Cursive writing a DEAD SKILL???

[Igel]

31. Some districts teach it. Or, rather, have revived it.

Not just because of research, but also because not knowing cursive is like having a bunch of stuff on various media storage formats. It's great that you have them, but the information is useless.

In a very-short-term thinking society, perhaps that's okay. Many kids really have trouble believing anything that happened before they started paying attention must be useless. Technology dropped out of the sky. If the textbook or story's more than a few years old, it's irrelevant because it's not fashionable, trendy, or what the Really Important Ones are talking about.

But there's another reason cursive is important. I teach. Students are expected to write down things they don't know. Okay, this assumes they've been taught to distinguish between "stuff I'm looking at" and "stuff I know"--many don't see a distinction. "I can always find out how to do this." (Yeah, if you want to take that 30 minutes when your boss expects you to take 30 seconds, or you feel you'll have 40 minutes to reseach how to put out the greasefire you accidentally started in the kitchen.)

Still, most of the good students have cursive. This leverages their study skills because they can take notes. Screw penmanship--all they need is the ability to read their own handwriting. Those printing typically write so much slower that either you spend most of the time waiting for them to write down a few lines of text or they give up because they know it's dragging on forever and half of the class has been done for 3 or 4 minutes and is talking.

Typing is faster and the files easily shared, so kids love taking notes on computer. But typing, sadly, results in far lower retention of facts, and far, far lower retention of how the facts fit together to produce something like "understanding." Kids are short-term thinkers, by and large, and want to get to through stuff so they can focus on gossip (for girls, mostly social; for guys, mostly sports ... both, IMO, are simply gossip).

BTW, many of those who only know how to print have truly abysmal penmanship. Their English notes could be runes or Canaanite or even cuneiform.

Handwriting is one of those things that isn't on the test or in the standards that might be tested, so it must be unimportant. Once was talking to a chemistry teacher. She was complaining strenuously that she was just told she was wasting time. She was teaching about moles and Avogadro's number. However, nowhere in the formal standards that she was to be using were either mentioned. Granted, stoichiometry, gas laws, atomic and molecular masses (perhaps "molar masses&quot were there. But the mole itself was not tested, and she was told to stop and desist at once. It was one of those things that wasn't on the test or in the standards that might be tested, no matter how useful the idea was or even how necessary it was for domains that would be tested. (This will now lead to a rant about principals and evaluators that don't know squat about what they're evaluting, so I'll stop here.)