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Nov. 10th, 2007 08:41 pmOh noez, handwriting's disappearing in teaching!
Researchers are bemoaning the fact that teaching cursive is going the way of the dodo - it's been declining since the 70s, and most kids nowadays get about 14 minutes of letter formation teaching a day in class.
Y'know, I'm finding it incredibly difficult to shed a tear over it - seeing as how I read the handwriting of people (usually in their forties or fifties or sixties) for a living currently, and often, their handwriting and printing stinks. Absolutely stinks. Those purported forty-five minutes of teaching they used to get did absolutely fuckall, because their vowels, stick-like letters, and m/n/ws are all illegible. We end up calling five people per order with 'hey, uh, we can't read your writing - what's this actually supposed to say?'.
As long as kids can print legibly, and can read cursive, I don't really care whether or not they can write the damn stuff. It's not like it actually works in the way it's supposed to, anyways - that is, make writing faster and neater. Anyone with eyeballs know that it doesn't; you get one or the other, or neither. Never both.
Researchers are bemoaning the fact that teaching cursive is going the way of the dodo - it's been declining since the 70s, and most kids nowadays get about 14 minutes of letter formation teaching a day in class.
Y'know, I'm finding it incredibly difficult to shed a tear over it - seeing as how I read the handwriting of people (usually in their forties or fifties or sixties) for a living currently, and often, their handwriting and printing stinks. Absolutely stinks. Those purported forty-five minutes of teaching they used to get did absolutely fuckall, because their vowels, stick-like letters, and m/n/ws are all illegible. We end up calling five people per order with 'hey, uh, we can't read your writing - what's this actually supposed to say?'.
As long as kids can print legibly, and can read cursive, I don't really care whether or not they can write the damn stuff. It's not like it actually works in the way it's supposed to, anyways - that is, make writing faster and neater. Anyone with eyeballs know that it doesn't; you get one or the other, or neither. Never both.
