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Post by lexikon on Dec 7, 2011 1:25:12 GMT -5
For the record, cursive kills my hand. Printing makes it so I have a split second break between letters. Cursive means I have to wait entire words for a break. And with someone whose disability causes immense pain when trying to write with a pencil... yeah. Eh... when I write in cursive I usually take a break every 2-4 letters and try to go back where I started. It may seem a bit off at a few times, but meh. It's a straw man because Farsi is used solely in the Middle East/SW Asia and is not as vastly spoken compared to the other languages such as Arabic and Urdo. Now if you lived in Iran or Afghanistan, it would be useful, but like I said, in America you're much more likely to come across Spanish or Japanese, and it'll be more important than cursive.
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Post by verasthebrujah on Dec 7, 2011 1:34:29 GMT -5
Cursive isn't faster for everyone, particularly if they don't use it often. On average though, it is. I've seen research comparing the speed and readability of print, cursive, and a number of shorthand techniques. If anybody is interested, I'll dig a little farther, but at a quick glance I was unable to locate it. And bringing disabilities into the equation changes things by definition. One of our students has dysgraphia (forgive me if the spelling is off), and his IEP may well exclude him from cursive. He is definitely allowed to use his laptop to do all other writing for all other classes--even when taking tests.
Nobody here is suggesting that you should be required to write in cursive. Obviously it isn't right for you. Still, would you say that you are worse off knowing how to do it than you would be if you had spent that time in elementary school on something else?
Admiral:
I am arguing that the value of knowing how to read cursive outweighs the cost of learning how to write it, the value being that most people will have a need to read cursive at some point in their lives. I am not advocating teaching every single skill that any human being could possibly need to use at any point in their life.
There is a cultural expectation that people know how to read cursive. If it weren't for the fact that I'm a teacher, I would have had no idea that literate individuals might not know how to read cursive anymore. The first time I wrote something in cursive on the board and the kids asked me what it said, I thought they were joking. I freely admit that social conventions aren't necessarily good, but they do still exist, and people have to deal with them. This expectation seems to be, as you say, a generational difference. However, I'm only 24, so for me to be on the older side of this gap, it has to be fairly new, meaning that the vast majority of the population likely still holds this expectation.
In light of this, I disagree that we can say that it is the writer's "fault" if somebody can't read their cursive (unless the issue is just that they have awful handwriting, regardless of whether it is print or cursive). But even if I were to concede this point, it is certainly the reader's problem. I don't know about others, but if I were given instructions, a review, notes, etc. from a boss, coworker, or client, and I had to go explain to that person that I don't understand what they want because I can't read cursive, I would be embarrassed (once again assuming that the other party has reasonably good handwriting).
Admittedly, the farthest that I've gone into the professional world outside of academia is Head Cashier at Barnes & Noble. However, at that job and lower level positions at the bookstore, as a restaurant host, as a teacher, and as a college student, I have had to read the cursive of customers, coworkers, managers, students, classmates, and professors. Maybe I'm way off-- maybe my experience is atypical, but I have a hard time believing that most people aren't going to have the opportunity to use the skill of reading it.
Again, I would say that describing cursive vs. printing as a generational difference is a reasonable analysis. The implication here is that cursive will go away, and the problem will be solved, so it doesn't matter. I find this point to be entirely reasonable. I just think that cursive is still common enough that it is still worth teaching, even if it won't be in a generation. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I'm shocked at how strong the negative reaction toward it is on this board, and if this is an accurate representation of public perception as a whole, then maybe cursive isn't as common as I thought. Maybe it is closer to being dead than I realized, and therefore already not worth teaching.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but that's what writing curriculum is all about. You have to decide what you need and what you don't, but that leads to difficult decisions. Should we cut cursive? Should we stop teaching kids how to read analog clocks? Should we cut art, music, and gym? As sick as it would make me to hear it, one could even make an argument that, while a decent knowledge of history is desirable, it isn't strictly necessary to function in society, as long as you know the Pledge and the National Anthem. Instead we should devote more time to math, computers, and science.
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Post by Dragon Zachski on Dec 7, 2011 2:04:24 GMT -5
Nobody here is suggesting that you should be required to write in cursive. Obviously it isn't right for you. Still, would you say that you are worse off knowing how to do it than you would be if you had spent that time in elementary school on something else? Actually, we spent more time on other things like history and learning how to write for the fun of it and how to read for the fun of it and stuff like that. There's many more things that are more productive to learn or do than cursive. Reading a book, any book (well, except Twilight) for one. And yes, people are insinuating that it's required to learn cursive. Make it an elective, but don't make it mandatory. I fully support the right to learn cursive just as much as I support the right to learn hieroglyphics.
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Post by Admiral Lithp on Dec 7, 2011 3:18:06 GMT -5
It seemed like you were talking about mandated classes. As for whether or not I'm "worse off"? Well, that's a tricky question. I can't really define what I lost. But I can define what I gained. And let's just say many, many things would have yielded more benefit.
Also, point of order: What the Hell?
Is everyone where you live like Edd's family? They communicate through Sticky Notes, or something? What happened to talking, & E-mails when that wasn't an option?
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Post by cestlefun17 on Dec 7, 2011 3:22:14 GMT -5
The responses to this are very selfish and self-centered "I personally don't use cursive; it's not important to me; therefore it's not important to anyone."
As vera said, to many people it provides for faster, more comfortable writing. To others it doesn't, and that's fine too. I'm glad I learned both, so I could choose which one worked best for me. It's not just about making pretty, flowery writing. I am incapable of taking notes in print, and printing for long stretches cramps my hand. I'm glad I learned cursive because I realized that that is what works for me.
The motivation to remove cursive from the beginning was based on poor reasoning: that computers somehow have eliminated our need to write things by hand. We will always need to write things by hand, and some people write much more efficiently in script.
Nevertheless, I firmly believe children need more handwriting lessons, not less, whether this be print, cursive, or both. Children's writing is getting more and more atrocious. I have had, on several occasions, to tell middle or high school students that their penmanship is simply unacceptable and that they would have to re-do an assignment or re-take a test (and it's always the boys too for some reason, never the girls!). Penmanship used to be a whole separate subject when I was in grades K-3, and was a separate grade on my report card throughout all of elementary school. I don't know if this is still the case, but it should be.
I agree about the huge elementary-style ruled paper. It is far too big, but I suppose that makes it easier when you are very young and developing motor skills. Here in France, they use a special grid-ruled paper that isn't spaced too far apart like the American style. They are also extremely strict about penmanship and every French person I've come across has immaculate handwriting.
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Post by Admiral Lithp on Dec 7, 2011 3:28:36 GMT -5
Okay, here's a good example of my point. Instead of this man being taught cursive in elementary school, he could have been taught how to read.
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Post by Yaezakura on Dec 7, 2011 3:41:47 GMT -5
cestle, you're missing the fucking point. It's not "is cursive useful for a handful of people?". It's "is cursive useful enough to make it a mandatory part of grade school education?".
As has been stated many times, the only acceptable use of cursive is personal notes. In the business world, cursive is either heavily discouraged or outright prohibited because it is inconsistent and often hard for anyone but the writer to read.
Feel free to make it an elective for people who want to study it. But it is not useful enough to form a mandatory part of education.
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Post by cestlefun17 on Dec 7, 2011 4:05:26 GMT -5
As vera pointed it, it takes very little time to learn cursive and is also taught in early and mid-elementary. We're not exactly taking away from time that could be spent learning "other things," as if second graders are missing out on advanced physics or trigonometry. If they aren't learning cursive, they will still need to be working on their printing anyway, because even printed handwriting skills are declining (really, I find that the students who write in cursive have the neatest handwriting. Most students who print have neat handwriting as well. But out of all the students who have poor, illegible handwriting, they are always printers). You may not use it in the business world (as if everyone goes into the business world ) but for many people is essential throughout the rest of their primary and secondary education: you are consistently writing for the 13 years you spend in elementary, middle, and high school, and for a lot of students taking notes and writing essays on essay tests in script is far preferable to printing. Not everything you learn in 3rd grade needs to be applicable to the "real world," a lot needs to be focused on how to be successful in the next 10 years you'll be in school. If anything cursive lessons help develop motor skills in young children, develops concentration skills, and re-inforces following direction. As this article from the New York Times article indicates, all handwriting instruction -- print and cursive -- is on the decline because more time is taken preparing for standardized tests. And it is showing! www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/us/28cursive.html (Some of the arguments the article uses -- such as not being able to read old diaries -- are ridiculous, and I agree that it is gratuitous to be teaching cursive in eighth grade, as it says some school districts do. Eighth graders should know how to write legibly by this point.)
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Post by verasthebrujah on Dec 7, 2011 6:54:08 GMT -5
It's a straw man because Farsi is used solely in the Middle East/SW Asia and is not as vastly spoken compared to the other languages such as Arabic and Urdo. Now if you lived in Iran or Afghanistan, it would be useful, but like I said, in America you're much more likely to come across Spanish or Japanese, and it'll be more important than cursive. It's not a straw man. The argument to which I was responding was effectively this. If cursive is worth teaching because one might be in a position in which they need to read cursive, then ALL languages should be taught, because a student might be in a position where they need a foreign language. Because it is unreasonable to expect students to learn all languages, we should not require cursive to be taught under the same logic. The post literally said "all languages." Farsi, as a language, is therefore a literal part of that argument. If by "all," he actually meant "a" or "any," that is different. My response to that argument would be to point out that Indiana does require foreign language education, as it should. I never said that learning a foreign language isn't valuable. In fact, I would argue that knowing any foreign language is more valuable than knowing cursive. But once again, you cannot learn a foreign language in the time it takes to learn cursive. I meant that nobody is talking about requiring students to write cursive after they initially learn it. Sorry about that, the language I used there was not as clear as I intended. I was referring to the argument that many have made that their teachers required them to write in cursive, even outside of specific subject. That isn't acceptable. I agree, you could have spent the handful of hours you devoted to learning cursive doing something else, and that something else could have been useful. However, with all of the hours a student spends on Reading, Math, or whatever over the course of their academic career, do you really thing that spending that extra handful of hours trying to teach kids to love to read is going to be THE difference? And I don't think cursive works as an elective because it doesn't take enough time to justify being its own course. At least we can agree on the Twilight thing. Admiral:You can't define what you lost because what you lost--the cost--was so low. I don't know about you, but I spent far more time in my public school career sleeping in class than I spent learning cursive. I wasn't sick very often, but I probably spent more time out of class with the flu than I spent learning cursive. In the long run, learning it isn't a big deal. Those forms of communication are dominant, and I don't expect that to change. But handwritten paperwork, customer orders, lists, notes, etc. still exist, and many of those are in cursive.
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Post by the sandman on Dec 7, 2011 8:37:19 GMT -5
Okay, here's a good example of my point. Instead of this man being taught cursive in elementary school, he could have been taught how to read. Holy shit. Two semi-colons in a single sentence? Someone should have taught him how to WRITE.
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Post by the sandman on Dec 7, 2011 8:48:24 GMT -5
And to be honest, everyone here is missing a key bit of data. Schools did not essentially drop script as a required skill because it's not useful or used anymore (although that is a valid point).
It was generally relegated to unimportant and irrelevant status a year or so after No Child Left Behind went into effect. Schools became so paranoid about losing Federal dollars due to low standardized test scores that basically anything that didn't directly relate to training students to pass these asinine tests was chucked out the side door. I know schools where they are requiring GYM TEACHERS to assign, grade, and evaluate students with writing assignments. Remember your PE teacher? Would you trust that guy to know how to grade an essay? There has developed a "Teach-To-The-Test" mentality in American schools, and script just doesn't help because most of those damn tests are of the "fill the dot in completely" variety and nevermind that it is physically impossible to assess someone on writing skills that way.
For God's sake, I know TWO schools in the Cleveland area that spend TWO DAYS just on training 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders on how to fill in those goddamn little circles. Two. Days. On how to fill in a circle with a No. 2 pencil.
And then you have those teachers in Georgia that simply went through and changed all their student's answers so they all passed the tests. And they did this at the direction of the Principal.
All across America music programs are being dropped or cut back. So art art, drama, and just about every other extra-curricular (except football, baseball, and basketball, those are sacred cows in American education, mainly because they actually tend to generate money instead of cost it). Why are we axing so many extra subjects and activities (including seeming innocuous and trivial things like script handwriting)? Because these things are not relevant to students passing those ludicrous and meaningless NCLB standardized tests.
So I guess in a way......IT'S ALL GEORGE BUSH'S FAULT!
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Post by cestlefun17 on Dec 7, 2011 9:51:28 GMT -5
I have never known it to be improper to use more than one semicolon in a single sentence. If you string too many insubordinate clauses together then yes, you'll have an unwieldy sentence, but I don't see that to be the case here.
Multiple semicolons are required if you are enumerating lists within lists or if items in a list are themselves complete sentences.
I agree with "cursive as an elective" being nonsense. You can't teach a whole course just on cursive (there really isn't THAT much to learn), not to mention that elementary schools do not have elective courses that people can pick and choose! (Yes there are things like art, and gym, etc. but everyone in the same class does those together. Elementary students are not putting together their own schedules.)
In any event, if you replace cursive education it would, in my opinion, only have to be replaced by additional print education. Teaching penmanship cannot end at 2nd Grade.
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Post by the sandman on Dec 7, 2011 10:43:16 GMT -5
I have never known it to be improper to use more than one semicolon in a single sentence. If you string too many insubordinate clauses together then yes, you'll have an unwieldy sentence, but I don't see that to be the case here. While it is not technically improper to use more than one semicolon in a sentence, unless you are using it to clarify a very complex series of lists-within-lists, if you put two of them in the same sentence you're almost certainly doing it wrong. Or at least extremely awkwardly. I would be more forgiving if the author in question had used the semicolons properly, but, alas, they did not. The second semicolon should be a comma, and the first, while technically used correctly to link two related independent clauses, should probably just be a period for ease of reading. And yet, tragically, it so often does.
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Post by cestlefun17 on Dec 7, 2011 12:20:00 GMT -5
This is getting off topic, but both semicolons are correct. The original quotation (which I wrote) is:
"I personally don't use cursive; it's not important to me; therefore it's not important to anyone."
The second semicolon is correct because "therefore, it's not important to anyone" is an insubordinate clause (I should have put a comma after "therefore."). All three components individually can stand alone as complete sentences and I joined them with semicolons because they constitute a single line of thought.
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Post by the sandman on Dec 7, 2011 13:25:59 GMT -5
This is getting off topic, but both semicolons are correct. The original quotation (which I wrote) is: "I personally don't use cursive; it's not important to me; therefore it's not important to anyone." The second semicolon is correct because "therefore, it's not important to anyone" is an insubordinate clause (I should have put a comma after "therefore."). All three components individually can stand alone as complete sentences and I joined them with semicolons because they constitute a single line of thought. I can see your point. (I think the missing comma was throwing me off a bit.) As a teacher, I wouldn't recommend this complex of a sentence structure, though. The semi-colon is typically considered an antique form of punctuation now and is generally discouraged in modern writing. The preferred modern structure for your thought would be to use a period and two commas to generate two concurrent sentences. Heh. Now I'm getting all paranoid with my own grammar lest I make an inadvertent error and look like a damn fool. Grammar Police are hereby disbanded!! (I celebrated the disbanding of the Grammar Police by using a most, MOST unacceptable double exclamation-point. And it felt goooooooood.)
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