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Then she killed a boy for his Penmanship medal:
Apparently, cursive handwriting (otherwise known as Script) is on it's way out. Well, it's a font, but people are writing with it less and less. I admit that there is a certain nostalgia factor to cursive. But I also must concede that it's not nearly as relevant or vital as say, spelling and grammar which also seem to be going the way of the dodo. In case you don't get the reference, a dodo is a bird that used to be alive but is now extinct. Since you've probably never seen one, you don't actually miss it. Ditto cursive.
I don't think I have a problem with script evolving into something some people choose to develop as a skill, but is not required in school. After all, we used to require that girls learned to cook in high school. Home Economics was considered vital and important for young ladies. You know, so they could land a man. Now we know that even if we don't teach cooking in school, anyone who cares about it will take the time to learn on their own. Calligraphy is a skill. It's neat, but is not vital to education. Hell, there are schools that cut things like music and art. I would assert that those things are much more important than any one style of handwriting.
Personally, I hated penmanship because I didn't want my writing to be contrived and uniform, which is exactly what they were grading us on. We were told that neat writing was just as important as the words we chose for the sake of clear and effective communication. At the time, I suppose that was true. It really isn't anymore. Now I'd say it's more important to know how to spell and punctuate, and basic communications etiquette (and dare I say it? Netiquette). Pervasive typing allows us to focus on content. At long last. Content. Students spending more time on what they're saying and less on penmanship can only be a good thing.
For the record, my own handwriting is an odd combination of print and script combined with some letter configurations that are just plain weird. As such, my handwriting is recognizable, which I like.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Charleston resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader's signature.
"I just assumed she knew how to do it, but I have a piece of paper with her signature on it and it looks like a little kid's signature," Davis said.
Her daughter was apologetic, but explained that she hadn't been required to make the graceful loops and joined letters of cursive writing in years. That prompted a call to the school and another surprise.
West Virginia's largest school system teaches cursive, but only in the 3rd grade.
"It doesn't get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach," said Jane Roberts, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Kanawha County schools.
Davis' experience gets repeated every time parents, who recall their own hours of laborious cursive practice, learn that what used to be called "penmanship" is being shunted aside at schools across the country in favor of 21st century skills.
The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.
"We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, she said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting.
"They're writing, they're composing with these tools at home, and to have school look so different from that set of experiences is not the best idea," she said.
Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University's College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they'll replace it entirely before long.
"I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds."
For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of "a gift."
That fear is not new, said Kathleen Wright, national product manager for handwriting at Zaner-Bloser, a Columbus, Ohio-based company that produces a variety of instructional material for schools.
"If you go back, you can see the same conversations came up with the advent of the typewriter," she said.
Every year, Zaner-Bloser sponsors a national handwriting competition for schools, and this year saw more than 200,000 entries, a record.
"Everybody talks about how sometime in the future every kid's going to have a keyboard, but that isn't really true."
Few schools make keyboards available for day-to-day writing. The majority of school work, from taking notes to essay tests, is still done by hand.
At Mountaineer Montessori in Charleston, teacher Sharon Spencer stresses cursive to her first- through third-graders. By the time her students are in the third grade, they are writing book reports and their spelling words in cursive.
To Spencer, cursive writing is an art that helps teach them muscle control and hand-eye coordination.
"In the age of computers, I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don't have electricity? One of the ways we communicate is through writing," she said.
But cursive is favored by fewer college-bound students. In 2005, the SAT began including a written essay portion, and a 2007 report by the College Board found that about 15 percent of test-takers chose to write in cursive, while the others wrote in print.
That was probably smart, according to Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who cites multiple studies showing that sloppy writing routinely leads to lower grades, even in papers with the same wording as those written in a neater hand.
Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that 26 percent of 12th graders lack basic proficiency in writing, while two percent were sufficiently skilled writers to be classified as "advanced."
"Handwriting is really the tail wagging the dog," Graham said.
Besides, it isn't as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock.
Most people peak in terms of legibility in 4th grade, Graham said, and Wright said it's common for adults to write in a cursive-print hybrid.
"People still have to write, even if it's just scribbling," said Paula Sassi, a certified master graphologist and a member of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation.
"Just like when we went from quill pen to fountain pen to ball point, now we're going from the art of handwriting to handwriting purely as communication," she said.
As for me, I'll be up late again working on the manuscript. I was working on it last night and looked up and it was 8am. Oops. So I need to be to bed by 5am at the latest tonight.
Got a preliminary mock-up of the new book's cover design by the amazing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
flemco. It's not quite ready for sharing yet, but it will be soon. He has really outdone himself this time. As I hate it when people offer unsolicited advice about my writing, I didn't want to give him any sort of guidelines for the cover. He's an artist, so the respectful thing to do is to let him do his thing unabated. Happily, long-term osmosis kicked in, and he did something very close to what I was thinking. Except, you know...good. I'm hoping I can lay it on you's soon.
I don't think I have a problem with script evolving into something some people choose to develop as a skill, but is not required in school. After all, we used to require that girls learned to cook in high school. Home Economics was considered vital and important for young ladies. You know, so they could land a man. Now we know that even if we don't teach cooking in school, anyone who cares about it will take the time to learn on their own. Calligraphy is a skill. It's neat, but is not vital to education. Hell, there are schools that cut things like music and art. I would assert that those things are much more important than any one style of handwriting.
Personally, I hated penmanship because I didn't want my writing to be contrived and uniform, which is exactly what they were grading us on. We were told that neat writing was just as important as the words we chose for the sake of clear and effective communication. At the time, I suppose that was true. It really isn't anymore. Now I'd say it's more important to know how to spell and punctuate, and basic communications etiquette (and dare I say it? Netiquette). Pervasive typing allows us to focus on content. At long last. Content. Students spending more time on what they're saying and less on penmanship can only be a good thing.
For the record, my own handwriting is an odd combination of print and script combined with some letter configurations that are just plain weird. As such, my handwriting is recognizable, which I like.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Charleston resident Kelli Davis was in for a surprise when her daughter brought home some routine paperwork at the start of school this fall. Davis signed the form and then handed it to her daughter for the eighth-grader's signature.
"I just assumed she knew how to do it, but I have a piece of paper with her signature on it and it looks like a little kid's signature," Davis said.
Her daughter was apologetic, but explained that she hadn't been required to make the graceful loops and joined letters of cursive writing in years. That prompted a call to the school and another surprise.
West Virginia's largest school system teaches cursive, but only in the 3rd grade.
"It doesn't get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach," said Jane Roberts, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Kanawha County schools.
Davis' experience gets repeated every time parents, who recall their own hours of laborious cursive practice, learn that what used to be called "penmanship" is being shunted aside at schools across the country in favor of 21st century skills.
The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.
"We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, she said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting.
"They're writing, they're composing with these tools at home, and to have school look so different from that set of experiences is not the best idea," she said.
Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University's College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they'll replace it entirely before long.
"I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds."
For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of "a gift."
That fear is not new, said Kathleen Wright, national product manager for handwriting at Zaner-Bloser, a Columbus, Ohio-based company that produces a variety of instructional material for schools.
"If you go back, you can see the same conversations came up with the advent of the typewriter," she said.
Every year, Zaner-Bloser sponsors a national handwriting competition for schools, and this year saw more than 200,000 entries, a record.
"Everybody talks about how sometime in the future every kid's going to have a keyboard, but that isn't really true."
Few schools make keyboards available for day-to-day writing. The majority of school work, from taking notes to essay tests, is still done by hand.
At Mountaineer Montessori in Charleston, teacher Sharon Spencer stresses cursive to her first- through third-graders. By the time her students are in the third grade, they are writing book reports and their spelling words in cursive.
To Spencer, cursive writing is an art that helps teach them muscle control and hand-eye coordination.
"In the age of computers, I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don't have electricity? One of the ways we communicate is through writing," she said.
But cursive is favored by fewer college-bound students. In 2005, the SAT began including a written essay portion, and a 2007 report by the College Board found that about 15 percent of test-takers chose to write in cursive, while the others wrote in print.
That was probably smart, according to Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who cites multiple studies showing that sloppy writing routinely leads to lower grades, even in papers with the same wording as those written in a neater hand.
Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.
Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that 26 percent of 12th graders lack basic proficiency in writing, while two percent were sufficiently skilled writers to be classified as "advanced."
"Handwriting is really the tail wagging the dog," Graham said.
Besides, it isn't as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock.
Most people peak in terms of legibility in 4th grade, Graham said, and Wright said it's common for adults to write in a cursive-print hybrid.
"People still have to write, even if it's just scribbling," said Paula Sassi, a certified master graphologist and a member of the American Handwriting Analysis Foundation.
"Just like when we went from quill pen to fountain pen to ball point, now we're going from the art of handwriting to handwriting purely as communication," she said.
As for me, I'll be up late again working on the manuscript. I was working on it last night and looked up and it was 8am. Oops. So I need to be to bed by 5am at the latest tonight.
Got a preliminary mock-up of the new book's cover design by the amazing
flemco. It's not quite ready for sharing yet, but it will be soon. He has really outdone himself this time. As I hate it when people offer unsolicited advice about my writing, I didn't want to give him any sort of guidelines for the cover. He's an artist, so the respectful thing to do is to let him do his thing unabated. Happily, long-term osmosis kicked in, and he did something very close to what I was thinking. Except, you know...good. I'm hoping I can lay it on you's soon.
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Don't be silly!
It's depressing that both of those subjects tend to be treated as sort of extra, non-essential topics that can be discarded at any time. Creativity can bring so much into your life and teach you important skills about how to perceive the world which you can--gasp!--actually use in real world situations. Well, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but those humorless, joyless dullards who see those subjects as a waste of time don't realize that.
My handwriting is a combination of printing and cursive and is very, uh, distinctive. I'm constantly teased by others because nobody else can understand it. I admire people who have beautiful handwriting.
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