hulk hogan meat shoes: Was there such a degradation in education in half a decade that they stopped teaching the basics?

No, cursive stopped being a useful "basic".

I write in cursive when I write memos or leave notes for people. I think it looks a little nicer than my angry looking and block shaped print. I never use cursive for anything longer than a few paragraphs though, the text tends to start to look really sloppy after the first page or so.

The point being, I like cursive.

nunia: I agree. The focus should be on proper communication, not on holding to traditions. If cursive has become obsolete, then why waste time on it?

What would be the advantage?

The fark? How about being able to write a grocery list without making it look like Mongo scrawled it with crayons? How about being able to read your grandmother's birth certificate?

I still write in cursive, my printing is awful. My cursive is almost legible.

Toshiro Mifune's Letter Opener: IN ALL FAIRNESS, PERHAPS THEY SHOULD START LEARNING HOW TO WRITE IN COMIC SANS STYLE

that is too comical

Toshiro Mifune's Letter Opener: IN ALL FAIRNESS, PERHAPS THEY SHOULD START LEARNING HOW TO WRITE IN COMIC SANS STYLE

http://bancomicsans.com/home.html (new window)

Kar98: Uh...it bloody well should.

I mean that were one to walk into a college classroom and flip through the blue exam books, everyone's handwriting will be in a varied and distinct style particular to each individual. But handwriting from two centuries ago seems to look very similar no matter who wrote it.

I happen to prefer cursive, because I can write a lot faster in cursive than printing.

/unfortunately, I'm left-handed so it tends to get smudged and leave graphite on the side of my hand.

Churchill2004: FormlessOne: ual labor rendered obsolete thanks to automation. Hell, at this rate, 3M will have to retire the Post-It in a decade or so.

I suppose you're also going to complain that Congress doesn't have its proceedings published by an expert Thomas Jefferson calligraphy imitator.

When was the last time anyone read the proceedings of Congress? And do they still come hide-bound?

hulk hogan meat shoes: I'm only 25, and I learned how to read and write in cursive in second grade. The kids in college right now are only 5 years younger than I am. Was there such a degradation in education in half a decade that they stopped teaching the basics? If this were a span of twenty years, I could understand. But 5 or 6? shiat, I assume those kids can remember a time without the internet, I sure can. I remember having to use a typewriter for school papers, and I didn't get a computer education until about middle school when I mostly had to teach myself on the computers in the library, and it was huge news when they finally got the internet around 1993. Maybe my schools were behind the times, but I liked learning how to do things the old fashioned way. Dewey Decimal and cursive writing and learning to type well because there's no such thing as a backspace on a typewriter.

25 is way too young to ask someone to get off my lawn. I don't even have a lawn, just a patch of half dead grass behind my apartment building.

Why should kids have to learn cursive? I'm 23 and I know it (kind of, i forgot how to write Zs) but since high school on, my teachers required everything typed up so what's the point of learning to write in the interweb age?

/Dewey Decimal?
//Do we ever!

College students can't read teacher's handwriting because it is in cursive paste instead of pixels ink

FTFY

i learned to read and write it in 3rd grade, forgot by 4th, and to this day PRINT my signature.
/sometimes i sign a fake looking M shaped thing in cursive because it wont match whats on record/

Here's a sample of my cursive.


/works in medical field

FTA: Quinsigamond Community College

Harvard on the Hill!

MrZoner: caninefly: I was in an experimental class in elementary school where we were taught italics instead of cursive. I had to go to an outside class so I could learn enough cursive to sign my name.

FTFY

Well played, it took me a good 30 seconds to figure out what you did.

Since the fourth grade, the only time I've had to write in cursive has been on the SAT (where it asks you to copy ~3 sentences where you say that you agree to their terms), and even that was more in a hybrid cursive-print style. Other than that, print and electronic writing have been the only means of writing I have had. My cursive was barely legible right after I learned it (and got progressively worse until my teachers told me that I need to print or they'd fail me). It's even worse now.

Why in the world do we need to teach our kids to write in cursive, a script that is unused and one that many people cannot read? Print is more legible, and electronic communications are taking over how we communicate. I get why we'd need to teach them how to read it (for the one time that they'd encounter it a year), but why in the world would we force them to write in a text that is less legible???

asscorethethird: Post

What's the point of cursive again? It's basically just stylized print writing that serves absolutely no purpose besides aesthetics. We find it pleasing and more formal because that's how people wrote centuries ago. Learning cursive would be like making kids learn British accents because they sound cool.

null: Cursive sucks if you're left-handed. You have two choices: smear it dragging your hand across it, or mess your hand/wrist/arm up with the hook method.

Or in my case, both.

asscorethethird: Come on! - cursive writting - I learned in 2nd grade. 2nd GRADE! - not at home, in classes. Big piece of newsrag paper with solid main lines and dotted centers. This jogging any memories? I also seem to recall teachers that required all assignments to be written in legible cursive.

WTF is wrong with the world today?

Cursive writing isn't needed at McDonald's? Heck, reading isn't really needed at McDonalds.

So, why teach it in public schools? When we tied specific deliverables to federal dollars, what we get is, of course, specific deliverables. Arts, music, penmanship, sports (that aren't backed by a professional industry) are gradually going out the door. We're not turning out good humans - we're turning out good workers. If you can afford the additional training, well, then you can learn such exotic skills as art appreciation and cursive writing.

Penny wise, pound foolish.

In my last job, I worked with a 20 year-old. He left a phone message on my desk. I had to bring it to him for translation because I could not understand any of it. Even the phone number was illegible.

He also typed about 120 words per minute. I guess that's a trade-off...

obsolete? Bullsh**. if you don't like cursive, that's because you suck at it, and you never wrote anything that required you to write something as fast as your thoughts were streaming, or as fast as someone speaking.

Cursive is simply the superior method, and doesn't require you to lift your pen off the page. Unless you have your gay laptop with you, you're never gonna be able to write decent.

Soon, you sucky students are gonna wonder why we have to memorize multiplication tables I bet.

FormlessOne: Post


I would have no problem with teaching calligraphy in art class, but making kids learn for no reason other than "it's always been done" is stupid.

Kar98: nunia: I agree. The focus should be on proper communication, not on holding to traditions. If cursive has become obsolete, then why waste time on it?

What would be the advantage?

The fark? How about being able to write a grocery list without making it look like Mongo scrawled it with crayons? How about being able to read your grandmother's birth certificate?

Not knowing cursive does not equal not being able to write legibly.

Not_This_Again: I used cursive for everything in college,for exams and taking notes. My friends would bust my chops over it, but it was much more natural and quicker so I didn't care.

/graduated 3 weeks ago.

Congrats! I still hate cursive.

Cursive is useless. Subby fails.

This is a nothing story. FTFA:
But soon after, one of her 20-year-old students notified Ms. Samara of a problem: She couldn't decipher a word.

While some professors' scrawl can be virtually impossible to decode, Ms. Samara's penmanship was not to blame. Her longhand, honed through years of training as an occupational therapist, was executed with a clinician's precision.

The student, Ms. Samara suggested, simply belonged to a generation for whom cursive writing was as arcane as Latin grammar.
No quotes from the student in question, just the teacher guessing that the student didn't know cursive.

Hey, biatch, maybe your handwriting isn't as neat as you think it is.

asscorethethird: Come on! - cursive writting - I learned in 2nd grade. 2nd GRADE! - not at home, in classes. Big piece of newsrag paper with solid main lines and dotted centers. This jogging any memories? I also seem to recall teachers that required all assignments to be written in legible cursive.

WTF is wrong with the world today?

Gonna get worse b4 it gets better

therumblefish: I write in cursive when I write memos or leave notes for people. I think it looks a little nicer than my angry looking and block shaped print.

I like to write my notes in Persian calligraphy, since it's so pretty to look at. Unfortunately the last time I left a note in that script, we had a visit from the FBI.

So I've reverted to classical chinese. Attractive and current since after all, China owns the U.S.

/告別同志

HappyLittleTree: What's the point of cursive again?

Uh, it's much faster than trying to "print" letters?

Number of times I got a handslap by a ruler in grade school for screwing up cursive writing: ~30

Number of times I've needed to write, or read something critical in cursive during my adult life: 0

Honestly, it's not as if people stopped learning how to write by hand at all. Like if there was a global EMP like in Escape from LA and no computers worked anywhere. People can still write in print. Cursive was only designed to be faster than printing, and printing became the back-up. Now typing is the faster way, and printing is still the back-up. Cursive is obsolete. As long as there is still a way to write by hand, ie printing, who cares.

nunia: The focus should be on proper communication, not on holding to traditions.

Exactly. Focus on actual language.
Reading, vocabulary, and clear/concise word usage is much more useful and important, and often lacking.

hulk hogan meat shoes: I'm only 25, and I learned how to read and write in cursive in second grade. The kids in college right now are only 5 years younger than I am. Was there such a degradation in education in half a decade that they stopped teaching the basics? If this were a span of twenty years, I could understand. But 5 or 6? shiat, I assume those kids can remember a time without the internet, I sure can. I remember having to use a typewriter for school papers, and I didn't get a computer education until about middle school when I mostly had to teach myself on the computers in the library, and it was huge news when they finally got the internet around 1993. Maybe my schools were behind the times, but I liked learning how to do things the old fashioned way. Dewey Decimal and cursive writing and learning to type well because there's no such thing as a backspace on a typewriter.

25 is way too young to ask someone to get off my lawn. I don't even have a lawn, just a patch of half dead grass behind my apartment building.

The change has been huge. Our age group +-1 were the last to receive the form of education before some very major shifts in teaching styles and curriculum.

They've really shiat on the system. Kids are coming out as idiots relative to us and older. Personally, I place a lot of the blame on the "no child left behind" concept. HS diplomas are now as good as toilet paper (and weren't worth a whole lot more during out period either).

A HS diploma should not be considered a right in any sense. There are many learned trades in this world that require aptitude and OTJ training much more than schooled learning. It is very difficult to filter people based on HS status due to them being handed out like candy to the tards. This forces young adults to be schooled for an unnecessary 2 additional years at a tech school for such trades just to separate themselves from the dumb asses.

I think it's more of teachers get tired of reading and commenting on 40 different 30 page final papers and start to write really fast...

I still can't read what my English teacher wrote on my final portfolio paper...it's not even in cursive...

zhinz1: ...The student, Ms. Samara suggested, simply belonged to a generation for whom cursive writing was as arcane as Latin grammar.
No quotes from the student in question, just the teacher guessing that the student didn't know cursive.

Hey, biatch, maybe your handwriting isn't as neat as you think it is.

I agree. My 2nd-grade teacher would have given Ms. Samara a poor grade for her script.

truthfully my graffiti, from carrying a palm pilot for years before i got a laptop, than my cursive handwriting.

Hell, watcha need to know how to write anyway? Just press the pretty buttons!

HappyLittleTree: asscorethethird: Post

What's the point of cursive again? It's basically just stylized print writing that serves absolutely no purpose besides aesthetics. We find it pleasing and more formal because that's how people wrote centuries ago. Learning cursive would be like making kids learn British accents because they sound cool.

Actually, learning (and practicing) proper cursive writing allows you to write faster than block writing, because you don't have to lift the pen from the paper.

And just because a skill is obsolete does not mean that the skill shouldn't be taught. Ask a good COBOL programmer these days what they're making - sure, it's an obsolete skill, but if it's still in use and fewer folks can do it, welcome to the sweet side of supply and demand.

As an aside, teaching Gregg, Pitman, or Teeline shorthand these days is probably like money in the bank when it comes to writing.

/cracks out the Pitman books...

And who needs to be able to read?!

Problem here is that cursive used to be a tool for professional writers and the elite members of society. These people practiced and perfected it so that it was both quick and legible. Since they started teaching cursive to the masses we were left with people whose writing is mostly illegible. The only thing it is good for now is signatures, which again, are mostly illegible. I have a coworker that leaves me cursive notes, and hers is the worst cursive ever. I throw them away as it is not worth my time to try and decipher it.

Kar98: It's much easier to read script than it is to write it well. And why the fark do I care what my grocery list looks like... its a tool, nothing more.



/writing pretty is not as useful a skill as being able to type quickly.

It should be relegated to a status as an elective art form.

Otherwise, it's a waste of time. Far better to make typing required of all the little rugrats.

Knowing how to milk a cow or raise a barn is nice, but it's simply not needed by 99.9% of today's population.

Kar98: Post


I meant learning BOTH cursive and print is pointless. It offers nothing. Teach one or the other. It's better to teach print now because what they'll encounter will be in print. Also, I doubt printing is significantly slower than cursive.

I'd rather they teach one form of writing, and maybe have students make up their own symbols as a creative exercise. THAT is substantially more beneficial than havign them learn something that isn't important.

Formal cursive is a joke. There's no reason for people to write ridiculous-looking z's and T's that look like F's and so forth. Just write naturally and don't bother taking your pen off the paper. Much better.