list goes on. Interestingly, none of these reforms every threatened Ernie’s unwavering opposition to change. Why should they. Ernie observed that no teachers in the 80s and 90s were removed from their teaching positions due to their non-changeability.

Ernie probably sat up a little straighter in 2001 when No Child Left Behind was enacted as a federal plan for reforming public education. It was not the voice of President Bush expounding the urgency for the United States to repair its declining international status in educational assessments. It was not the infusion of federal dollars into Title programs that opened new teaching positions and purchased a flood of new teaching materials. And, it was not state governors extolling their legislatures to adopt NCLB regulations so that state budgets could be buffered with educational dollars. What caught Ernie’s attention was the doomsday clock of Adequate Yearly Progress. No matter the level of reading and math achievement of the students in Ernie’s school in 2001, by the spring of 2014 100% of all students were required to be proficient in state assessments or teachers would be fired and schools were going to close. It was the law.

For the first time in Ernie’s long memory, federal and state leadership said “What you are doing right now is not good enough. Do whatever it takes to meet the mandates of NCLB. If you can’t get the job done, we will fire you and find someone who can.” A mandate with the promise of enforcement was entirely new to Ernie, but as often as he was told “NCLB is the law and it is for real,” he still wondered what would happen if a great number of schools failed to make AYP. Would the Governor really fire all the teachers and take control of all those schools? So, Ernie waited and continued to teach as he always had taught and the academic achievements of his students continued to fall into the bottom of the “bell curve.” By 2007, 28% of all schools were failing to make AYP. The next year 38% of school failed to make AYP and USDE Secretary Duncan warned Congress that by 2011 82% of all schools would fail to make AYP if the rules of NCLB were not changed.

“Ah,” said Ernie. “Told you so.” State after state petitioned the USDE for relief from the AYP mandates of NCLB. “Ain’t nobody going to close schools or fire teachers now,” said Ernie, who had not changed his teaching practices one iota. He knew from his seat in the back of the faculty meetings that “change comes and change goes and, if you are smart, just sit back and do nothing. It will all blow over.”

But. Wait. NCLB did not entirely go away and the quid pro quo of the waivers caught Ernie’s attention. Academic standards were still in, but not the Common Core. School Report Cards replaced AYP and schools would be graded according to student performance in reading and math, attendance and graduation, and the quantitative gap in the academic achievements of mainstream white children and children of color and children with learning disadvantages. And, all teachers would be given a Teacher Effectiveness Index score based upon their use of effective teaching strategies and annual student achievement in reading in math. To top it off, all of this data would be publicly accessible on a statewide data base – the School Effectiveness Dashboard. Anyone in Ernie’s school district could dive into the data to find out how well Ernie’s students performed on the state assessments and how his school principal rated Ernie’s application of the Framework for Teaching.

“Really,” said Ernie. “I have been in my classroom since the 80s and after all the huffing and puffing I am still in my classroom. Let’s wait a little longer and see.”

Ernie was right once again. The state legislature botched the contracting for a statewide data system, renamed and adopted the Common Core academic standards saying “it would be nice if you taught these”, and dropped the evaluative features of the School Report Card system. The Report Card became an annual snapshot with no accountability features.

It may be that Ernie will retire this year. He has been in the classroom long enough to receive a full pension. Actually, it may be that Ernie has been retired for years but did not choose to leave his classroom. After all, his annual salary is greater than his annual pension and regardless of what he did in the classroom he still collected his paycheck. Next fall, we’ll look to the back row of the first faculty meeting of the year. Ernie may still be there. And, if not our Ernie, there still will be other Ernie’s slouched down low in their chair gazing out over a constantly reformed schoolscape that never really changes.