Younger friends, can you write or read cursive? I’m curious.

View Comments

• I write almost exclusively in cursive! That being said, most of my friends my age look at me like I’m insane while I’m doing it

  • Me too!

• I only write in cursive, I have since learning it in about second grade. It saves me time!

• I learned cursive in second grade and was absolutely miserable while I learned it. Now I'm grateful to have the knowledge. I love learning about the American Revolution and while there are transcriptions of the articles in cursive, there's something more personal about actually reading the handwriting and loops of a founding father.
  In my mind, cursive resembles the letters enough that I can't imagine students looking at it as though it were a foreign language. I guess we'll see!

• Dennis G. Jerz, I've learned from discussions about cursive with my boys that not all brains perceive the loops and connections as standards dictate. From the beginning, both of my boys would struggle to use the same start-points as the books dictated on printing letters and even numbers (i.e., starting a zero on the line rather than at the top). In cursive, the rules seem to change. "Stay on the line. End letters on the line. But not when they connect to these letters. No, only these letters, not those letters....Which letters? And that has a loop. Oh, well, it should have a loop. People don't always make the loop. Yes, it's still the same letter, even though they formed it differently...". Finally I "gave up", and to this day each has their own way that flows best for them and works with what apparently seems sensible to their own brain wiring.

  • Absolutely. I think some kids, though, just get too thrown by a certain illogic of cursive to quite get the hang of it.😊

  • ...and that is of course why so many adults deviate from the "norm." But I think the point of teaching the Palmer method (or some other norm) is to start everyone's personal divergences from a common point.

• Personally, I see cursive as a lovely art form with practical applications. Like any art form, it is not necessary for everyone to achieve full mastery. Anthropologically, one could make a serviceable tool while others carved fine artistry on their tool handles. Needlework, in early America, was a standard part of the education of very young girl children. This practice faded as the culture evolved and changed. Like fine crochet, I hope cursive never disappears from our cultural lexicon. Often, younger generations rediscover the beauty of a "lost" art form and regenerate it's practice. (Even latch hook and paint-by-numbers have been rediscovered!😉)

  • I forgot about those chairs! What a brilliant story xx

  • Junior High 7th and 8th grade the Catholic kids from st. Regis had to walk across town to the public school where we took Woodshop and home Ec. Then we had to walk back to st. Regis. We got into all sorts of trouble on those walks. Snowball fights. We get back to St Regis soaking wet. Smoking. Taking shortcuts through town that we weren't supposed to. Stopping at the candy store. Good Times.

  • Don Ammon I took a typing class in high school around 1985, because I wanted to touch-type. One day when we showed up to class, the keys were all covered. When the typing classroom got renovated, the teacher gave me about 24 old wooden chairs, which we used in our production of Our Town that fall. In my school, the boys and girls took both home-ec and wood shop in 7th grade, but metal shop was an elective. (I took it in 8th grade.)

  • Like wood and metal shop. I wish they let boys take home ec in the late 70s. That would have been far more useful. The most useful class in HS was definitely typing. ASDF JKL;

• For the record, my 19yo has handwriting that's so bad the woman who evaluated his homeschooling every year encouraged us to treat his fine-motor control issues as a disability. My 15yo almost compulsively fills notebooks with handwritten lists and dialogue (from the Sherlock Holmes musical she's writing, or the high fantasy novel), but we've never forced her to learn cursive.

  • Dennis G. Jerz It’s great. If you need me to send you some guidance on how it works, let me know. Otherwise just go to view, notebook layout. Start experimenting with the audio notes.

  • Cathy Ganley I did not know that! We experimented with a fancy pen that was supposed to do that, but the reviews were highly mixed, the pen was finicky, and my son didn't find it at all useful.

  • I was going to ask what path you chose. Interesting thoughts. For those of you have kids who struggle with taking notes, you should know that Microsoft word has a notebook function that allows you to record audio notes that are timed with the notes you type into the document. Hugely helpful for those with processing issues.

• Really interesting--one of my boys can, the other can't. They stopped teaching it between boys.

• My two homeschooled boys learned and practiced cursive for more years than even, perhaps, the Catholic schools (though NOT as thoroughly as in France😉). One enjoyed the artistry of it, and has lovely handwriting, but struggled to compromise beauty for the speed necessary in tasks like note taking. The other son far prefers the keyboard, and is exceedingly creative at stories and compositions, which he types. Both have noticed and complained that, although penmanship is TAUGHT standardized, adults of all ages personalize it into varying degrees of readability. I support them both.😊

• I can read and write cursive and so can my youngest brother, but my middle brother can't. I actually wrote my big persuasive paper for freshman comp and culture about why cursive should still be taught in schools. One of my reasons I supported was that some studies I found showed it was easier to read than printing, even though I find most people's cursive script WAY harder to read than hasty print, but I needed SOME way of making my case sound smart.

• That's awesome. I now have a superpower: writing in code millennials can't translate.