Does your kid know cursive? It's coming back as a requirement to CA schools

[summer_in_TX]

71. You seem to have been a secondary special ed teacher.

You probably didn't see the beginning acquisition of reading, writing, and spelling skills. I'm a retired elementary special ed and dyslexic teacher, where I had plenty of opportunity to observe the beginning development of cursive (and block printing) skills as well as reading and spelling in schools these days.

My students' kinder and first grade teachers had shown them more than one style of writing the letters (standard block print and D'Nealian which supposedly was a bridge to cursive, with a little flip up at the end of letters) and let them choose their own best way. But my students were seriously confused by that and instead just came up with their own way to write their letters. The teachers' training probably never helped them realize that a subset of their students would need very repetitive, prescribed, detailed instruction in order to be able to learn to write legibly. It would have been easy to pick the one best (block printing) and focus on that, but no one explained the problems not having a carefully chosen standard way would cause. (That D'Nealian curl is very problematic to write for dyslexic and slow learners.)

It was common to see the downstroke of a lower case a start at the very top of the letter and then go off into space, a little like a cursive o but the line often didn't touch the circular part of the letter. Almost every letter had anomalies that made their writing very difficult to read – and I had lots of practice and could usually figure it out.

My dyslexia training programs in Austin and the Houston area emphasized teaching students cursive, because cursive letters are hard to flip around and they didn't already have bad habits to unlearn. Dyslexic students typically need around 500 repetitions of a writing or spelling activity to reach mastery. By second grade many had "mastered" the wrong way and it would take another 500 plus to relearn printing the correct way.

Through my training I learned to orient my dyslexic students (and others classified as slow learners) as to a clock face (analog clock) and start cursive letters c, a, d, g, o, q… at about the one o'clock position, and verbally cue them the whole way through, so they would hear and be able eventually to cue themselves. "Start at one o'clock, curve up left over back around, up to one o'clock, straight down, and release."

I might have to say and show it once or twice to a regular learner and they could usually do it, but a dyslexic learner needed to see it, hear it and do it multiple times with my careful supervision so they wouldn't practice it wrong. I was able to do that as a special educator because I had very small groups. The physical feel of pushing and pulling a pencil or pen across paper is part of the building of strong memories for the shape of the letter.

These were students beginning to learn to read and write; they were certainly not ready for typing. Besides dyslexics often cannot distinguish easily between letters like b, d, p, q and n and u. So they wouldn't be able to find the right letter on a keyboard to type. After all, in their experience of the natural world most objects are the same thing even when turned around and upside down. They need explicit instruction to help them make sense of that. Then connecting letters with their sounds (and lots of letters have multiple sounds they can stand for, not to mention letter pairs, and so forth).

Handwriting and especially cursive handwriting are learning tools, powerful ones. They help make cognitive connections (and retain them) between the letter shapes, their sounds, then in combinations in words and sentences. The nerve connections between arm, hand, brain, seeing, saying, touching, etc. are all part of learning at those beginning levels. Helping dyslexics learn to read and write is just more focused and specialized. Once those strong neural connections are made, their brain matter becomes more and more organized, making future learning quicker and easier.

But regular learners use essentially the same process, it's just that they need less things explicitly spelled out, far less repetition, not as specialized techniques. California is wise to bring cursive back.

I find the differences between individuals' brains and how they learn and think really fascinating.