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Accursed Cursive!

© Joan Archer

My eldest son, Michael, brought up an interesting idea to me a few weeks ago, while we were discussing homeschool issues. He is, as some of you may recall, my one and only public school kid, now halfway through his tenth grade year. It seems, during his middle school years, his teachers had put forth the notion that cursive writing should no longer be taught at all, based on the fact that seldom does an adult's handwriting resemble what they were taught in second grade at all, and that it usually ends up close to being illegible.

Before I continue this article, I think I should take a moment and define what "cursive" writing is. It is also called "long hand" and "script". It is the elegant, swooping form of writing that we all learned shortly after we could be entrusted to print at a minimally okay level. It is what most of us were taught in second grade, and it made me feel really grown-up to be able to write like my mom and dad did. I felt truly graduated into the elite Club of Those who can Write like Adults Do. As I recall, it was the only time in my entire scholastic career that a teacher (Mrs. Tvrdy) held my paper up for the class to see and said, "You all need to write more like this! It's perfect!" Even better, we were allowed to use our ballpoint pens in writing class, just like we were real people, or that the school board thought we might at least have that potential. I think you can see the direction this article will be slanted in, so I'll just get on with it.

One of the complaints my son's teachers made was that for those kids who are reading or writing disabled, teaching cursive takes too much time and makes the teacher and student both irritable. My answer to this is, what challenge doesn't originally leave student and teacher at wit's end? That's one of the hallmarks of a challenge, is that it outwits and befuddles us at first. When we achieve under these circumstances, then we feel ten feet tall and bulletproof. Also, as was stated and re-stated on a current sit-com episode, "Shared Adversity Breeds Intimacy." Could the problem be, that some teachers are afraid of building a relationship with their students? Hmmmm.....

As a parent who has had the delightful task of teaching cursive to a dyslexic child and also to a child who has fine-motor skill problems due to prematurity, I can sympathize in a way with those teachers who feel it is far too difficult of a skill to teach. If you have a class size or an attention span that requires all information to be in sound-bite size, you will not be able to teach any sort of lettering at all. It is a far too technical skill to spend less than a half-hour per day on, especially with the more reluctant students.

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