When I returned to substitute teaching after a hiatus of several years, I entered a fourth-grade classroom and wrote my name on the whiteboard because that’s what substitute teachers do.
But I wrote it in cursive, which is apparently what most substitute teachers do not do … because kids don’t read it.
Sure enough, when the kids entered the room, one of them looked up at the whiteboard and asked, ”What’s that say?”
A few days later, for show-and-tell in a third-grade classroom, a little girl brought a beautiful greeting card containing a letter from her grandma who was vacationing in Europe. “Would you like to read it to the class?” I asked.
“I can’t read it.”
“But you’re a good reader,” I said.
“Yes,” she admitted, “But I can’t read that. It’s in cursive.”
Holy cow! What’s happening here?
OK, what’s happening is that cursive is no longer part of the curriculum in many classrooms. A lot of our kids can no longer read cursive because they have not been taught to write it. The rationale for this exclusion, as I’m sure we all suspect, is the computer — the keyboard, in all its forms.
This metamorphosis is eliciting a lot of response, positive and negative, from teachers and parents alike. Many teachers find themselves blessedly relieved of the burden of teaching what they consider an archaic subject at the expense of time which is now devoted to keyboarding. A cart of Chrome Books can be found in many classrooms, with its laptops ready. Or, at the least, in districts unable to afford a cart in every room, one is rolled around from one class to another. Kids in many, if not most, schools attend computer classes, beginning in the primary grades.
Who has time to teach cursive? Who has time to learn it?
Anyway, say the advocates of this revolution, why should children be made to learn something they’ll never use as adults?
But there are teachers who bewail what they consider an egregious lack; and parents are divided on the issue as well. It has become a polarizing topic.
Back in my day, a whole lot of decades ago, cursive writing was begun in the spring semester of the first grade. For many of us, it was a rite of passage. If you could write in cursive, you were grown up. You were mature. You were literate. It was called penmanship in those days, and we practiced our lines, loops and swirls, and most of us loved every minute of it. In a way, it was also an art form.
Today, kids hold their pencil like a shovel and struggle through the printing of letters and words in a scrawl which, in some instances, is barely legible, because — what the heck — they don’t need to know this anymore.
But they do, and there are a number of reasons why.
It is far more than pencil manufacturers who are lobbying for cursive to stay with us. Once mastered, it is faster than the manuscript (print) form. Computers notwithstanding, people will always write with pencil and pen. Yet, those of us who champion this are told to stop pretending that it’s a practical skill.
What about a signature? we ask. People have to be able to sign their name. And we are told that a signature need be nothing more than an illegible scrawl which has little to do with cursive writing, and besides, electronic signatures are commonplace and perfectly acceptable these days. In fact, printed signatures are perfectly legal.
So what? Kids who can’t write cursive can’t read it. And Grandma doesn’t have Skype.
If it was an art form decades ago, it remains so today. There is a certain beauty in a handwritten document.
Advocates for cursive writing tell us that more areas of the human brain are engaged when children use cursive writing than when they keyboard. The fluid motion employed when writing script enhances hand-eye coordination and develops fine motor skills, in turn promoting reading, writing and cognition skills. Cursive writing is also an integral part of many professionals who work with students who have dyslexia. Because the pen moves fluidly from left to right, cursive is easier to learn for students who have trouble forming words correctly.
Bringing this down to a personal level (and I may catch some flak for this), I have used handwriting all my life — far more than I use Algebra I and II with which I struggled for two years in high school.
Parents and teachers who are concerned about all this — and there are many — should make their concern known.
Robin C. Harris, an 18-year resident of Lake County, is the author of “Journeys out of Darkness, Adventures in Foster Care.” A retired educator, he is a substitute teacher for Lake County schools and has recently completed two works of fiction for children and teens. He is available for tutoring in first through eighth grades. Harris can be contacted at harris.tke@att.net.
