Tag: cursive

Cursive II: A New Hope?

Image via DragonLord878 on Flickr

I’ve been taking notes in my iPad quite a bit lately. It’s the one device that always seems to make it into my bag. Sometimes, I’m typing – but not always.

I’m a doodler from way back, and my notes tend to be all over a page when I use a pad of paper or a physical notebook. I’ve got boxes and arrows and squiggles. If you want an idea of how my brain organizes information, look at my notepad.

Typing notes doesn’t do that for me. It requires lines and linear thinking that just don’t mesh with how my brain wants to organize ideas on a page. That’s not how I hear them and it’s not how I catalog them in my thinking.

So, I’ve been writing. If you’ve ever tried to write on a tablet with your finger, you know that’s an easy way to start hating using a tablet. Unless you’ve razor-sharp, pointy fingers like Gollum, hand writing on a tablet isn’t at all like your, well, handwriting.

Instead of embracing the frustration, I’ve worked my way through a series of styli for tablets and settled on the JotPro. Instead if the foam or rubber tip of other choices in the market, the JotPro uses a tiny plastic disk attached via a ball bearing to help you make your marks. It is the closest I’ve come to something like a pen on the tablet and I like it.

Except.

It makes a sound. I’m a printer by practice, largely owing to my second-class left-handed status. I was the only one in my class with this particular affliction in second grade when we were learning cursive, so I got about a fifth of hue he instruction and it was backwards.

So, I print.

When using a plastic plate on a glass screen, though, this can mean I make some noise. Printing, for me, with the JotPro sounds like I’ve brought some tinkering elf from Santa’s workshop to the meeting, and he’s building a tiny house. It’s a distraction.

About two weeks ago, I switched from printing. I reluctantly started writing in script. It meant the stylus glided across the screen with only intermittent taps. The elf was sent packing. I’ve not regularly used cursive since…I can’t actually remember.

Now, I’m using it whenever I take notes. Slowly, I’m remembering how to connect all the letters. I still pause longer than I’d like when remembering how, exactly, to form the capital “G,” but I’m on my way.

Lately, in many of the conversations I’ve had in our schools around the district’s plans to put iPads in the hands almost every student, there has been much gnashing of teeth about the future of handwriting and cursive instruction. Those lamenting the possible death of cursive speak of it as though it is a piece of our humanity and not a tool developed for a purpose long forgotten.

I haven’t cared. If the goal is communication, I don’t much care the tool so long as messages are effectively sent and received.

These last two weeks have me thinking a little differently. Perhaps cursive has a place in the modern world. Perhaps it is the tool these new tools were accidentally built for (accidentally).

Cursive isn’t inherent to our becoming whatever the better versions of ourselves might be. It’s possible, however, that cursive might find a renewed purpose in helping us interact with the things we make and the capturing of the ideas that surround us.

Things I Know 199 of 365: I won’t be mourning cursive’s passing

It was in second grade that Mrs. Kelly attempted to teach me to write in cursive. By some strange fluke, I was the only left-handed student in the class. I remember sitting at the back of the classroom filling in math worksheets while she led the rest of the class through complex curlicues and how to connect the capital H to the lower-case E.

Later, when Mrs. Kelly had finished the lesson for the others and they were diligently working, she would spend a couple minutes with me.

She made certain I had the basics, but I wouldn’t exactly call it differentiated instruction.

As a result, my handwriting has always endeavored to be, but never quite reached the status of, penmanship.

So, when I read this piece on Indiana’s decision to halt the mandated teaching of cursive in Hoosier schools and this impassioned piece from Vancouver mourning it’s death, I sat open-gobbed for a few moments.

I wasn’t alone.

A little bit of digging showed slews of comments wherever the story turned up. People are feeling some kind of way about Indiana’s decision.

I’d write, “Indiana’s decision to kill cursive,” by my handwriting took care of that long ago.

Because of that, I don’t write in cursive. When I take notes, it’s printed and shorthand and all over the page. It’s nothing that could be contained by the tri-lined paper of elementary school. When I return to it, though, to remind myself what I learned or heard, I know what I meant. If I need to share it, I type it. And, never, do I sit at the keyboard thinking how much better it would be if I were writing a cursive version of anything.

Doug Kennedy, quoted by Cincinnati’s WKRC 12, said. “When you’re born, someone signs your birth certificate. When you’re married, you have to sign your marriage license. When you die, someone’s going to sign your death certificate. All these things are important aspects of your life.”

Sure.

I’m with Kennedy. Those signatures happen.

But they didn’t always.

Did we think they would?

Without cursive, people won’t stop being born, getting married or dying. We’ll just signify it some other way.

Most commonly, those opposed to the optionalization (with no more cursive, it’s a world gone mad and anyone can make up words) question how these poor children will sign their names to documents as they grow older.

I don’t have any other answer to that question than, we’ll figure something out.

And that’ll be fine.

Language is an arbitrary, symbolic devise that moves to fit the needs and tools of the times and cultures in which it is being used.

I love calligraphy. It is an art I have all the more appreciation for because I do not practice it. When communicating, I want my medium to make my message as accessible as possible. Indiana has taken a step toward that objective.

Writing for The Vancouver Sun with a full-throated defense of cursive, Naomi Lakritz had this to say:

There’s one more crucial reason kids need to know how to write longhand.

As any teacher will attest, writing things down helps children remember. Typing at a keyboard does not. There is something about the act of writing that makes information stick.

Sure. It’s true.

We know having kids learn by teaching and doing are even better conduits to building the synaptic relays of memory, so maybe we can cut the lectures requiring them to take the notes Lakritz worries about and have them learn by doing – maybe in an art class.

I’m not worried children won’t be able to read cursive. I’m worried they won’t know how to read.

The two are related, but not interdependent.