and me as someone whose hand cramps up after writing just one check...

[acroyear]

The Handwriting Is on the Wall - washingtonpost.com:

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.

Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.

Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research.

Well, one problem I always had was the artificial criticism. My hands simply were NEVER EVER going to be under control for that sort of thing. Never.  I couldn't draw; I couldn't sketch; I couldn't write.  And I absolutely couldn't STAND being graded down simply because I was not going to and would never ever have any ability to do that kind of stuff with my hands.

If there's anything that made me hate school and the arbitraryness of grading, it was penmanship.

The second thing was going through 4 years of the same f'in' arithmetic lessons I got right the first time thank you.

At any rate, I'm kinda of mixed minds on this.  I do agree that we're throwing way too much variety at kids to "keep them interested" while still following No Child Gets Ahead standards planning, but at the same time, the fact that an otherwise A student gets Bs simply because they can't physically do something has always seemed harsh.

They complain about how they are "hurting morale and self-image" by punishments once used to maintain discipline, yet they kept on with hurting the self-image of students (like me) who actually were normal simply because they couldn't do one particular thing.  The Animal School indeed...

Comments

[shalandara.livejournal.com]

I never gave much thought to handwriting and school and children ..... until I had 2nd graders. Handwriting is actually an issue right now. One child was having problems with spelling. (OK, let's not go into the fact that I think it's dorky the way they have her doing spelling). But since she was never taught *how* to form the letters she has problems writing them. She can usually look at a word and tell me if it is spelled properly, if I have written or typed it. But since she has trouble forming her own letters she can't always tell if what she has written is correct or not. And then I realized that she and her sister were never taught by the schools to write, as in how to form letters. It was a "do whatever and make it look like that letter" kinda thing. I went and got workbooks for this, and their handwriting has improved noticibly in just one week. Now, she can concentrate on learning instead of having to constantly re-write her work.

I took the schools not teaching them how to write as another "let's not stifle the self-esteem of the child" thing, in addition to it being a "writing nice letters isn't measured on standardized tests so we won't spend time on it". And yet they get told to write neatly and legibly. Go figure. And next year they will be expected to learn cursive. No wonder kids have trouble, if they are expected to do another form of writing when the simple mechanics (i.e. the easiest way to make them look nice) of printing isn't told to them. Are they expected to figure it out on their own?

My handwriting is going downhill (but I think that is more a carpal tunnel thing) and Siegfried's is downright bad with printing (do not go into cursive). But I also do calligraphy, and there I do take the time to write nicely, but then again that is an artform basically.