Is Cursive Writing No Longer Essential in Indiana Schools?

[Antiphon]

Zooby has my point. And yes, very few adults will learn it. It's just not a good idea to lower basic literacy standards.

The components of literacy include
-spelling
-comprehension
-vocabulary
-reading/writing

The argument is "who uses it anymore? It's deprecated anyway so let's toss it."

Why doesn't the same logic apply to vocabulary? How many words are not in common use? Can't we afford to skip those too?

 

[Jack21222]

Why doesn't the same logic apply to vocabulary? How many words are not in common use? Can't we afford to skip those too?

YES we can afford to skip those, and we DO. Rare vocabulary words ARE NOT TAUGHT in primary nor secondary school. The only "esoteric vocabulary" instruction you'll find is people studying for the SAT. In college, you might find some people studying vocabulary words for the GRE.

Rarely-used words are simply not taught in school, nor should they be. It's nice to see you agree.

 

[Antiphon]

The ideas not mine; I got it from George Orwell.

 

[Integral]

I keep wondering if typing will soon be obsolete due to voice recognition software.

I too have virtually lost my cursive skills - or any writing skills beyond the chicken scratching that only I can read. On the up side, if someone ever steals my notes it will do them no good.

I certainly have not lost MY cursive skills. Ok, the fact that no one, including me, has ever been able to read my cursive , makes it hard to gauge.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Alright, are YOU suggesting that if cursive writing isn't taught in 3rd grade, then nobody will learn it? Or do you feel Antiphon was suggesting that?

Why not make that a high school elective? Or a topic in English 101 in college? Or just something people self-study if they're interested in it?

If it's not required in school I doubt a very large percentage will volunteer to learn it, yes.

Honestly, I've never read the original constitution, or any other original historical document. I've only read "experts" who copy it down in book or electronic form. I fail to see how knowing cursive would have changed that.

He is not talking about the constitution. He pulled that example out of the air to represent any document in cursive that might be important to someone to read. In realistic terms this might be old family letters, for example. If no one reads cursive but specialists, you're going to have to pay to have them transcribed, and you're going to have to trust the person didn't do a sloppy job.

 

[Evo]

I don't find it impossible to read cursive without spending years perfecting it.

I can read middle english without having studied it, even though there is little to distiguish between s's and f's. Not to mention archaic uses of words.

 

[Proton Soup]

i would continue to teach cursive if only for the art. but maybe not the nazi cursive that evo learned. we could save the nazi stuff for grade 3 touch typing class.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I don't find it impossible to read cursive without spending years perfecting it.

You could learn it, yes, but don't under estimate how years of reading cursive puts you in a better position to read anyone's cursive, even when it's not so legible. Someone who teaches themselves to read cursive out of a book is going to find each new example a kind of baffling new code in and of itself. Something akin to learning a foreign language from a book and then being baffled by the way native speakers actually pronounce it.

 

[ideasrule]

I had to learn cursive in grade 4, but could never write faster in cursive than I could normally. After that, the only times I've needed the skill was when teachers wrote comments in either chicken scratch or cursive, or maybe a combination of the two, and I somehow couldn't ask them to explain. In other words, I never needed it. (Incidentally, reading the U.S. constitution is not one of the tasks I need cursive for. I can read the original documents just fine: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_downloads.html)

A typing class would have been much more helpful IMO. Until grade 9, my way of typing involved striking shift and the spacebar with 1 finger and the rest of the keys with another. That was obviously slow as hell. Measured on a utility/class basis, the grade 9 typing classes were the most helpful I've ever taken in any school.

 

[lisab]

Oh, it will be so cool if they stop teaching cursive! Then all us old folk can write to each other in a code no one else can read! Our own secret language !



Nevermind that we have nothing much to be secretive about that's completely irrelevant.

 

[Zantra]

I guess I'm in the minority, but I see this as a bad thing. I grew up learning cursive, and had to use it basically all the through school, and pretty much up until college, I had to use it. When I was in school the perception was always pretty much that non-cursive was the "lazy" way to write, and cursive was the elegant, fluid, educated way to write.

Does it actually help you write faster? probably not. But it is somewhat of an artform. I did practive, and to this day I have to write excruciately slow in order to make it come out not looking like chicken scratch. but It's something worth keeping. Some day some archeologist may scratch his head at our cursive and it will have become "heiroglyphs"

 

[BobG]

It's a lot eaiser to write cursive in the snow than it is to print in the snow.

 

[dlgoff]

It's a lot eaiser to write cursive in the snow than it is to print in the snow.

You dog you (respectfully speaking). I know exactly what you mean. Been there done that.

 

[Geezer]

Now my biggest problem is spelling since I heard things differently and phonics made no sense.

I was reading at age 3, and I still had significant trouble with phonics. What a complete waste of time.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Not just voice recognition software, but the ability to search for spoken words/word combination and to cross reference to other spoken word sequences, etc and do it as fast, or faster, than computers handle numbers/words now. In other words, the ability to create an organized database of spoken words so no "written" records have to be kept at all.

That would be an interesting development if technology made written language, itself, obsolete, seeing as how written language was the key to so much of our technological development.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE

 

[dlgoff]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE

Love it. Go Scotty go.

 

[moa_osen]

I've had several professors who won't accept hand written papers unless they are in cursive without errors. Writing things without my computer helps me with better spelling in the long run and makes me a little more diligent; I tend to write in a really sloppy manner when I am on a computer and make really embarrassing grammatical mistakes. Penmanship is good in a classroom situation, and I prefer to do proofs by hand and not on a program-- and cursive makes it look so darn good.

 

[jtbell]

I can't see written word ever being completely replaced by spoken word. I MUCH prefer reading to listening, especially with large documents, and I know a lot of people who would agree.

Consider the hearing-impaired, for whom reading versus listening is not a matter of mere preference.