Just yesterday, I was having a conversation with one of my junior-class students who had recently taken the SAT. There's a short paragraph at the end of the test that the students copy. It says something to the effect that they really are the students who took the test, blah, blah, blah.
They had to write it in cursive, even though NONE of them wrote their essays in cursive, or filled out the application paperwork in cursive. Sort of defeats the purpose of comparing handwriting. Weird.
I'm with you, though, despite being a (private) school teacher. My three-year-old son can pick out all sorts of veggies and fruits at the store. He loves to cook with Mom and Dad.
Great video! Thank you.
Having homeschooled for nearing on twelve years, I'm with you on the cursive handwriting. I remember my second grade teacher, a nun, breathing down my neck as I struggled with the cursive "Z" which bore absolutely no resemlance to an actual Z. It looked like a 2 with loops. And I don't think I've written a cursive "Z" since I left grade school. It went the way of the completely love-for-reading killing BOOK REPORT. Don't get me started. When my children were younger, I remember coming home with as many as 40 books and spending months studying horses (daughter), marsupials (son), dog breeds (daughter), explosives (son) and the history of ice cream (daughter and son). I consider myself an unschooler who, due to deep seated insecurities, buys and enforces a math curriculum. I am also a little neurotic about geography.
Properly done cursive is faster than hand printing. You learn cursive if you are going to do graphics and fonts or read historical documents. Cursive is useful in some fields. Neat tidy readable writing is great overall. I think the problem is to many people are taught cursive too soon before they have even mastered tidy printing.
Properly done cursive is faster than hand printing.
That's what I was always told and for some people I'm sure it's true, but I print much faster than I can write in cursive.
It's becoming moot because I rarely do either anymore thanks to typing and texting -- both of which I wish I could do more quickly.
Mrs. G., surely you know about explosives camp?
Did you say explosives camp? I just read the article and you may have just changed the course of my son's life.
kcb, my daughter is currently attending the furcadia school of unschooling, lol.
Furcadia, if you don't know, is an online multiplayer role-playing game. She is obsessed with it, to the point where she will get up at 6 in the morning just to have time to play before I get up and kick her off the computer.
A big part of furcadia is roleplay, of course, and there's a lot of written/verbal back and forth. She read me one of her roleplays the other day and I swear, her vocabulary, her descriptions, her sentence structure would have put some adults to shame.
She also meets and talks to friends from around the world, and is constantly learning new things so that she can keep up with conversations with her friends.
And now she's got an online job where she gets paid in dragon scales, which she can use to purchase accessories for her character in the game. So math: she has to keep track of her hours and her pay and how many more hours she needs to work to earn what she wants to buy. And she's learning responsibility.
Sometimes I feel like I should be doing something more constructive, but as far as I can tell she's doing pretty good on her own. Between books, games, walks on fall days, and conversations, I think she's doing fine.
You learn cursive so that later in life you can derive enormous satisfaction from writing an entire draft of your doctoral dissertation in history longhand, with a fountain pen. 
Don't mock joined-up writing (cursive seems to be an American speciality btw, in English-influenced countries they used to distinguish "writing" from "printing"). In this part of the world they stopped teaching it in 70s, and now no-one can write properly. I bemoan my inability to do anything other than print every time I pick up a pen.
You try taking notes for an entire degree's worth of lectures when your hand is programmed to form each letter as a separate entity. What you end up with is a scribbled mess. Friends of mine who grew up in India have lovely flowing writing that looks like a grownup did it, and I'm jealous! It may seem like a minor skill, in which case what's so bad about preserving it?
You try taking notes for an entire degree's worth of lectures when your hand is programmed to form each letter as a separate entity.
It worked for me. But if you can't read your print and you don't take notes on a laptop, go ahead and teach yourself cursive. There are plenty of resources online, or you can order a workbook. Nothing's stopping you, and the end result will probably look great because you're *motivated* to learn.
My point, which isn't entirely to do with cursive, is that skills are best learned when they are needed or wanted, not when some committee-approved curriculum says it's time or because a skill used to be state of the art.
Also, if kids get in the habit early of picking up skills as needed -- and determining what's needed or wanted in the first place -- they'll carry that into adulthood and be better able to take charge of their own learning.
Between books, games, walks on fall days, and conversations, I think she's doing fine.
Sounds excellent to me, kactus. I need to check out Furcadia for Rocketboy, except that he's already spending enough time online. He's decided that he wants to design video games for a living and all this gaming is 'research.'
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