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Tuesday, June 3, 2008
a plea for better instruction in cursive handwriting
This man makes an excellent point.
While I'm on the subject of lousy instruction in cursive handwriting, I like this remedial handwriting program very much:
I tried it one summer with C. and me. Didn't manage to get through it, though my own handwriting improved quite a lot.
Maybe I'll get back to it one of these days.
Ed had an email from an old friend in France asking why it is that parents all over the Western world are locked in a permanent struggle to get schools to teach their children the fundamentals.
Good question.
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13 comments:
No one seems yet to have noted the potential of tablet computers with handwriting recognition to become instructional tools for improving handwriting--all it takes it to make the recognition engine "fussy" with regard to particular aspects of letter formation and spacing, and, voila! a handwriting teacher that works in real time and in context. Anyone who has ever struggled to master Graffiti for Palm knows what this is about.
You could probably start with a rigorous DeNealian in such gadgets for pre-school and early primary students and progress through whatever your preference might be--Palmer, Copperplate, Spencerian... Be as retro as you want to be, or just let nature take its course with older students headed for medicine.
I am not a fan of D'Nealian as a handwriting program. My preference is for Handwriting Without Tears (HWT), a logical, developmentally-appropriate, rigorous progression from print (manuscript) to cursive. It is in wide use as a base curriculum, and can also be used to remediate older students with lousy handwriting.
Disclosure: by the end of the summer, I plan to achieve Level I certification in HWT. My observation is that it is especially accessible to boys who have less fine-motor dexterity than girls.
I marvel at the old letters from Washington, Jefferson, etc. They were works of art on so many levels. Could it be that treating the medium (cursive) with disdain is at the root of the same disregard for the message (writing).
I'm a woodworker in my spare time and with wood it's like that. A really good piece of wood gets treated differently by me than a scraggly (is that a word) piece of green crap that I get at Home Despot.
I know in my classes (that go up to grade 8) I'd settle today for legible printing, keyword there is settle.
Would you believe that one of the challenges in early algebra is recognition of the ubiquitous cursives used for variables? So many speed bumbs, so little time....
Thanks to Catherine Johnson for posting the Handwriting Repair video! ("Points to Ponder" above)
As a handwriting instructor and remediator, I gain a lot of my income helping the kids, teens, and adults who've "washed out" with D'Nealian, Handwriting without Tears (whose name I regard as false advertising) and the other "big name" programs which jump the children from an absolutely joinless writing style into a rigidly 100% joined writing style. For more information on the serious and usually unrecognized problems built into the core of those programs and many others, again I do highly recommend the "Points to Ponder" video (as well as the web-site it mentions at the end).
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree completely.
Waste time on cursive because that's how our founding fathers wrote? They wrote in cursive because handwriting was all that was available, and cursive is faster. Yes, it is nice to be able to write pretty letters to your grandparents. But that is not a sufficient reason to waste as much time as we do on it.
I have spent way too much time slogging through trying to read people's sloppy cursive. Thank-you cards and forms need to be handwritten. In the former case, printing is perfectly acceptable when done well. In the latter case, printing is the only acceptable way of doing it.
It is far more important that students learn how to type properly. A hunter-and-pecker with beautiful handwriting is at an extreme disadvantage to someone who can type competently but needs to print when handwriting.
Yes, there is something to be said for the beauty of properly done cursive writing. But craftsmanship is for someone with a love of the particular art. We've been trying to force everyone to love writing by hand, and the result has been gobbledygook. Give 'em a basic understanding of cursive. Let those who like it keep going. But let's spend our time teaching kids something with real practical value. Maybe if kids knew how to properly type they wouldn't need these idiotic netspeak abbreviations.
On the other hand, Washington had just an elementary school education. Somehow he was taught cursive AND composition that shames us.
Considering that my seventh grade English teacher called me a "human typewriter", I can't form a big argument in support of cursive writing. However, It's not as if schools are taking time away from other really important material (like kids' spelling). I think few would argue that it should be taken out completely, so schools should dive right in and get the job done. I think that some schools do the job poorly because they really don't think it's important. That's worse than not teaching cursive. Actually, I think that cursive forced my son to slow down (his cursive was neater than his printing) and it ended up helping his printing.
Cursive instruction can also pack a punch if it's done wisely. One of HWT books has the student practice cursive on valuable lessons such as grammar, Latin & Greek roots, Note-taking, letter writing, and practice with composition skills. Not only is the child fine tuning the motor skills necessary for writing clearly in either cursive or printing, there are important concepts being covered at the same time.
Students need more practice with handwriting, period. As a 6th grade teacher, I have students who are struggling with the physical process of writing to such an extent that it is affecting their abilities to express themselves in writing complete and logical thoughts. It seems to be especially profound in boys who struggle with attention issues. Because they need to think about the formation of each letter, they loose their intial thoughts even as they try to complete a sentence. Writing needs to be effortless and legible. (Somewhat in the same way that math facts need to be automatic to progress to more complicated problem solving.) I am not sure I care whether students write in cursive or manuscript but for some students cursive writing is much more fluid and flows more quickly. If a child has severe attention issues the mere process of stopping and restarting a stroke (that is common in manuscript) is enough to derail the process of completing a thought in writing. Most students (and people in general) are not continuously connected to a keyboard. Students need more, not less, handwriting practice!
Agree with anon. The practice of having a student draw the letters in kindy (the 'write a sentence, then illustrate your sentence' kinder assignment is common here), then go to first and learn how to write is a failure. Students are not becoming making the transition to fluent writing. Students neeed more practice and effective instruction.
There is not enough money in the county to provide every child with an electronic wordprocessing device, nor is there enough security. I'd rather just have the traditional workbooks, which of course have been eliminated as being too costly. It's too bad the buyers cannot leverage some of their power to reduce costs.
I agree with anon. I had to make my son write all last summer because he was struggling with the basic function of writing.
They really should forbid all typing of papers until junior high sometime.
Remember, too, this generation doesn't write letters. They text or email. That was another way that many of us got in extra practice.
SusanS
My older son can only write in cursive; go figure. It probably has something to do with having spent 1st and 2nd grade in a Waldorf school, 'nough said. He learned cursive in public school in 3rd grade and for him it was a bell of freedom: finally, the hand could keep up with the brain.
I complained about his subsequent (private) school not continuing to teach it. My complaints fell on deaf ears until the teacher realized that the kids could not read cursive either. No one could read my son's spelling tests (written in cursive) when they exchanged papers to grade. That convinced her to teach it--if only to provide her kids with the skills to be able to read cursive if they encounter it.
I wrote a piece in 2006, Why I Learned to Type, the key point was this:
I'm 44, but I haven't written in cursive in decades. I quite literally no longer can.
Put bluntly, my handwriting sucks. My mother says I should have been a doctor. The computer keyboard didn't kill my longhand. I learned to type because I knew that, in order to communicate via the written word, it was a far better option for me.
Now when I write with a pen or pencil, I block-print. Yes, it's slow, but at least it's intelligible. And I've been doing it for so long now I literally cannot write in cursive anymore.
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