I don’t think being unable to communicate fluently in writing without the aid of a computer is any more desirable a state than being unable to do simple arithmetic readily without a calculator. These gadgets should be aids, not crutches. The non-electronic skills need to be there as a backup. On the other hand, US schools have long done an awful job of teaching handwriting, as anyone who tries to read mine will attest. So not teaching it at all might indeed be preferable to wasting time by teaching it incompetently.

I like cursive. Its easier to write faster when you don’t have to pick up the pen as much - I always use cursive. Sure, typing is also easier, but if you’re going to write by hand at all, cursive is more efficient than printing. And there are still subjects where its impossible to type as fast as you can write - like when trying to quickly take notes in a math/science class.

I guess if they need to cut something, cursive isn’t as important as some other skills. But its not true that its useless or that no one uses it after 4th grade.

I haven’t written in cursive in so long that I can’t functionally do it anymore.  My 9th grade typing class has been, throughout my life, perhaps the most useful class I ever took as a child.  If the hours and hours spent teaching me cursive had been spent on something useful -like computer literacy, technical drawing, learning a foreign language, or playing an instrument -it would have been a vast improvement on my education.

Genuine question: are kids today generally allowed to answer essay questions on an exam using a word processor?

If so, how do they solve the cheating problem? Does the school supply “exam laptops” with the wireless functions disabled?

Steve, when you write on paper, do you write in cursive?? This isn’t about not teaching how to write at all, just not how to write in an old fashioned style that nobody can read anyway.

Also, if you teach things like times tables correctly, it shouldn’t be just rote memorization. If you are blindly memorizing your times tables with no thought as to the underlying truth of the numbers involved, you’re doing it wrong.

Spelling I’m more ambivalent about. Its possible to learn spelling along with interesting etymology and linguistics notes, but since human language is arbitrary (unlike math), it does involve a certain amount of memorization no matter what you do. I think its much better to learn spelling by reading a lot of interesting books than by memorizing lists of words out of context.

Really. I was taught cursive and forced to write with it throughout school and I feel that I can write much more quickly and legibly with it. Its useful for students to learn interpretation of writing as well as for developing motor skills at a young age. So I can’t really understand the hate here.

Many people still use cursive on a regular basis in their writing (I do when writing on the board). Teaching but not requiring it means that students can read what others are writing. It doesn’t take up that much extra time in the curriculum.

I can see how cursive is finally going to go by the wayside. I only used to for writing letters, and now that I don’t do much of that anymore, I only use it for greeting cards.

But memorizing certain things early pays off down the road—knowing your times tables sticks with you all through the rest of your school years. Theres no point in having to think though 7x8 every time you encounter it. I feel the same way about vocabulary words and spelling. There’s a lot out there you have to know, and it helps over the long term if you just “know it” early.

“If you’re going to write by hand…”

Why on earth would you do that?  I haven’t written anything longer than a two line note by hand in about, I think, 15 years.  Maybe longer.

Think of what you could do in the time spent torturing children with multiplication tables, spelling tests, and cursive classes.  That time could be spent reading books and doing actual math equations where they’ll learn spelling and dividends through use.  That time could be spent learning a foreign language.  Or learning to type, which will serve them much better than almost any other manual skill of that sort.

I nearly flunked “math” in the 3rd grade because of multiplication tables.  Guess who is really good at them now?  This motherfucker.  That’s because after the 3rd grade, I was really good at math.  By doing actual equations, I eventually learned the multiplication tables I tearfully believed I would never learn.

I still write cursive (signing legal documents and taking notes—it’s faster) and I still have to read cursive because I’m a historian, and when I work with primary documents—especially those written during the 19th century and earlier—almost all were written in cursive. I learned cursive in school, just as I learned typing (on a typewriter) and I can type 140 words a minute on a keyboard; 120 on a typewriter. Keyboard skills, I think, are probably more useful at the moment than cursive skills, but I do use cursive quite a bit, still, and it does make me laugh that I might be able to write notes on paper that nobody can decipher in the future. MUAH HA HA! My own secret code, and it would just be cursive!

DJA, when i was in law school, as far back as five years ago, we did take our exams on laptops with a program that basically shut down the entire computer, save for the software’s own word processor, which operated basically like microsoft word.  so yes, it’s obviously possible to do this and i can only expect it will become the norm in all grade levels at some point.

which is not to say teaching handwriting is not useful, of course, but yes, cursive is completely unnecessary.

Also, what I have written I’ve printed. It turns out that this is still a legitimate way to hand write, and people understand it far better than cursive, which tends to get sloppy over time and lack of use.

Actually, now that I think about it, I can’t really be said to know how to write in cursive.  I can’t even really spell out my name in the sense that you’re supposed to.  I spent hours a week on this “skill” from age 7 or 8 until high school, and as soon as I was allowed to drop it, I literally forgot everything I learned because it was so completely useless to me. 

I wish I’d learned Spanish instead.

I never learned cursive, and I’m 30.  It hasn’t impacted my life at all since my great grandmother died.  (Before that, twice a year I got a card that took me a few minutes to figure out said “Have a happy birthday/christmas, Love Nana”.)

@DJA - my University offers an accessibility service for those who need it - presumably with no internet?  Otherwise, when kids have to write essays or whatever, they print.  Nominally I suppose they could write, I’ve never seen it happen.

Genuine question: are kids today generally allowed to answer essay questions on an exam using a word processor?

I took the comprehensive examination for my masters in English on a computer.

I have no functional opinion on whether or not modern people should know how to write cursive, but one (admittedly minor) effect of not learning it is that it’s a pretty significant handicap for future historians - most western historical documents from the fall of Rome to, say, 1950, were written in “longhand”.

I will repeat what I posted on BlagHag: the fact that all official forms say “please print” for every line except the signature line is a tacit acknowledgment of the utter fucking uselessness of cursive for communicating anything.

Kids aren’t going to stop learning handwriting, but it’s simply a waste of time to emphasize it so much - the level of handwriting proficiency require to fill out a form or jot down a quick note simply isn’t that high. The idea that it’s a necessary “backup” to typing is laughably antiquated. A backup for which circumstances? There are certainly specialized circumstances and professions in which a high level of handwriting is required, but drilling school children for hours and hours on a skill that is essentially irrelevant is the very definition of inefficiency in the name of tradition.

I see Andi@10 beat me to the punch…

@Amanda I write by hand when I take notes in math and science classes, as it’s difficult to manipulate equation editors quickly.

Jill, that strikes me as an argument for teaching shorthand, not cursive.

Also, what I have written I’ve printed. It turns out that this is still a legitimate way to hand write,

I am not going to write a thank you note to my Aunt Mabel in print letters. My signature is my name spelled out in cursive, not a loopy scratch.

The end of the need to handwrite anything lengthy basically ends the use of cursive, but up until relatively recently, it was a cultural norm to expect that personal notes are written in cursive, not print.  Cursive is only dying because typing is so ubiquitous and an accepted mode of communication, outside of birthday cards, and the cultural expectation of handwritten communication in cursive has disappeared as a consequence.

@Amanda Also not everyone is able to afford a laptop to bring to lecture

While I appreciate the sentiment, cursive is not a lost art outside the United States.

I regularly work with a team from India.  They all use cursive writing for note taking, short memos, etc.  I hadn’t seen it for years and it took me a moment to recognize it.  However, if we’re going to work in a global economy, we need to be prepared to communicate in a global economy, and that doesn’t mean attempting to dictate what we want.

Why on earth would you do that?  I haven’t written anything longer than a two line note by hand in about, I think, 15 years.  Maybe longer.

Clearly you aren’t a student in math or science. Yes, one can type math papers beautifully using LaTeX, but you’re writing lines of code that have to compile properly, so it takes a lot longer than typing normal english sentences. I know people who do all their homework in LaTeX but I don’t know anyone who can take real-time notes in it in a class. Everyone still uses paper notebooks. Or, the really tech-savvy ones get tablet PCs where they can write their notes in handwriting with a stylus directly on the computer screen to be saved as a file.

See, that’s one situation where it really makes much more practical sense to write by hand, and to do it quickly, even if you have the money to buy a fancy computer. I’m sure there are other such situations, not to mention the situations where people might need to write something and not have a computer with them or not be able to afford one that they can carry around everywhere.

I’m guessing that all the people here saying they never write by hand any more are in the humanities. Try writing a bunch of equations and diagrams interspersed into your paragraphs and tell me whether its faster to do it with a pencil or to figure out how to typeset the whole thing.

On a related subject, how long until typing classes include typing quickly with your thumbs on a touchscreen phone?

I nearly flunked “math” in the 3rd grade because of multiplication tables.  Guess who is really good at them now?  This motherfucker.  That’s because after the 3rd grade, I was really good at math.  By doing actual equations, I eventually learned the multiplication tables I tearfully believed I would never learn.

For the multiplication tables, I’m not sure who you’re arguing with but I hope its not me, because as I said above, memorizing multiplication tables by rote is NOT the right way to do it - you should be thinking about and understanding what you’re doing. Using them in equations is one way to do that, but ideally it should be done much earlier in an intuitive way.

I teach math, and it is a pain to teach college students who still can’t tell me what 5 times 6 or 1/3+1/3 is. I don’t advocate them memorizing these things by rote, but they do need to *know* them at a deeper level, by learning and understanding them properly, not by memorizing them. If you literally reach for a calculator when someone asks you what 3x5 is, that’s not a good situation. But the solution is not to memorize that on a flashcard, the solution is to think about the numbers involved. The beauty of math is you barely ever really have to memorize anything, if you understand it. Unlike, say, history or french, where no amount of conceptual understanding will produce a fact if you’ve never been presented with it.

  I nearly flunked “math” in the 3rd grade because of multiplication tables.  Guess who is really good at them now?  This motherfucker.  That’s because after the 3rd grade, I was really good at math.  By doing actual equations, I eventually learned the multiplication tables I tearfully believed I would never learn.

I never learned the Multiplication tables in school. I was sick the week they taught them, so I just learned by doing. 35 years later, I am better at doing basic math in my head than my math major father, my engineer sister, and really, any tech major person I know.

I will add, as an agnostic on the subject, that it’s amusing to see how much irrational hate the topic evokes in people, and the nonsense that gets spouted in defense of that hate (“I don’t use it, therefore nobody has any use for it whatsoever!”).

Ack, forgot to add - it really is the same impulse that drives the continued teaching of multiplication tables and all the fussing and moaning over the use of calculators to perform basic arithmetic - and the blaming of said calculators for the difficulty of, say, cashiers making change when the register loses power or whatever. As though arithmetic were the conceptually and intellectually meaningful part of math, rather than the humdrum weight-lifting that it actually is. Here’s reality: before calculators were commonplace, cashiers just gave people the wrong change all the fucking time. And before computers (even more than typewriters) made typing ubiquitous, lots of people had shit handwriting that others struggled to read. These things were taught so heavily because there was no alternative; it’s not like, by magic, everyone was adept at basic arithmetic, or had lovely handwriting, or could read at all, for fuck’s sake.

People refuse to believe it, because it’s DIFFERENT, but technology really has made our lives better in lots of ways, even really simple ones, like making all of us better at the basic arithmetic we have to do every day, to making it easier for us to read what people have to say.

I know! How about making cursive an elective? WOOO! As a historian, I just really like the way it looks, and when I read 19th-century diaries and letters in archives, it’s just kinda cool. But I do understand why it probably isn’t relevant for anything more than signing one’s name these days. I think being versed on a keyboard is a much better skill to have, and I wonder why I still see college students doing the ol’ “hunt and peck” on a keyboard. Learning how to position your fingers on a keyboard for maximum typage efficiency would be a much better class than learning how to write in cursive. Y’all?

#26…  Hate?  Irrational hate?  If some of the comments here are hyperbolic, yours would have to be counted among them.

Also, what I have written I’ve printed. It turns out that this is still a legitimate way to hand write, and people understand it far better than cursive, which tends to get sloppy over time and lack of use.

I just think you’re saying what works for you and insisting it must be best for everyone. I have absolutely no problem with you writing in printing. I don’t think anyone said its not a legitimate way to write. But you’re insisting everyone else must do things exactly like you. Personally, for me, my cursive is easier, faster, and more legible than my printing. I have trouble printing clearly because its tedious and slow and I end up wanting to avoid picking up my pencil to save time.

Like I said, I don’t support forcing people to write in cursive, but I think its good to teach the basics so kids can decide if they like it or not. I have used cursive almost all the time since I was shown how to do it. Never bothered me that some people didn’t. Should I argue that you shouldn’t be taught printing at all because I don’t like it as much as I like cursive? Just accept that different people and different professions like and need different skills, and it doesn’t hurt to learn the basics. That’s what school is for. No one is forcing you to use everything you learned in elementary school every day of you adult life.

Now, what would be cool would be learning something like shorthand. I don’t know that much about how it works, but it sounds like it would be a useful skill, especially if it could be used for math and science (I’m betting it would be useful for the sentences parts and not for the equations parts). I wonder how hard it is to learn to use it fluently? Maybe that’s something I should learn on my own as an adult.

Hmmm.  I’m an agnostic on this. 

It may depend on how your mind works.  For some kids (like me) the process of memorization may enhance learning, whereas for others (like Amanda) the process may just be be useless torment.  But I don’t know how you adjust a curriculum to account for different learning styles.

In my experience, the process of learning multiplication tables helped to me to truly grasp how multiplication works.  If I got stuck on something like 7x8, I could think, “well, 7x7 is 49 and if I add another 7 to that, the number is 56.”  I had a similar experience when I was learning Latin years later—all the endless memorization of how conjugations and declensions helped me to understand the grammatical structure of Latin and to appreciate more fully how English is structured. 

On spelling, though, I am more in Amanda’s camp.  Memorizing spelling words won’t help a student grasp any grand principles since spelling is so arbitrary in our language.  It would certainly be preferable if kids simply learned spelling by reading avidly. I fear, however, that most kids, at least in America, won’t read enough to learn spelling this way.  But maybe we just amp up the required reading in schools??? 

Cursive is also tedious, but it is useful to have a fast, easy way to communicate in writing when a computer is unavailable or inconvenient for some reason. I’d hate to have to start printing on sticky notes I leave for people because the kids can’t read cursive anymore. 

Yeah, I guess I come out in favor of the old ways!

I’m guessing that all the people here saying they never write by hand any more are in the humanities.

Wrong. On the other hand, I’m not a mathematician or engineer, I’m an evolutionary biologist (and not a theoretician, I hasten to add), and there’s a point there.

But, see my comment #17 on there still be specialized cases where these are important skills. Again, the fact that there is a use for it does not mean that it’s efficient to spend many hours teaching young children how to handwrite because a few of them may need to write down equations in advanced college math classes.

Composing on a keyboard and taking notes on a keyboard are skills I had to teach myself as an adult.  I still prefer the clarity of hand-written notes but the typed ones are searchable so I switched.

It would be difficult to impossible to do notes on a topic with a lot of symbols or diagrams, though.  There are some programs that allow that to be done on a computer but it’s hard to find a good one, and you also need a stylus device to enter the symbols and diagrams. 

I’ve heard that drawings can be done with fingers on a touch-screen but I don’t know how.  Can anyone explain how you draw with your fingers?  It’s hard enough for me to type on the itty bitty touch-screen keyboards.

I was forced to write in cursive for years and it never, never got faster than my printing and always looked worse. Of course, I was a little embarrassed anyway for being a girl with handwriting that wasn’t the most gorgeous. Then I went to design school and they had us do exercises in block printing and now I usually eschew lower case letters all together because I’ve found it to be the best balance of speed, legibility and attractiveness. (These exercises also improved my regular print, but not enough.) And being a grown up now no one can give me shit about it. I’m not saying it’s for everyone, but it’s great for me. I just make the letters that would be capital slightly bigger than the other ones and it reads fine.

Shorthand is something I would have found more useful.  In the workplace and while taking classes, I still handwrite extensively. I write my notes mostly in print, of course, but handwriting is something I still do rather often.

Mastering print also takes memorization and repetitive rote learning as well. No one is complying about the necessity of doing that, right? Rote learning is unfashionable because it’s boring for teachers to teach and isn’t particularly fun to learn. But not everything can be fun.

I’m glad to see cursive go.  I have literally not used it a single time since 7th grade when we forced to use it for homework assignments.  Typing is far, far more useful and will also have the benefit of making the internet a less annoying place for adults because more users will be proficient in typing.

Yet I’m sure that people will whine about this change like it’s the end of the world, and think they’re so original for being crotchety about change.

I also have to admit that rote memorization is the worst possible way to learn anything.  I’m a chemist and I never memorized the periodic table.  The elements that I deal with frequently have become part of my memory just through common use.  As for the rest, I can consult a periodic table if I need to know anything about them.  All throughout high school and even college, all the other students made such a big deal about memorizing equations.  I preferred understanding the physical situation and then coming up with an equation to fit it.  IMO, there’s way too much emphasis on memorization in our education system and not enough understanding concepts.

Also, I think it’s completely fucking stupid to say that we should rely on typing because “what if there’s no computer around?”  If someone said that we should learn to print or write cursive because then we’ll be helpless when there’s no pen or pencil (or sharp object to draw blood from your finger) they would rightfully be laughed at.  This isn’t the only case where I see this argument.  I see it constantly in regards to technology that we shouldn’t learn to use a tool because some day that tool may be unavailable to us.

@bananacat But pens and pencils aren’t prohibitively expensive for large sections of the population in the West alone, let alone the Global South, like portable computers are.

A little OT, but this is an example of something wonderful done with pens that probably couldn’t be done on a computer:  http://vihart.com/doodling/

Y’all are quite middle-class and Western-minded I think. It’s possible that the price of portable electronics might go down enough that larger segments of the third-world can access them (witness Ghana; much of their population communicates by those pay-and-talk cells because they’re cheaper than landlines), but I doubt that they’ll ever be so universal that you can assume that all everyone needs to learn is typing.

Am I one of the few who will defend learning multiplication tables? 

I’m not saying that math should be as boring as possible, but even in Amanda’s case, she’s learned the multiplication tables, just inadvertently instead of explicitly. 

If you’re going to do math without the aid of a calculator (and it can be necessary sometimes), sooner or later you’ll end up needing to know what 3*5 or 7*8 or 5*9 are, for example.  Addition and subtraction are easier to handle without memorization (although there is still memorization involved), but multiplication and division (which relies heavily on multiplication when done by hand) pretty much require memorized multiplication tables.  Sorry.  Perhaps the teaching methods could be improved, but that does not invalidate the basic need — if you are going to function in a world where math sometimes must be done in the absence of a calculator of some sort…

(And, yes, I do realize that if I have a computer or even a cell phone in front of me I have access to a calculator any time I need it…)

Regarding cursive writing, I can, with great difficulty, still do it, although for all practical purposes I never use it any more.  I’ve been writing computer programs since I was a teenager, and since cursive is even more unreadable when used to write programming code on paper, I had a ready excuse to drop something I didn’t like anyway.

OTOH, my mother has always had beautiful, readable, cursive handwriting, which probably made me extra embarrassed by my own chicken scratchings and increased my loathing of cursive.

As far as spelling and grammar, come on, you at least have to be in the neighborhood of correct, or people will flat out be unable to understand what you’ve written.  I will readily admit that spell-checkers are a boon to mankind, but I’m much less confident in grammar checkers.  I find myself in frequent disagreements with the grammar checker in MS Word on things that I absolutely know I’ve done correctly.  Until true AI is an actuality, I’m afraid that grammar is still something that will take human eyes and knowledge to get correct…

@bananacat But pens and pencils aren’t prohibitively expensive for large sections of the population in the West alone, let alone the Global South, like portable computers are.

Pens, pencils, and especially paper were prohibitively expensive for large sections of the population for a very long time and it limited literacy.  The solution wasn’t to stop striving for literacy, but instead to make those things more accessible and affordable.  Also, using computers doesn’t mean that we will all have to abandon printing immediately.

But there are still large populations of the world that can’t afford cars, and of course that doesn’t mean we should all stop using cars for transportation.  Same deal with modern cooking surfaces.  Nobody ever says that I shouldn’t learn to cook on a stove top because some day I might have to cook over an open fire and I won’t know how to.  Yet there are plenty of people who don’t have stoves.

Tyro, I think that print is actually much, much simpler to learn than cursive, mostly because it looks like the enormous majority of letters that we see in our everyday lives. The example is absolutely everywhere; there is essentially nothing to “learn,” in the sense of memorizing letter forms, with print writing. It’s all coordination and muscle memory.

The thing about learning cursive in the third grade was that I already knew how to print, in no small part through sheer osmosis. What sucked about cursive was essentially having to relearn the alphabet with radically different, sometimes entirely new symbols (like the cursive uppercase G - which so happens to be the first letter of my name). That’s a hard thing to do when you’re nine years old. It’s also incredibly frustrating to have to switch to this new system when you have a nine year-old’s questionable fine motor skills, and your penmanship with the old, familiar symbols is still abominable - and then I have to learn this new thing, and it’s supposed to be better? Yeah, right.

I have no problem with having students do plenty of handwritten classwork so that they have the opportunity to at least get lots of practice with the mechanics of writing, which is something that really takes a very long time to master. But cursive, in my view, is a really disruptive thing to teach most kids.

Y’all are quite middle-class and Western-minded I think. It’s possible that the price of portable electronics might go down enough that larger segments of the third-world can access them (witness Ghana; much of their population communicates by those pay-and-talk cells because they’re cheaper than landlines), but I doubt that they’ll ever be so universal that you can assume that all everyone needs to learn is typing.

Who here said that everyone everywhere in the entire world should immediately abandon all forms of hand printing and writing and switch to keyboarding?  This is about a school in Indiana where most or all students have access to computers and also to standard printing.  Are you saying that these kids should learn cursive because someday they might have to communicate with people in a community that doesn’t have computers?  For the few students that end up doing that, they can still use printing (if that place even uses English) or they can learn cursive while they are learning everything else they need to survive in that culture.

I think you’re arguing against a straw man instead of what is actually happening.

“But there are still large populations of the world that can’t afford cars, and of course that doesn’t mean we should all stop using cars for transportation.”

I didn’t argue that people shouldn’t learn to type or stop using computers. I ask them to check their privilege and not assume that EVERYONE can access those things. One of my pet peeves is actually cities that are designed so as to be car dependent, as I can’t afford a car.

I write on a computer. I also write with a pen, when I don’t have access to a computer. Not everyone has enough money to buy a desktop *and* a laptop.

That, and I like writing with a good pen.

They have schools in Indiana?

I write in cursive every single day. It’s much faster than printing and the Nuns really beat that nice Palmer method of writing into me at a young age.  I am a personal assistant/bookkeeper and I’m constantly writing notes to my boss, vendors, and my co-workers. I also write to my grandmother regularly because it makes her happy and I send handwritten thank you notes to everyone that deserves one.  Everyday I find loads of uses to write. It kind of seems to be a loss not to teach people how to do it anymore. Almost like one of those old sci-fi stories: ‘if only we could read this archaic reading then we could save the world from doom’. You know?

I think learning cursive or at least to print legibly is important. Also, as others, have mentioned knowing how to read cursive is important for primary source research for most historians. On the other hand, I remember that my school forced us to write in cursive from 3rd to 6th grade. I grew so annoyed of having to write in cursive, that as soon as I was allowed to write however I wanted, I printed everything, except my signature. Now my printing is kind of a mix of print and cursive, mainly a leftover from rapidly taking notes in college.

I think learning how to type is a completely separate issue. Children should be taught to be proficient in both. You aren’t always going to have a computer around, especially people who can’t afford it. Plus, I know a lot of people that write only in cursive. Are the kids going to be able to understand that?

I’m happy to see cursive go: my grandfather (who died in the mid ‘70s) could produce a beautiful Copperplate hand, that he’d learned in school before the turn of the 19th century. That, at least, had beauty going for it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperplate_script

But despite years of cursive turn, my handwriting is still appalling. However, my notetaking is fast, fast. Took two years of typing in high school, but avoided shorthand, because those two courses combined destined a woman to secretarial work back then. (My brother, was a boy, so didn’t take typing: 58 and he’s suffering through two finger typing papers for college courses he’s taking now.)

I can understand dropping cursive, but dropping spelling and times tables when most school libraries have been gutted, makes as little sense as the lack of punctuation taught in many schools, apparently, sometime starting in the ‘80s for freeflowing “creative” writing.

I’ve had to deal with too many young adults who not only have no idea of colon or semicolon, but are flummoxed by apostrophes, comma placement, and the good ole period.

Please don’t encourage the school system to dumb down further, ‘cause they’ll do it all in the cause of cutting costs.

To whoever asked about the using a word processor in K-12 schools:

The younger brother of a friend of mine is severely dyslexic, enough to qualify as a disability.  For his standardized tests he was provided with a stripped-down laptop that he could dictate to.  The laptop would only operate with a word processer (like another commenter described).  Although Travis was a computer genius, he wouldn’t have had enough time to figure out how to get past the block, and he was monitored so he couldn’t try.

A couple of people mentioned how expensive laptops are: we’re talking about systems that are provided by and owned by the school, perhaps only for specific tasks, and not the school requiring that every student buy their own.  So everyone freaking out about economic inequality just calm the hell down.

And specifically on Amanda’s comment about shorthand: equations, like the kind I had to take down in notes in my engineering classes, are already a form of shorthand. You can’t shorten them further and you can’t type them quickly.  It just can’t be done.  So I’m all for everyone needing some skill in writing.  But cursive, yeah, it can go.

Because the tiny percentage of the population that is made up of historians isn’t enough of a justification for wasting 99.93% (guessing) of students’ time.

I write in cursive still; in fact, about 90+% of my notes are written in cursive, even when I had access to a laptop computer (since about 2004 or so). I might type notes on a computer if I’m reading something, but I definitely prefer to write notes in cursive if I’m listening to a lecture or a talk. I find that I think about what’s being said and condense it much better when I’m writing by hand then when I type. But that’s just my style and I’m sure it works differently for other people. On top of that, I’m an historian, and my primary sources in archives mostly date to the late 18th and early 19th century, so knowing cursive definitely helps there.

I could see de-emphasizing cursive writing, in favor of more up-to-date skills, but I’m not sure I’d be for abandoning it altogether. If that did happen, though, I wouldn’t see it as a tragedy.

There have to be other “useless” or “obsolete” skills that elementary schools teach nowadays that we could get rid of.  Think of it as a way to balance the budget.  For example, who needs history?  That’s just the past, and it isn’t as if it’s going to have anything to do with the future.  And team handball?  Who the fuck plays that outside of Liberty High School, circa 1978?  So much of science we don’t need, what with Wikipedia, and all.

I say, do away with everything that they teach!  Although I did learn something helping my children with their religion homework (who knew that I didn’t know the Story of Christmas?).  Religion, that we should keep.  Everything else, good riddance to bad rubbish!

“It kind of seems to be a loss not to teach people how to do it anymore. Almost like one of those old sci-fi stories: ‘if only we could read this archaic reading then we could save the world from doom’. You know?”

...and I think that is ultimately the point.  We still have people people who can read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and Sumerian cuneiform, and Aztec glyphs.  Cursive writing, in the US at least, may be going out of style, but there will always be people who want to specialize in such obscure knowledge.

It may be sad when some technique or specialized knowledge falls into disuse, but it’s kind of inevitable.

(When is the last time you used a slide-rule to quickly multiply two large numbers?  When is the last time you had to solder-together your own radio or fix the carburetor on your car?  When is the last time you had to calm down the skittish horse that was pulling your carriage?  Or navigate the ship you’re using to get to the New World by using the stars and a compass?  Etc., etc., etc.  Specialized knowledge disappears all the time, just as it is created all the time to address new situations or technologies…)

@bananacat
My argument about the third world is more akin to James at 23. Global economy, global communication.  We should be making more efforts to reach out, rather than making hurdles for people to come to us. In the case of Indiana, I’m also thinking of all the times I loaned out my laptop to friends who were too poor to afford them in university, as the profs more and more required them for schoolwork. I am disgusted at all the aspects of education, which is supposedly the bootstrap-y road out of poverty, that throw up barriers to keep poor people from succeeding. I want poor people to have more access to higher learning, and I want them to have learned cursive so they can take notes fast enough to keep up with lecture.

Amanda, you’re a genius!  You knew that the comments would be quickly filled with crotchety “traditionalists” that insist this is the beginning of the Apocalypse and self-absorbed people tsk-tsking about “what is the world coming to?!!!1!1”

If you get paid by page view by your advertisers, you’ll make tons with this blog post alone.

I still hand write stuff once and again. At 90WPM, I can type faster than I can write either print or cursive, but when I’m writing in a notebook (because I’m folksy and given to bouts of sentiment), I do that in cursive because it’s faster. But my handwriting is very neat and legible—I can even use the handwriting recognition on my win7 tablet and it doesn’t translate “beat up martin” to “eat up martha.”

My biggest beef right now with tablets is that they don’t understand that people might need to take notes in multiple ways. For example, I am a database developer. When I’m sitting at a client’s feature planning meeting, taking down notes about the system I’m going to develop, the majority of the notes will be words-only, but then I might have to sketch up a diagram of the data model, or a rough-idea of how they want their screens to look as they’re describing shit to me. I can see also needing this if I’m sitting in a chemistry lecture where I might need to sketch up a presented molecule, or any other science where there is theory and then application that requires illustration. I searched in vain for a tablet that would actually allow me to do this—but all the tablets I’ve seen are still operating on the “supersized smartphone” principle instead of the “open page” principle—the want you to be able to enter words, and there might be a sketch program in the background, but having full MS OneNote capabilities seems to be something they can’t fathom.

And when I try to explain this gripe, instead of people saying “hey, yeah—it might be nice to be able to write down mixed-media notes on your tablet,” I get weird shit—like people declaring that our small business needs to haul smartboards to client sites so that information can be shared up collaboratively and then compiled by the project manager’s assistant because no one should take personal notes anymore, or that taking a shitty, low-contrast phone photo of a network setup hastily drawn on a whiteboard is sufficient for all.

There have to be other “useless” or “obsolete” skills that elementary schools teach nowadays that we could get rid of. 

I disagree! How can you possibly call yourself “educated” if you don’t know Latin and aren’t familiar with the extensive literature written in medieval French? Not only that, but you can’t possibly claim to have a firm grounding in chemistry unless you are knowledgeable in German. Also, I insist that all my students learn how to use an abacus and I will occasionally allow the use of an adding machine for certain calculations.

People using “I have a very narrow need that only 1% of the population, if that, has for cursive, therefore kids should learn it on the very narrow chance that my very narrow needs won’t disappear or be replaced by something else” are the funniest.

Iam, I personally think the world went to hell when kids stopped learning Latin.  And why do young people not have to learn woodworking and horse shoeing anymore?  Just because you don’t use it DOESN’T MEAN YOU WHIPPERSNAPPERS GET TO JUST GET AWAY WITH NOT LEARNING IT.  If we had to suffer, so do you.  Why?  Because.

That you had to do something as a kid really doesn’t mean it was necessary.  Though I see how people get confused. This comes up in the spanking debate and the circumcision debate.  It happened to me, and making sure I feel like every part of my life is perfect is more important than treating kids with decency and respect.

one (admittedly minor) effect of not learning it is that it’s a pretty significant handicap for future historians - most western historical documents from the fall of Rome to, say, 1950, were written in “longhand”.

That’s not really going to be an effect at all, given how radically handwriting has changed over the centuries.  When I was in grad school, my friends who studied medieval and renaissance literature already had to take special courses in…what’s it called again…oh, I forget the name of the subject…to learn how to read things like secretary hand.  Future historians and English scholars can just take classes like they already do.

I’m a fan of dumping cursive.  My handwriting sucks, and interestingly, it sucks in exactly the same way as my uncle’s and cousin’s handwriting sucks, even though I grew up 1500 miles away from them.  It’s a skill that’s really on its way to becoming obsolete.  I mean, I’ve never learned how to use a slide rule, either.

I do think there’s something to be said for teaching spelling and multiplication tables, though.  In an ideal world, yes, people would learn spelling through osmosis by reading lots and lots of books.  But I just don’t see that happening for the majority of people.  The majority of people do not spend their free time reading lots and lots of books, and the amount of time in elementary school devoted to studying spelling is not so much, as I recall, that forcing kids to read during it would make up for that.  Similarly, being able to do multiplication in your head is probably one of the two most useful skills I picked up in elementary school.  I can figure out tip very easily; I can estimate the cost of things while grocery shopping much more easily and figure out which item is the better deal.  I didn’t enjoy learning my multiplication tables, far from it, but since when is life a non-stop cavalcade of pleasure?  It was worth doing and I use them every day, more or less.

The only time I use longhand is when I’m doing first drafts of creative writing.  Throughout college and grad school, I took notes in print, because my handwriting is so bad that even I have trouble reading it.

I’m not impressed, but I figure I’ve well established my tendencies toward Ludditism already.

I’m just sorry I didn’t get to spend more time learning to use a slide rule - I only got it once, the last year it was taught, and the following year the curriculum was changed and it was assumed that everyone was going to have access to a simple pocket calculator.  But slide rules - for all their obsolescence - have one thing that electronic calculators do not: they’re physical things that mechanically work, and you can touch the relationship between this scale and that scale in a way that is totally gone when you can just plug numbers into a black-box and an answer comes out.

I think there’s an analogy with handwriting systems, but I have to get offline for a bit and might be back later for further poking at this with a stick.

Everyone still uses paper notebooks.

I’ll bet 75% of the print.

Mark@46 FTW!

James, I’m inclined to argue that people in India dealing with US clients should stop using cursive or that people who deal with India should brush up on their cursive rather than claim that everyone should learn cursive because of the slight possibility they might end up working with somebody from India who maintains quaint, archaic habits. Especially 20 years from now, what are the odds they are going to deal with someone who still communicates business correspondence in cursive?

When I was in grad school, my friends who studied medieval and renaissance literature already had to take special courses in…what’s it called again…oh, I forget the name of the subject…to learn how to read things like secretary hand.

Paleography.

Cursive is faster than printing, because you rarely lift your pen from the page. 

Keyboarding is dramatically faster than cursive, especially if you can touch type.  Keyboarding should be taught in schools as well as penmanship.  It just makes life easier.

So does having your lower addition and multiplication tables memorized.  And your squares, if you continue in math.  It’s absolutely better to teach little kids certain useful things by rote because their little brains are totally designed for memorization.  Forget it later, if you don’t use it.

Rote has it’s place.  It’s one reason learning a foreign language is easier the younger you are.  Not only does it enter a different part of your brain, but the sheer load of memorizing vocab is easier when you are younger.  I have a facility for languages, but by the time I was 19 and took Russian, I just did not have the ability to sit there with flashcards like I did when i was 12.  The conjugate their NOUNS as well as verbs, so every single new word was actually 6 words.

Gah.  I wanted to LEARN and think with different parts of my brain. 

Seriously, we should teach all our grade school kids things like the names of all the bones in the body and the periodic table and anything else that rote makes easier.  It’s really silly to try to make 22 year olds memorize so much shit, when an 8 year old brain is geared for it.

As for current schools?  Not only are most of them STILL not bothering to teach foreign languages early, as we know is best, but they don’t teach handwriting at all except in OT or PT.  Kindergarten is where they teach reading now, and they use Denelian printing, which is close to cursive anyway.

I’m making my kids use the iPad for flash cards and handwriting and French this summer.  The second grader needs to memorize this shit, b/c I’m tired of helping her with the basic algebra and geometry in her math classes while she’s counting on her fingers.  4 + 7 = 11!  If she just *knew* the answer, then the higher functions would be easier to do. and concentrate on.

Reading cursive as taught in US schools in the second half of the C20 is not synonymous with being able to read historical documents of all of western civilization. Not least because every country has had its own scripts - knowledge of modern cursive is not much use when reading Elizabeth Secretary hand, nor German black letter*. Being British, I have never learnt to read or write US-style cursive. However I can write a swift joined-up italic hand, and I have no problem reading a photo of the original US Constitution. I did have to learn Secretary hand to read C16 manuscripts, but it was pretty easy to do so, and only needs doing by those who have both time and interest.

Children need to learn useful skills - being able to write rapidly and legibily is definitely not obsolete for us all, and it is best learnt youngish. But that’s not the same as demanding all children learn one particularly culturally popular style.

*The loss of common knowledge of that has caused problems, but I’m not aware that cursive is used as the main print medium in the USA.

Well, I can’t really argue about cursive.  But I have to differ regarding multiplication tables and spelling tests, at least to a certain extent.  If you can tell me definitively that learning multiplication sans tables works for everybody equally well, then fine.  But tables work for a good part of the population. 

When I was working on multiplication with my daughter, I tried to get her to learn the patterns and the underlying methods.  Didn’t work.  She just didn’t get it.  We started using tables, which she didn’t seem to mind.  Over the course of a few weeks, she learned the tables and the underlying patterns came to her organically.  So yeah, tables: bad for some, good for others.

And spelling?  English is so fucked up that I don’t see another way of doing it, at least for the purpose of kick-starting the whole thing.  But hey, I’m not a professional, so if there’s a better way for everybody then let’s get it in schools.

Similarly, being able to do multiplication in your head is probably one of the two most useful skills I picked up in elementary school.  I can figure out tip very easily; I can estimate the cost of things while grocery shopping much more easily and figure out which item is the better deal.

These are all great skills to have, but I disagree with your premise that rote memorization is a good way to acquire these skills.  In 4th grade we had these times multiplication table tests where everyone in the class would compete against each other.  I never won and I was always mediocre.  There was a boy, Zach, who was almost always the fastest to finish.  Fast forward a few years to algebra, and Zach is the one using a calculator for trivial facts and I was the one who could do simple multiplication in my head.  I never got good at multiplication through memorization, but when it means something, I can figure it out in a snap.  5*12 doesn’t mean anything, but 5 feet times 12 inches is very clearly 60 inches.  Or 36/24 doesn’t even catch my interest, but 36 hours dived by 24 hours is obviously one and a half days.

I used to babysit A LOT in high school and college for money.  It’s amazingly easy to teach arithmetic to preschoolers if you don’t call it division or multiplication.  Pretty much as soon as they can count, they can do arithmetic, and surprisingly, division is the easiest to learn.  I just find 10 or 12 toys and ask the child to divide them between the two of us, or into three groups if I include a pet.  The first time I’ll walk them through actually sorting into piles and counting.  The second time they’ll do it themselves.  By the fourth or fifth time they will shout out the answers before I even finish explaining the question.  And these are mostly just average kids, not geniuses or anything.  If you make the numbers mean something, they’ll pick it up instantly.  But if you just tell them 12/3=4 and 10/2=5, then they have to memorize a bunch of different facts that don’t even mean anything.

Laurie @31: I don’t think there’s an “all things are equal” aspect when some kids are being tormented.  Tormenting a kid at school is a way of saying, “Put your head down and get through this torment,” not, “Learning is exciting and something you want to do!”  It discourages creativity.  I was a sickly kid and part of me loved it, because when I was allowed to finish the work on my own at home while sick, I was able to go about it my way and I a) did a better job and b) enjoyed it more.

Laurie @31: I don’t think there’s an “all things are equal” aspect when some kids are being tormented.  Tormenting a kid at school is a way of saying, “Put your head down and get through this torment,” not, “Learning is exciting and something you want to do!”  It discourages creativity.  I was a sickly kid and part of me loved it, because when I was allowed to finish the work on my own at home while sick, I was able to go about it my way and I a) did a better job and b) enjoyed it more.

@Tyro, #57.  I had three years of Latin in (public) high school in the ‘70s’.  Probably the best thing I took in high school.

Git offa mah lawn!!!

Personally it’s a total PITA to write my name in the snow without using cursive.

As far as to what’s taught in school, we all know schools themselves are obsolete.  That’s why we’re well on the way to eliminating them in the US.

Is Iam138 luke123’s new login?

I doubly ditto calls to end compulsory cursive in elementary. Like many here, I went through a year (years?) of cursive and have forgotten it, having no use for it since. With algebra, there’s at least the “teach your brain how to think” line going for it. Just make it an elective, and replace it with some compulsory foreign language study.

I’m just sorry I didn’t get to spend more time learning to use a slide rule - I only got it once, the last year it was taught, and the following year the curriculum was changed and it was assumed that everyone was going to have access to a simple pocket calculator.

Meh, if your teachers are any good then they’ll design tests that can’t be easily solved with a calculator.  I went to school for chemical engineering, which means 3 courses of calculus, 2 of differential equations, linear algebra, and at least a dozen science/engineering courses that relied on those math courses.  I had a graphing calculator somewhere but never used it because it ate up batteries.  I took my solar-powered scientific calculator that cost me all of ten dollars, and plenty of times I even forgot to bring that.  And I did perfectly fine, often getting the highest score on tests.

See, my teachers cared about understanding concepts.  They take for granted that a student at that level can use a calculator.  They had no intention of testing our ability to punch in numbers.  Plenty of tests were purely symbolic, and for the vast majority I never used actual numbers until the very end anyway.  In the cases where I forgot to bring a calculator, if I did the problem entirely right but didn’t put a number at the end, the teacher would still give me full credit.  I could usually do a rough estimate in my head, which is helpful to check the plausibility of my answer (if I get a flow rate of 0.0001L/hr for a giant pump, then I know I screwed up somewhere).

If not having a calculator is enough to make or break you on a test, then either the teacher has designed the test poorly, or you don’t actually understand the concepts and you are relying too much on plug-and-chug.  If it’s the “real world” then either you’ll have a calculator available, or not having a calculator is the least of your worries because you’re stranded on a desert island.

Okay.  Yes, I am a fogey about cursive, even with my traumatic experiences learning it and my poor penmanship.  But I do think it should be taught, because I think it is still useful.

Amanda, I don’t understand your opposition to multiplication tables.  You do have to know them in order to be able to multiply without a calculator at efficient speed. 

Also, instead of spelling, I’d rather sacrifice nearly all of the bullshit that schools teach as “grammar.”

In this book I’m reading by Bill James, he has an amusing digression about how the two things his teachers were always on him about to stop doing were a) writing humorous notes to his classmates and b) wasting time doing elaborate mathematical crap with the scores in sports pages.  They told him to stop wasting his time and instead do important things, no doubt such as learn cursive.

Guess what two things he did in high school that had the most impact on his future career?

1) Writing humorous notes to his classmates
2) Impenetrable statistical shit that I don’t really understand but he basically taught himself through his “unimportant” hobby

He’s a writer and the inventor of the sabermetrics system in baseball.  He’s really good at both.

I think one thing we really need to do is let go of the idea that something is “educational” because the children we’re foisting it on hate it, and we need to think more broadly.

i write mostly in cursive because it’s FASTER. i don’t get the appeal of printing. that shit takes too long!

And the result is that you’ve spent one less second to produce writing that you’ll just have to go back and re-write since nobody else will be able to read cursive; it’s not only useless for real-world note taking, it’s actually disallowed in situations where you’re writing by hand in order to fulfill a documentary requirement, such as in the lab, due to the difficulty and ambiguity it produces.

I suppose it depends on the audience for the notes; as I mentioned above, most of my notes are in cursive, but then again, I’m the only one who reads them.  Although I did work in 3 different labs and regularly took notes in cursive, and no one ever indicated to me that it wasn’t allowed.

Again, I’ve found cursive useful in certain situations, but I also understand that curricula do change with the times.

My cursive is lousy, but it’s not necessarily worse than my printing—both suffer from light pen pressure & haphazard sizing.  And I can’t even claim mad typing skilz, either.  Still, I’m kinda weird in that I like to see others’ handwriting, even if I stop short of believing in graphology… sometimes the resemblances between relatives’ and friends’ penmanship do seem to link up with character similarities.  Anyway, that’s my completely non-practical reason for liking cursive, joined by the more practical one of individual signatures still being pretty good identifiers.  Just FTR, handwriting class gave me the first C I ever had, so grading it for any length of time doesn’t appeal to me.

My most legible writing is actually a mostly-linked printing, so I find this method intriguing and practical, while still allowing room for both improvement and distinction:

http://www.bfhhandwriting.com/

I can’t say that memorizing times tables is “torment.” especially when you’re young and so much stuff is about memorization. But then again, like most little kids, I memorized all the different types of dinosaurs, too.

My father used to quiz me on my times tables. He also bad this thing with making sure I remembered all the unit conversions of length and volume. Good times.

I haven’t written in cursive in so long that I can’t functionally do it anymore.  My 9th grade typing class has been, throughout my life, perhaps the most useful class I ever took as a child.

Same here.  But, god help me, I’ve got a three hour exam coming up which will have to be taken by hand.  I pity the poor bastard who has to read my handwriting.

Oh, and Eileen - you’re now an old fogey.  The typewriter is officially a dead technology - the last mechanical typewriter factory closed down in 2010.

That age-old writing method you might never have used since fourth grade will no longer be taught in Indiana schools come fall, thanks to a memo from school officials.

...and while we are at it, we should be teaching kids D’Nealian instead of block printing.

(I know ppl complain that the tails add an extra step, but the kindergarten teachers I know say that the kids naturally make the tail anyway, and the hard part is getting them to stop.)

Regarding what we here in America call cursive being faster:

Actually, it’s not.  Not exactly.  Not for most people anyway.  From what I understand, it was developed as much because of the ink and pens being used than because of speed.  With modern pens, what is actually faster is whatever random, personal type of printing or cursive - which is actually usually neither but instead something between actual cursive and block printing -  works best for you.

Yes, plain block printing is s-l-o-w,  but it takes a lot of practice (time) to keep cursive legible, which is why most adults use something that isn’t quite either.

(Also, for the record - I know schools that do this, and they don’t stop teach what cursive is or how to do it, they just make it a month or so long lesson instead of a several year lesson, and change the focus from expecting kids to do it all the time to giving them an option, exposure, and the knowledge of how to sign their name.)

35 years later, I am better at doing basic math in my head than my math major father, my engineer sister, and really, any tech major person I know.

Gawd, I’ve had people look at me as if I’m some sort of savant for doing simple long division in my head.

Who’s butthurt?  I just can’t understand preferring print (now, THAT takes me forever) over cursive (the pen never has to leave the page).  I wasn’t a stellar student, but I learned cursive writing, the multiplication tables, typing, and a couple of foreign languages in my K-12 career.  There’s room for everything, I swear.

Thanks, Linnaeus!

That’s fine, bananacat, but the fact that that’s the way your brain is wired doesn’t mean that it’s a universal truth.  There’s an anecdote right above your post, in fact, in support of tables and rote memorization.  I like abstract thinking.  I always have.  I always did better on solving equations than on those horrible test questions about one train leaving from New York at 75 miles an hour and one train leaving from Chicago at 85 miles an hour and stopping every 2 and a half hours for 30 minutes or whatever.  10/2 meant something to me; imaginary trains did not (let alone imaginary pits that needed to be filled with gravel).

I don’t think there’s an “all things are equal” aspect when some kids are being tormented.  Tormenting a kid at school is a way of saying, “Put your head down and get through this torment,”

Why do you assume that learning spelling and multiplication tables is automatically “torment”?  I liked learning spelling.  I didn’t enjoy learning multiplication tables, but calling it “torment” is some pretty major exaggeration.  I mean, I disliked and saw no point to memorizing all the state capitols, which I have never used since third grade, but torment?  No.  Just annoying.  I’m fine with taking cursive out of schools, but not because it’s torment.  I didn’t find it tormenting, just annoying and something I couldn’t do well.  I just think it’s an obsolete skill. 

Guess what two things he did in high school that had the most impact on his future career?

That’s nice for him, but even granting the implicit idea that the point of education is to prepare you for your future career, which is an argument I object to, how does that work for the vast majority of teenagers who pass notes in class and mess around with baseball stats?  Surely they’re not all going to grow up to be Bill James. 

As for getting rid of grammar study—first of all, where I am, they’ve already done that.  Grammar is not taught in either elementary or high school (at least in public school).  And the result?  The result is that the majority of 18-22-year-olds I teach cannot string a coherent sentence together.

I only write in cursive and I’m pretty young. Well, actually my capitals are print. My lowers are either cursive or small capitals.

If everyone stops writing cursive I’ll just be the last guy writing that weird way that might almost be Arabic but isn’t.

Personally it’s a total PITA to write my name in the snow without using cursive.

Good for the pubococcygeus muscles though.  Dotting the “i"s is particularly tricky.

“But I prefer cursive!” is exactly the kind of silliness I’m talking about.  It assumes that you or your preferences are being attacked, and they’re not.  Not teaching kids cursive in no way, shape or form prevents you from using it.

EG, they are automatically torment for some kids. I question whether or not it’s wise to discourage half the kids from learning because the other half are okay with it.

I’m kind of confused about this spelling thing. Amanda, were you taught via the Whole Word method? It’s the one where this is the word, this is the definition, this is how it’s spelled, memorize it. That’s not a dominant teaching method but comes back in every couple of years when parents start freaking out that their kids can’t spell or define words correctly. Then they realize that kids have a harder time learning new words and start pushing phonetics again. I always felt phonetics was better for actually enabling kids to read; you don’t get stuck on words you don’t know.

Also, instead of spelling, I’d rather sacrifice nearly all of the bullshit that schools teach as “grammar.”

A million terrible facebook posts are shouting “huzzah!” or more likely “hzah!”

Also, the point of the story EG is that what you need as an adult is often thwarted by an educational system that’s built more on “that’s how I did it and dammit, kids today have to suffer what I did” than finding the individual needs and desires of the individual child and encouraging them to bloom.  A kid who enjoys writing or reading extensively is usually discouraged because it’s disruptive to some other bullshit that is being taught for no good reason.  I can’t tell you how much trouble I got into because I would rather have read thick novels and written long pieces of fiction and/or notes to my friends rather than study, say, how to make Jello molds.  (Home ec is the only C I got in high school.)  Now, I love to cook, but guess what skill proved more valuable?

Montessori theories have it right.  We need to stop treating children as intractable assholes who need to be beaten into submission and instead expect them to take part in their own growing experience.

@Amanda: If they pull out the “You want kids to stop learning to write by hand!” strawman, we can pull out the “You want kids to learn to write calligraphy with a quill pen!” and have a strawman fight. As I think back over the last decade and a half or so since high school the only times I’ve ever used cursive is signing my name.

@jennygadget: I’d always heard that cursive was used because the pens tended to blot. If you never picked the pen up off the paper, you didn’t get a blot. I have no idea whether that’s true or not.

Really. I was taught cursive and forced to write with it throughout school and I feel that I can write much more quickly and legibly with it.

you would be wrong.
I will say that of your handwriting, sight unseen. You might be quicker, but you are not more legible in cursive. No one is.

I do enjoy the insistence from the Strawman Gang that cursive is so much more efficient than printing, therefore we should go through a massive effort to teach something, which is itself a massive effort for minimal payoff. Penny wise, pound foolish, it seems.

And I don’t know how many of you have been in a college classroom recently, but have any of you cursive-advocates filled out a Blue Book exam in the last 10 years in which you were allowed to write in cursive? Without exception, every course I had in my years of higher education, professors would explicitly ban the use of it on exams.

Not teaching kids cursive in no way, shape or form prevents you from using it.

Over the long run it does, unless you’ve reconciled yourself to being weird and sad and writing illegibly. Which I have.

We need to stop treating children as intractable assholes who need to be beaten into submission and instead expect them to take part in their own growing experience.

But then how will you ever lower their expectations to be the good little factory workers and janitors that the 19th century American education system was designed to to churn out?

I suffered through four years of German in high school, and at least, my cursive is better than my German.

As far as I’m concerned, neither is absolutely necessary in public schools: spelling and multiplication tables, nope, can’t see they’re as useless, since I find use for one or both every damn day of my life.

As do most Americans.

I’m with Amanda 100 percent on this.

And by the way:

That you had to do something as a kid really doesn’t mean it was necessary.  Though I see how people get confused. This comes up in the spanking debate and the circumcision debate.  It happened to me, and making sure I feel like every part of my life is perfect is more important than treating kids with decency and respect.

I’d even go broader than this. I think one of the fundamental errors many people make whenever they make arguments about the culture is essentializing their own experiences. Indeed, the way I learned about this was in feminism classes in college and law school—this was a huge concern of many second wave academic feminists.

The key point is this:

What might have been good for you might not be good for someone else.

Proof that cursive is useful for you is not proof that it is useful for the majority of people who learn it. Proof that circumcision worked out fine for you is not proof that it is not detrimental to other people. Proof that you were spanked as a child and turned out alright is not proof that others who were spanked as a child will turn out alright as well. Proof that you can stay at home with your kids and still have a happy life is not proof that other parents don’t need day care. Proof that you were able to breastfeed without disrupting your life is not proof that other mothers shouldn’t choose formula. Proof that you were able to rise up out of poverty and make a success of yourself is not proof that poor people don’t need economic assistance.

People make this mistake, over and over again. If you want to analyze a cultural practice, you need to look at how it affects other people in different circumstances than you are, not just how it affects you.

I just can’t understand preferring print (now, THAT takes me forever) over cursive (the pen never has to leave the page).

My pen and page got counseling and are well over the anxiety-separation now, thankfully. ;p

But seriously, I only use cursive for my signature (and it’s sort of been pared down to a cursive capital letter followed by a squiggle now anyways) and my printing has always been fast enough to keep up with lectures. Grad school lectures, with pictures of organ systems and chemistry and shit, even!

And I’ve always been told my print is lovely—and it’s certainly more readable than most cursive I’ve seen—and people try to borrow my notes more than the loopier ones of my peers. Print’s also been universally accepted, unlike cursive, even for personal cards and notes. I think I last had to write a paragraph in cursive for the GRE, maybe (basically promising I wouldn’t cheat)? And even then I didn’t remember how so I just ran all my print letters together and it was good enough. :p

So I absolutely agree that cursive is not at all a necessary life skill any more. Perhaps it’s pretty-looking and occasionally fun, but so is being able to hold a conversation in Spanish or knowing how to cook (could we please replace cursive with home ec.? That’s old fashioned-y but actually useful!)

Does anyone else remember being to taught to print in the “d’nealian” style? It was supposed to make it easier for you to learn cursive later on. You made your capital As like lower case As and you put loops on your lower case g’s, y’s, and q’s. It was a terrible way to teach kids how to write, I swear that all it ever did was make my printing illegible. It’s important to teach kids how to print, and I think kids should probably be taught a little bit of cursive—or at least how to read it, but making a six-year-old write a cursive lower case “k” dozens of times is a crappy way to teach kids how to write. When you get older, you tend to develop your own writing style anyway. A lot of people I know print in all caps, or they don’t make the serif on their upper-case J’s or whatever. Personally, I never dot my i’s. I remember being forced to write papers in cursive and being marked down for every incorrect loop or unclear letter. Finally, by the sixth grade or so, everyone stopped giving a shit about teaching kids cursive. It was just this weird thing they pushed on us from the third to the fourth grade or so, then dropped.

I’ve long written in a hybrid form of block and cursive that does away with the ridiculous capital Q and other things, but is both fast and legible enough for general communications. At work, if I have to write a report, I’m specifically told not to use cursive. That may be because some writing is awful, but it’s also because everyone can read block text.

It’s a bit of an anachronistic art, like calligraphy. It will never go away, nor will it ever be universally popular again. But I’m not worried as some are that old records of sea voyages and diaries of 19th Century pioneers won’t be able to be understood in a few decades. We’ll have computer programs to read those things soon enough.

We’ve got bigger issues, such as zeroes and ohs being mixed up in those damn capcha thingies all sorts of websites use to determine if I’m human.

I’m gonna speak up in defense of multiplication tables here, because they helped me. They’re just a tool, not an evil plot of the patriarchy. But then, I like diagramming sentences too, though I’m not sure it serves much of a purpose other than sheer grammar nerdiness.

I grasped the theory of multiplication just fine as a kid, but I tended to just convert it to addition (add 7+7+7), which takes forever.  Knowing 7x3=21 off the top of my head made my life much easier.

In fact, I’m not sure how you “real” math people are doing low-level multiplication in your heads if not by having a lot of common ones memorized.

EG, they are automatically torment for some kids. I question whether or not it’s wise to discourage half the kids from learning because the other half are okay with it.

Well, sure.  Everything is automatically torment for someone.  For me, it was gym and music.  I hated gym and music has never, for even a moment, made any sense to me whatsoever.  But that doesn’t mean music shouldn’t be taught (I would advocate some pretty strong changes to how phys ed is “taught,” if that is the appropriate word.) 

I’m as big an advocate of children’s rights as you’re ever likely to find…but I’m not convinced that not having to do anything that sucks is a right.  Life is full of unpleasant but necessary experiences—vaccinations, long airplane trips, dealing with nasty relatives.  There’s a lot of unnecessary suffering inflicted on children in this world, but I just don’t see times tables at the top of the list, when it comes to either suffering or unnecessariness.

what you need as an adult is often thwarted by an educational system that’s built more on “that’s how I did it and dammit, kids today have to suffer what I did” than finding the individual needs and desires of the individual child and encouraging them to bloom.

I completely agree.  But part of that is because it’s extraordinarily difficult to foresee what anybody is going to need as an adult.  It is pretty common, though, to need to know basic multiplication sums and how to spell throughout one’s life (despite spellcheck, which cannot tell you that “entered” is not spelled “interred”).

To restate: Cursive is faster for note-taking than print, though not as fast as shorthand. However, shorthand is more like a code than an alphabetic writing system and is significantly more complex than cursive. As such it is a much more “fragile” skill—shorthand deteriorates with disuse much faster than cursive. Cursive skill, of course, deteriorates with disuse faster than print skill does—basically, the more elaborate the system, the harder it is to retain.

Cursive is a handy skill for me, and I still think it’s sensible to ditch cursive instruction in favor of typing.

I use cursive because it’s good for writing out large blocks of text in longhand. I could print, but cursive is faster and when you’re dealing with a thousand words or so at a sitting, whatever makes it go faster is great. Also, my cursive writing is prettier than my printing. This is not to say it’s more legible—-my printing is totally legible—-but I think it looks more elegant.

And what I think looks nicer is the only thing that matters in this case because when I use cursive, no one has to read it except me. I use it for writing my novels, and since most people are not the same type of crazy as I am (and thus find healthier uses for their spare time than making shit up about people who don’t exist), they won’t need the same handwriting skills. Furthermore, since I’m back in America where I have reliable electricity and a computer that doesn’t suck, handwriting isn’t so useful to me anymore. Especially now that I have software that lends itself especially well to creative and long-form writing, I expect to make less use of pen and paper and do a lot more composing the text straight into the computer.

(Which is kind of a shame, as I’m awfully fond of notebooks and pens, but these things are supposed to serve us, we are not supposed to serve them.)

So, just because I’ve made use of my cursive skills, doesn’t mean it’s a useful skill for a 21st-century American. When I learned handwriting, most people didn’t have computers at home and laptops were unheard of. If I hadn’t learned cursive as a child, I don’t think my creativity would be hampered or even that it would have taken any longer to write my first drafts. The small percentage of current schoolchildren who will grow up to be novelists will use other tools to get their ideas written out. More of them will use computers at a much younger age than I did, for example.

Meanwhile, even where I make use of cursive, I still need keyboarding skills. Most of my first drafts start on paper, but it all ends up on the computer. And that is to say nothing of doing my homework in college or holding down my day job now. Having learned to type at a young age has treated me much better than making those fancy-looking capital letters.

I guess if I was a parent I could teach my kid cursive as a sort of “secret language” that they could use with their friends to pass notes without fear of interception.

If you think that kids should acquire an understanding of math (as opposed to how to use a calculator), then it’s certainly wrong that they shouldn’t learn to memorize basic arithmetical facts, like what 8 times 7 is. As emyabee says, you need basic arithmetical facts memorized if you’re going to tackle equations of any complexity.  Otherwise it just takes too long.

But despite appearances, I don’t think Amanda’s point is that kids shouldn’t ever memorize these facts.  Her point is that the rote approach to learning these facts is crap.  Giving a kid a 12 by 12 chart with the words ‘multiplication table’ on top and making them remember it in order is an awesome way to get them to hate math.

Plus it doesn’t work that well. The better way is just to get onto real math, algebra, whatever. In puzzling out simple equations, the facts get memorized along the way. And they get memorized in a way that connects more deeply to their actual mathematical understanding.

I haven’t written anything longer than a two line note by hand in about, I think, 15 years.  Maybe longer.

While hyperbole is cute and all, there is no fucking way you’re that old.  Exams are still taken by hand in blue books in universities across this country, especially approximately 10-15 years ago when YOU were in college.

Also, multiplication tables work for a lot of children, some would say the majority of children, to make it easier to do equations in the first place.  How long would it take you to multiply 384x428, if you didn’t have 4x8, 8x8, 3x8, 4x2, 8x2, 3x2, 4x4, and 3x4 already memorized?

I also find it somewhat stunning that because you personally had trouble with rote memorization that means that ALL children have trouble with it and that it has no use in education whatsoever.  I guess I’ll attribute that to hyperbole as well.

I don’t even sign my name in cursive; it’s a weird scrawl that uses the same first letter for first and last names, and since it’s an “M”, I often turn the middle point into an inverted pentagram unless I’m signing it for some Christian I don’t care to offend. Misspent youth, metal fan, blah blah.

My primary hobby is tabletop RPGs, which require a lot of writing basically for fun. Don’t know anyone what does their game notes in cursive, and it would just piss me off. I’ve seen some really bad handwriting in print, and it’s a lot more readable than bad cursive. (Although I did puzzle an entire session over why one of my players had ‘Norwegian’ listed on his D&D character; turned out it was ‘Nonweapon’ (as in proficiencies)).

In fact, I’m not sure how you “real” math people are doing low-level multiplication in your heads if not by having a lot of common ones memorized.

You have missed my point.  I have common multiplication facts memorized, but IN SPITE OF rote memorization, not because of it.  I have done these things so many times that they stick in my brain because they are actually useful and represent real things.  I have memorized multiplication because it is an abstraction of reality, not just some random tidbit to remember.  And FWIW, I visualize 7*3 as 3 rows of 7 in my mind.  I tried very hard to memorize times tables when I was supposed to, and it didn’t stick.  But then when I did algebra and multiplication was a part of that, it just naturally stuck in my brain with little effort of actually memorizing it.

Ooh, I luuuuuurve diagramming sentences (which someone else mentioned above). 

I hear what Amanda is saying about not tormenting children, and if some portion of the student body is harmed by a pedagogic practice, then we should consider tossing it.  I also agree with her that there is a strain of thought in of thought in our educational system that some children SHOULD be made to suffer because it’s good for them.

BUT.  I keep coming back to my idea about different learning styles.  What’s torment for me may not be torment for thee and vice-versa. I remember shedding tears of frustration (and most importantly, not learning anything) over certain assignments—usually related to “creative math.”  I wish I could remember more about those assignments but I think the gist was the teacher would pose a real life problem and we would be challenged to come up with solutions, usually before having been taught on relevant tools to solve the problem.  I suffered through this kind of thing all the way through calculus. I remember thinking, “I’m not Isaac Newton. I am not going to be able to invent calculus on my own.”

If you think that kids should acquire an understanding of math (as opposed to how to use a calculator), then it’s certainly wrong that they shouldn’t learn to memorize basic arithmetical facts, like what 8 times 7 is. As emyabee says, you need basic arithmetical facts memorized if you’re going to tackle equations of any complexity.  Otherwise it just takes too long.

There should be a review of the multiplication table and kids should have access to it, but if they start using it in context they will just naturally remember it from using it so often.

Also, multiplication tables work for a lot of children, some would say the majority of children, to make it easier to do equations in the first place.  How long would it take you to multiply 384x428, if you didn’t have 4x8, 8x8, 3x8, 4x2, 8x2, 3x2, 4x4, and 3x4 already memorized?

Again, kids should get a quick review of the multiplication table without being asked to memorize it.  Then when they do 384*428 and a bunch of other things like that, they’ll quickly remember what 4*8 is simply be using it in context so often.  They’ll memorize it, but not because they intended to.

I was lucky that my chemistry teacher in high school never made me memorize a periodic table.  I still can’t list all the elements and yet I excelled at chemistry and became a chemist.  But I have memorized facts about oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, and a few others simply by using them so often.  I never needed to intentionally memorize anything.  The stuff that I use sticks in my memory, and the stuff that is not useful to me personally isn’t worth memorizing anyway.  My hs teacher spent time explaining trends, concepts, and even the history behind the periodic table, while the other teacher at that school wasted time forcing students to memorize the thing.  I know I got the better deal because I remember what I need to, and I’m able to memorize new elements as they come up in my daily life.

One thing I would LOVE to see tossed from our school system though is Arts and Crafts.  I am not talking about art education, or creative arts.  I am talking about set handicrafts, like making potholders out of old scraps of cloth, or making little houses out of tongue-depressors or toothpicks.  Man, I hated that shit. 

It was rote in the sense of leaving little room for creativity, intricate and complex enough to be incredibly frustrating, and completely useless unless you happen to enjoy handicrafts.  My mother still enjoys telling the story of me coming home sobbing and covered in papier mache.  And I have to say the teachers put incredible pressure on the little girls in particular to produce perfect little handicrafts. 

I was so excited in 8th grade to finally graduate from handicrafts to learning art history.

I remember shedding tears of frustration (and most importantly, not learning anything) over certain assignments

Sure, me, too. I also remember that despite those “tears of frustration,” it turned out that I could do it! Lots of things don’t come naturally to us. The most important lesson I learned in school was that despite the fact that something might seem like “torment,” you can actually master it if you concentrate on developing the skill.

How is it that a basic multiplication table is “torment,” but we teach kids to memorize song lyrics and sing them by heart without getting ourselves in a tizzy about how this might be traumatizing?

The problem here is that Amanda is conflating the fading away of cursive as a skill that’s no longer necessary to teach to everyone with the fact that some things still have to be taught even if it is a bit frustrating at first.

One of the things I’ve been blessed with is the fact that I didn’t understand math intuitively. A lot of concepts didn’t “take” for me, and instead of complaining about how this was tormenting, I just did problems over and over again—by rote—until it became second nature. People chiming in to say how they intuitively understood the concepts but hated the memorization doesnt really apply to most of us mere mortal who, even if we naturally do pick up math, are going to be frustrated by some topic that is going to “torment” us as children until we apply ourselves until it finally gels in our heads. Just because it just so happens that cursive isn’t worth our time in this regard doesn’t mean that the same thing applies to arithmetic.

There should be a review of the multiplication table and kids should have access to it, but if they start using it in context they will just naturally remember it from using it so often.

Because that’s how it worked for you, that’ll be how it works for everyone?  How is that any different from forcing kids to memorize by rote because that’s what I did, and it worked for me?  Back in the days when one still had to learn phone numbers by heart, I could do it perfectly if I made a specific effort to memorize it by paying attention to the numbers.  But if all I did was look it up over and over and over and over again, ad nauseam, I could go on doing that for months without learning it.

The initial post was merely partly wrong, but the update is hideously obnoxious. I assume some fraction of the “butthurt” (not sure you’re using Atrios’s term right, but in any case…) generated upthread had something to do with the usefulness of knowing the multiplication tables. Those people are right, and aren’t indulging in irrational and no doubt patriarchal chauvinism for their own educations.

When I started high school, 47 years ago, typing was an elective and nearly girls-only. I’d agree that it ought to be taught in elementary school now, especially since not all the kids will have access to a keyboard at home. I’d also strongly advocate teaching a second language starting in first grade or kindergarten. Ideally, kids whose home language isn’t English should get formal instruction in their home language, but in general I’d expect the second language will be Spanish, at least in America. The perspective of a second language makes learning grammar much easier.

It would be nice to know if there really is a best age or way to teach basic arithmetic. I think it’s very important to be able to do simple mental arithmetic, and pencil-and-paper addition and subtraction, but one of the most important things is order-of-magnitude estimation, as in “is this result even reasonable?” It’s too easy to mess up a calculator entry and critical to notice when it’s nonsensical.

I wonder how much of the print/cursive divide is driven by the tools employed. Ballpoints practically demand printing while fountain pens and felt tips insist on cursive. As an old guy and a math major I’d echo those above who point out that in some subjects you have to take notes by hand. (While it’s not exactly the case that every mathematician invents his own notation, you never know what the next symbol is going to be).

Remembering my own student days, I wonder if kids with laptops are doodling anymore? Although I’m now a text-based life form, in my larval stage half my pencil-based output was graphical: doodling and cartooning and what-not. Drawing as a distraction allows one to keep an ear on the lecturer, which checking the Web does not (our brains aren’t actually outfitted with two independent text channels).

I think cursive ought still to be taught, but it might be put off until middle or high school, maybe using the time saved by learning grammar with a second language in elementary school. It’s a link with the past and with other cultures, and it may be too early to dismiss its utility. When taking Russian in college I had to learn cursive Cyrillic, and it was actually kind of fun (I was, and remain, a fountain pen user).

I don’t know how you adjust a curriculum to account for different learning styles.

For starters, fund schools to a level that brings class sizes below 20-25 students for K-8 at least, and ideally even smaller in the youngest grades. The fewer students a teacher has, the more flexibility they have to work one-on-one and adjust their approach to suit each child. Next, trust teachers to set their own curriculum while working under a broader framework of national standards based on actual knowledge rather than multiple choice test scores, and encourage peer review and similar programs so that teachers can learn from and improve each other, rather than forcing them to implement rigid lesson plans delivered by consultants whose last meaningful experience in a K-8 classroom was as a student.

This is why I expect that if the politicians get their way regarding public school (un)funding and test-score-based merit pay for teachers, in another decade or so no child will make it out of American public schools able to figure 2*2+3 without a calculator.

Cursive will probably end up like Roman numerals.  You get taught it for a month or so and if you like it you can keep on with it, otherwise no one really cares.

I seem to recall reading that bad handwriting (cursive or print) is mostly caused by teaching someone to write before they have the coordination to do it well.  Once you learn to print/write awkwardly it is hard to “clean it up.”

Keyboarding seems an obvious solution, kind of like how infants who learn signing before their mouths are able to handle talking may be less frustrated than those who don’t.

I would have loved to have learned shorthand.  I type fast enough to almost transcribe meeting content but that doesn’t work in the meetings where you can’t carry a computer.  I second the complaints about tablet handwriting recognition—the notes I take are two-dimensional, that is, stuff written above or below or in margins makes sense in that X,Y position.

I nearly flunked “math” in the 3rd grade because of multiplication tables.  Guess who is really good at them now?  This motherfucker.  That’s because after the 3rd grade, I was really good at math.  By doing actual equations, I eventually learned the multiplication tables I tearfully believed I would never learn.
Comment #9: Amanda Marcotte on 07/07 at 05:04 PM

Pretty much the same story here.  When it had a meaning and a purpose, suddenly I cared.  Though I still have to kind of think about 8 times 7.  But I had a really really good geometry teacher who made doing these things seem fun somehow, for pretty much everyone in the class.  No negative feedback, just joy when you got it right, and a lot of chances to get things right at all levels.

Ack, forgot to add - it really is the same impulse that drives the continued teaching of multiplication tables and all the fussing and moaning over the use of calculators to perform basic arithmetic - and the blaming of said calculators for the difficulty of, say, cashiers making change when the register loses power or whatever. As though arithmetic were the conceptually and intellectually meaningful part of math, rather than the humdrum weight-lifting that it actually is. Here’s reality: before calculators were commonplace, cashiers just gave people the wrong change all the fucking time….

People refuse to believe it, because it’s DIFFERENT, but technology really has made our lives better in lots of ways, even really simple ones, like making all of us better at the basic arithmetic we have to do every day, to making it easier for us to read what people have to say.
Comment #27: grolby on 07/07 at 05:22 PM

I refuse to believe it because I lived it.  You can easily give change by counting up from the price to the money the person gave you.  $1.95 from $20: “That’s one ninety five, five is two and three is five and five is ten and ten is twenty.”  I guess it sounds like thieves’ cant or shortchange if you don’t know it, but you can make change easily if you do.

OK, cursive writing isn’t necessary to life, although a printed personal note seems loutish. But no multiplication tables? No memorizing spelling and vocabulary words? Sorry, but some “rote memorization” is necessary if you’re going to learn anything worthwhile. Learning isn’t always going to be fun.

Have to say that about the only time I use cursive is in signing my name.  Mostly I type things and print them out or else use manuscript print style.  Of course my cursive handwriting has always so bad that even I sometimes have trouble reading it (I learned to write in the late 1950s and early 1960s).

Montessori theories have it right.  We need to stop treating children as intractable assholes who need to be beaten into submission and instead expect them to take part in their own growing experience.

If some cousins and college classmates who attended private schools which purportedly practiced Montessori theories or went way beyond them are any indication, it is just as hit-or-miss as rote memorization of multiplication tables are depending on the student concerned and their personalities. 

These non-mainstreamed schools including the private schools which allowed students to freely wander in and out of classrooms per their own intellectual inclinations seem to work best with students who are already independently inclined and have an internally driven boundless curiosity and intellectual discipline to learn as much around them as possible. 

While some college classmates benefited from these educational methods, there were also plenty who ended up having some substantial gaps in basic academic and practical skills because their personalities/learning styles/inclinations required more structure than those systems provided. 

This ranged from lacking knowledge of basic arithmetic skills to the inability to prioritize short-term unpleasantness/“torment” in order to accomplish long-term goals(i.e. working on a tedious piece of an important academic/professional project) because “it’s not fun”.  Sometimes a little unpleasantness….so long as it is not excessive may need to be endured if it will lead to fulfilling a desired goal/outcome for oneself.  Not surprisingly, many had serious issues dealing with the tedium and pressures of adult life in both professional and personal/social contexts.

@oldfeminist, one of my favorite things to do when I’m paying cash for something is hand the cashier a seemingly nonsensical amount. I won’t just put down $17 on a $16.28 total, for example, if I can pay $17.03 and both get rid of useless pennies and score a few more laundry quarters instead. I’ve had people genuinely freak out that I was able to do that kind of basic math on the fly, though.

Consider that it might also just be evidence of a disability, you privileged jackass.

“If it’s not about you, it’s not about you.”

Not sending a thank you note is also loutish, even though that might be acting “privileged,” given that I have a functional long-term memory and I might not be acting fair to those with anterograde amnesia.

nineveh at #66 mentioned one solution in passing.  For a short while about fifteen or so years ago, Italic cursive was taught in a number of US schools.  This is essentially a way of turning block printing into a faster and quite attractive form of cursive.  People who learn Italic have writing styles that vary all the way from really connected and fast to almost-like-printing, but always faster and easier than that modified Spencerian that is often still taught.  It’s fast to learn and easy to do (much better than, and more attractive than, Denelian).

I have some motor skill issues and was in psychical and occupational therapy for most of school. I didn’t learn how to hold a pencil without the aid of pencil grips until 2nd or 3rd grade. Cursive didn’t come that long after that. I really struggled with it and had to do tons of extra work. I wound up getting permission to type more and more and was treated as something of an oddity at least until high school and hell sometimes even then. I don’t feel bitter about the fact some poor awkward kid out there won’t have to go through all the crap I did.

I have beautiful cursive.  Shit, I get compliments on it.  As in, multiple compliments from multiple people.  Also, it’s faster than print.  I only ever take notes in cursive.  I had a teacher last semester who forbade us from using computers in class, even to take notes.  She thought (was probably right) that people would just be surfing the internet instead of taking notes.  I do type ~90wpm, but it’s so much easier to take a pad of paper with me than a computer.  And that anti-computer teacher?  Went fast.  If you tried to print, you would get left behind.  You could try to shorthand, but in sciency classes with lots of long-ass terminology and dates and names of important persons in the field, you still end up writing butt-tons. 

We had to use cursive until high school.  I’m only a little younger than Amanda, but cursive + pen was the rule pretty much until we had loads of nice computers with which to type reports.  It was only then that papers had to be typed.  I fucking hated cursive, but now ... I use it almost exclusively.

Times tables?  A breeze.  I don’t learn well by rote memorization, but those were easy for me and I pretty much still remember them.  Very useful.  I think we learned them mostly by having quizzes every day.  And we had some kind of competition where, if you got 100% on every quiz you got a coupon or something.  For ... food?  That was 20 years ago, but I remember it was something like that.  Free cookies or ice cream or the like.  Free food is a good motivator.

Spelling?  Also useful.  Can we just give the WHOLE INTERNET some weekly spelling tests on how to spell, say, “the opposite of tight” or “the opposite of win” or whatever?  And if you spell well, then your cursive gets SUPAH-FAST.  I can write legibly and quickly because I can spell well.  Never “learned” spelling per se.  I think that’s something that just comes with practice.

Even if you aren’t going to learn to write cursive, I think it behooves teachers to teach how to read it.  I remember Aunt Soandso sending me cards for Holiday and not being able to read them because I was 7 and we hadn’t learned cursive yet.  I know they recently changed some of the letters to look more like their print version (Q and Z iirc) but a lot of the letters look like they might as well be Arabic or Greek, especially when you’re a kid. 

I get that Amanda doesn’t like it when people disagree with the thesis of the post, but ... well ... apparently a lot of people disagree about the usefulness/ease of these things.  C’est la vie.  I personally think kids would be better off not doing all the pointless testing and still learning cursive.  Shit, several years after I left high school the elementary schools were somehow fitting in computer time, stupid NCLB testing, cursive, multiplication, everything else, AND Mandarin Chinese.  It’s totally doable.  But cutting the tests would be better than cutting out actual learning. 

Laurie@31, <em>Memorizing spelling words won’t help a student grasp any grand principles since spelling is so arbitrary in our language.<-em>?  Not so!  One of the first things students of spelling will learn is that English is a patchwork monster whose component languages can still be discerned, and that can be quite interesting and informative.

I honestly think repetitive tasks and rote memorization are fine when mixed in with more kinesthetic activities and fun stuff. They do really work for some students. Plus even though I ended up doing pretty well in terms of education, I still kinda wish I had been forced to memorize some poems or formally trained in metre or something as a child. It’s bad when students of the sciences can recite Dickinson and I, as an English student, can’t remember past the first few lines of my favourite poem.

Cursive isn’t really like that, though.

Jesus. I don’t remember cursive being that big a deal in my primary school. It’s not a big deal now; most of the characters are easily recognizable as their printed counterpoint, and the stupid ones (Capital Q, I’m looking at you) are, what, an extra six or eight characters? It’s not like we don’t expect people to know/pick up other symbols than the Times Roman 52 forms of printed letters - the tilde and the umlaut spring to mind.

It’s just ridiculous to pretend that cursive is this wholly wild and disparate system. Check out Devangari; there’s a script for you. But if teachers are spending a zillion years on the subject, that’s probably bad. I guess there are some auxiliary benefits - fine motor control and…and..well, surely something else. Multiplication tables, however, you lost me there. You may not have liked the format they were taught, but they’re foundationally important, and math is everywhere.

Jesus. I don’t remember cursive being that big a deal in my primary school. It’s not a big deal now; most of the characters are easily recognizable as their printed counterpoint, and the stupid ones (Capital Q, I’m looking at you) are, what, an extra six or eight characters? It’s not like we don’t expect people to know/pick up other symbols than the Times Roman form of printed letters - the tilde and the umlaut spring to mind.

It’s just ridiculous to pretend that cursive is this wholly wild and disparate system. Check out Devangari; there’s a distinct script for you. But if teachers are spending a zillion years on the subject, that’s probably bad. I guess there are some auxiliary benefits - fine motor control and…and..well, surely something else. Multiplication tables, however: you lost me there. You may not have liked the format they were taught, but they’re foundationally important, and math is everywhere.

(Oops. Sorry for the double-post, y’all.)

I just print with tails that join my letters. Best of both worlds, problem solved.

I’m not sure how big an issue this really is. At the peak of cursive mania it was taught for 2 hours a week, now it’s much less than that—10 minutes a day or less. I suppose you could teach typing instead, but the problematic thing is that they don’t teach writing much anymore (including printing). I don’t really care about cursive writing (although cursive writing in general came about because it was easier), but I do think everyone needs to be able to write by hand.

As I side bit, Indiana also thought about passing a bill to make pi equal to 3.2 so you might want to check the actual bill before you endorse it.

Oldfeminist on making change: I learned that too, but it’s a lost art now. And, like Bex, I can do modular arithmetic and minimize pennies, which flummoxes those few who learned the old way. It also flummoxes those who have to punch my prepackaged solutions into their POS systems. Most of the time I get the right change. We really ought to get rid of pennies, though.

*I’ll apologize in advance if anything here is repetitive, I’ve not yet read the other comments*

First and foremost, I suck like hell at cursive and have never written anything other than my name in it since I switched to a (non-catholic) school that didn’t MAKE us use it.

But, on Amanda’s broader point, I failed my way through spelling/vocab lists for my entire school career.

My spelling has ONLY improved in recent years thanks to, of all things, a subpar spell-check program.

It will tell me what I get wrong, but I have to be rather close, or it can’t figure it out. Somehow, this has helped me exponentially more than years and years of (failed) spelling tests.

I think it’s something about the real-time “that’s spelled wrong!”, it lets me know right when I misspell something that it’s wrong, and I fix it right then and there.

That said, I’m sure there were others that did just fine with the traditional system.

The point is learning is not a one-size-fits-all!

The illustrate this, in my very early school days I did horrible at reading, I could barely learn at all.

Not long after though, I was consistently at the top of my class, reading several grade levels higher than I was in.

What changed? I was given (in-school) reading tutoring that helped me learn using different methods. (And, eventually, I was identified, at a somewhat early age, as being Dyslexic and given even more specialized tutoring.)

Because, I could learn to read, quite well in fact! But I could not learn to read using the traditional methods used for the rest of my class. And, had I be stuck with them, I’d probably be barely literate today.

Additionally, I have NEVER been able to write in cursive with any amount of speed, unless I wanted a page filled with nothing but random squigles.

Amanda’s comment that cursive isn’t a necessity was not a claim that SHE doesn’t need it therefore no one else does.

But all the comments from people referring to cursive as “faster” and “less tedious”, stating this as though it were some kind of fact, sure as hell ARE projecting their own subjective experiences with cursive on to everyone that may write in it.

  In fact, I’m not sure how you “real” math people are doing low-level multiplication in your heads if not by having a lot of common ones memorized.

Of course we are. We just memorized all the information on the times table by DOING it, not by rote-memorizing a 10x10 grid(or whatever the hell size it was. I do checkbook math, multiplication, and long division in my head to such an extent that I am not even sure that I remember how to do long division on paper any more.

Ruby, it’s a fact that my cursive is quicker than my printing. Why are you taking issue with that? Lighten up: less heat, more light.

Anyone: if I prefer X to Y, I’m in no way suggesting that therefore anyone else must share my preferences. We celebrate diversity. X, Y, Z and sometimes W, but only on Friday.

Um, guys? Whichever form of writing - typing, printing, or cursive - you use the most tends to be what you do fastest, which is why it seems the most convenient, sensible, pretty, enlightened, etc. way to do it. 

My printing is slower than my cursive because I use cursive more often. If I start printing regularly or for an extended time - filling out forms for instance - it speeds up.

My typing was way slower than my handwriting when I started using computers back in high school, but now I find I can type ridiculously fast and writing by hand in a journal every now and again is something I do when I want to slow my thought process down. 

The only real reaction I have here is that I feel a bit old hearing that something I learned in school is not going to be taught because it’s no longer relevant, but meh. It happens.

It also flummoxes those who have to punch my prepackaged solutions into their POS systems.

More likely fills with rage. POS is a system that is openly hostile to complexity. It’s harder to enter exact change amounts than an even sum into the system so no they aren’t flummoxed by the 25 cent result but pissed off by the four extra steps they had to take to get there. Even if they cut corners and just hit $20 dollars for everything giving out the correct change for what they’re actually given, chances are they will have a manager at the end of the night wondering why there are so few Jacksons in the drawer regardless of whether the count is off or not. That system is premised on taking as much power out of the hands of the clerk as possible so please don’t blame the mouse for being locked in the wheel.

This was kind of an interesting thread.  I just want to mention one thing…

Schools are fundamentally about creating a common pool of language.  There’s a point to which individual talents have to be subsumed into the common project.  Everyone has to try to learn a few basic things so everyone can borrow one another’s talents.  If people can’t read your writing, then you can’t do many things, (*especially the goddamned doctors*, and oh yes! WASH YOUR FUCKING HANDS, DOCS).  For the most part, it’s minor, but I think people substantially underestimate the degree to which we all depend on herd knowlege.  A few bad drivers is compensated by other, more capable drivers, and traffic more or less goes.  When most of the people can’t really drive, then traffic is really a nightmare, and dangerous besides.  If most people can’t write legibly, which is what this thread is about, in the end, cursive or printing—cursive is *intended* to help make you more useful to other people at a lower cost to you.  Any argument about cursive really applies to printing as well.  It also applies to speech and dialect as well, and there is no hard and fast line about speed, coherence, and ease of learning.  Public schooling just isn’t going to be able to reliably cope with customizing education to a great extent per student.

bad Jim, yours is, mine isn’t.

My issue was that people were stating that cursive is faster as though it were an absolute fact, rather than something subjective that varies from person to person.

Also, many useless things are taught, generally because they make learning more useful things easier.  I think cursive writing is far better, pedagogically, than a semester or two of keyboarding, because teaching the physical act of writing allows for much better feedback on all kinds of things, like spelling or grammer.  More than that, writing things out really helps you interact with abstract knowledge.  As another sciencey dude, seriously, typing my math would have been a major crimp in my style, because I need to see my errors.  Going back and changing stuff and stuffing things down the memory hole as I do so would have made learning how to deal with tangly problems a nightmare.  Moreover, when I code, I usually need to write the algorithm out by hand.  If I were to build something with other people, or cook with other people, or do any collaborative project, writing quickly and legibly is important.  We don’t notice how necessary this can be sometimes, because we’ve dumped so much of our interactions to centralized data-munching and pumping, not so much because we’ve all learned keyboarding.  If the service industry in the US changes very much, say, that personal touch, then handwriting will gain in importance for more people.

I’m still in favor of ditching cursive, but I’m actually not in support of a ton of typing classes; I learned the basic principles in class—where to hold your hands and such—but only got up to a decent speed (and was able to look up while typing to some extent) thanks to constant IM chatter with my high school friends. Typing “the quick brown fox” a million times did nothing that breathlessly exchanged middle-school-girl fanfics didn’t do a thousand times better. :D

And I’m actually okay with memorizing multiplication tables, too. It’s valuable to know exactly why and how it works and be able to replicate the thought process behind multiplication, but it’s also super helpful just to have the basic tool of 6 x 7 = ? at your fingertips. It’s like learning the alphabet; yeah there’s a cool history behind it, and having a good idea of how letters function can be helpful, but you also just need to know them to start spelling stuff. Once you have the basic vocabulary of math you can go back and dig into it more thoroughly without constantly stopping to reinvent the multiplication wheel every time someone mentions 42.

I never really thought about it, but I haven’t written in cursive in forever, even when I’m using a pen and paper. I grew up right when schools were just starting to get computers and still relied on making copies from that purple-ink rolling machine where the copies were warm and the smell gave you a buzz. Cursive was pretty standard throughout grade school and into high school. But ever since finishing high school, I just find it extremely rare to ever write anything in cursive.

That said, I can only imagine what my signature would look like if I had never been taught cursive. My signature is the one thing that I still always write in cursive, and it is both barely legible and extremely distinguishable. Most people would have a really hard time convincingly forging it. I was the victim of some fraudulent activity involving my checking account in the 1990s, and it only took the fraud investigator one look to immediately determine that my signature had been forged on some stolen checks.

that purple-ink rolling machine where the copies were warm and the smell gave you a buzz.

Ditto machines!  I haven’t thought about ditto machines in ages.  Wow—sniffing that ink was such a routine part of school for me.

(*especially the goddamned doctors*, and oh yes! WASH YOUR FUCKING HANDS, DOCS)

Wow, it’s like you’ve been hanging out at my workplace or something.

Scrumby, exactly. I feel about as guilty as I do superior when I hand over the odd assortment of change that will minimize the load in my pocket and wallet. Nobody likes it when I do that, but I smile, indicating that I intend no harm, and so far it seems that people perceive me at worst as a benevolent nutcase.

Getting serious for a moment, most students go haywire with fractions. This may be worse in the U.S. than elsewhere; here a 9/16 wrench is indispensable. As a binary sort the only problem I see is notation: in hexadecimal 0.9 is 9/16, 0.A is 5/8, 0.C is 3/4 and so on. The only advantage of decimal is that most of us have ten fingers and toes.

AndiM on 07/07 at 05:05 PM:

... it does make me laugh that I might be able to write notes on paper that nobody can decipher in the future. MUAH HA HA! My own secret code, and it would just be cursive!

As anyone who has graded essays written in cursive can tell you, everyone who writes in cursive writes in their own secret code. Indeed, some write in a code so secret they can’t read it themselves.

Don’t get butthurt over this, Amanda, but yeah: for a few years of childhood most kids have what is to adults an uncanny ability to memorize. Educational systems should take advantage of that: kids should learn multiplication tables, to spell complex words, learn a second language, anything that is more easily learned if you have the ability to memorize. When they start running out of the natural ability to memorize they run right into the natural ability to ask good questions, and that’s when it’s a perfect time to start teaching them analytical thinking and encourage them to question authority.

OTOH, any school that makes the process of learning dull is either a bad school or one trapped in a bad system where teachers must “teach to the test”. Multiplication tables are boring to memorize, but as others have noted upthread, they become more interesting when they’re related to real stuff.

Interesting food for thought in all the comments.  I definitely see all sides of this!  Which is why I may keep changing my mind, at least slightly.

My current thoughts are:

— While there is a “no pain, no gain” mentality to some of the ways schoolchildren are treated, it also occurs to me that children feel torment fairly easily.  There is always going to be something a kid is going to find extremely difficult or tedious or frustrating and children don’t have the tools yet to cope with that.  For Amanda, it was memorizing multiplication tables or learning cursive.  For me, it was making papier mache crap, creative math, and also, come to think of it, cursive too.  While I don’t think we should go out of our way to make life unpleasant for kids, I think some unpleasantness is probably inevitable because kids are less able to cope than adults with tedium and frustration.

— There should be a way to accommodate everyone.  Yes, I think quite a bit of rote memorization is necessary and useful but as others have pointed out, it should be related to real-world principles.  When I memorized the names of all the countries of the world and their capitals and their location on the map, I also learned things at the same time about those places.  And it helped me to understand those countries better.  For example, learning which countries shared borders with Austria helped me to understand Austria’s situation as a sort of gateway between western and eastern Europe. 

—Oh and speaking of geography, we NEED to teach geography in school.  Why the heck DON’T we teach geography in public schools.  The level of ignorance of basic geography in the U.S. is a travesty.

I’ve lost so much data and gone through so many different and incompatible computer systems over the years that any records I really care about (lab notes, brewing records, etc) get written on non-volatile, direct-human-readable media. Since they’re usually only for my own use, whether anyone else can read them or not is irrelevant, and since they’re usually records being take whilst in the process of doing something else, speed is of the essence. Shorthand would actually be useful, but I can’t be bothered learning it now… I also use cursive constantly to take notes at work - and I work in IT. There’s only so much you can fit on a screen at one time, even with 2 or 3 monitors.

I was taught to do copper plate, with a fountain pen, in primary school. It was part of one particular teacher’s way of expanding our vocabularies and general knowledge, and those were some of the best and most interesting lessons I ever got. Very much the exception rather than the rule though.

Mind you, I’m in the UK, where literacy is still valued…

My only concern: signatures. Most forms have separate lines for signature and printed name, so signatures are clearly expected to be in cursive. They’re also really important legally.

Are there really 150+ comments on whether or not to teach children joined up handwriting?  Is it something unique to US schooling that makes learning joined up writing (which I assume is what is meant by “cursive”) a horrible horrible experience?  I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with anyone here in the UK about how awful it was learning to write.

I had a teacher last semester who forbade us from using computers in class, even to take notes.  She thought (was probably right) that people would just be surfing the internet instead of taking notes.

If this was a college course and the teacher was dealing with adults, then she needs to stop babying them and let them pass or fail on their own merit.  If students surf the web during her class then there are two possibilities: 1) The student is irresponsible and either isn’t cut out for that major or they need to fail a test and learn to pay attention and stop surfing the web or 2) The teacher’s lecture are not interesting or useful and students can easily pass without paying attention, in which case she shouldn’t care if students are surfing the web as long as they are learning the material.

I also feel very strongly the same way about requiring attendance to lectures (labs and discussion-based class are different), and even most homework assignments.  Teachers need to let irresponsible people learn the hard way and stop punishing the rest.  If I can get an A in a course without doing the practice homework, then wouldn’t it be a waste of my time to do that busywork?  For the courses where homework is helpful, I’ll choose to do it.

Sorry, didn’t read the 150+ comments on here so far, but I want to say that I’m a nurse, it is REALLY important that one’s legal documentation is legible, it is really important that when someone writes orders for pretty serious medications that the pharmacist and I can read the order, and why the hell are they still using cursive? They do! All the time I see not just physicians but nurses and other health care folks using the much less readable cursive for no apparent reason other than “that is how I write.”

I am pleased beyond all reason that at my work they are scrapping the majority of the handwriting system in favor of typing (hey! there is that keyboarding skill again!) in the name of safety and efficiency. Not that there will be no handwritten orders allowed ever, but the majority of documentation and orders being legible? YAY!

I was also like to add that the best way to learn spelling and grammar is to learn a second language.  Rote memorization of vocab and spelling words was a waste of time throughout elementary school.  I got As on the tests and then promptly forget everything.  But all of my grammar, punctuation, vocab, and spelling drastically improved in “real life” as soon as I started taking Spanish in 8th grade.  I’ll look at my diaries from 7th and 8th grades and there’s such a drastic difference.  In fact, I found myself correcting people so often that I realized I’d have no friends if I kept going at that rate.

So yeah, let’s drastically reduce rote spelling and grammar (although certainly keep a review of it) and replace it with a second language, probably Spanish.  Foreign languages might not seem that useful because most people never go on to speak them in adulthood, but it is extremely useful to get better at English and it’s so much easier to learn it as a kid than as a teenager.

I’m really surprised y’all are fighting so much over this. I mean, where I grew up, ditching shit because we don’t use it any more and it’s just a pain in the ass now is called progress, and so far I’ve yet to see anyone in this thread make an argument in defense of teaching cursive that didn’t rely on a corner case which is completely irrelevant to almost everyone.

“A printed personal note is loutish”? You say so, grandpa. I think that’s just a rich people thing.

So maybe I’m the exception, but I actually was able to take notes and write those essays in little blue books so much faster once I was allowed to print rather than use cursive.  And my printing is by far more legible that my cursive ever was. 
If I received redline drawings with cursive writing on them, or written site reports in cursive, I would send them back, because technical writing is already standardized throughout most of the scientific and engineering comunities with which I have been involved to be printed, not written in cursive, because cursive is too individual and messy, and therefore too inexact and prone to causing mistakes.
I think (IMO) everyone should be taought to print legibly.  I have absolutely no use for cursive beyond signing my name.  I know (not an opinion) trying to make me write legibly in cursive was a huge waste of schooling hours in my case.

I mean, where I grew up, ditching shit because we don’t use it any more and it’s just a pain in the ass now is called progress

I think you’ll find that the argument is occurring because there isn’t actually any agreement that “we don’t use it any more and it’s just a pain in the ass”. I use it all the time and consider it as natural as breathing, so I really don’t get what the problem is.

As a counter-example, lots of people regard cooking as something we don’t use any more and which is just a pain in the ass, but that’s usually because they simply haven’t been taught to do it properly. The fact that the current approach to teaching skill X isn’t working very well is not necessarily a good argument for not teaching that skill at all.

In no way did I say kids shouldn’t be taught to use pens and paper.

Well, actually in comment #9, you said Why on earth would you [write by hand]?  I haven’t written anything longer than a two line note by hand in about, I think, 15 years.  Maybe longer.

What this thread looks like to me:

Amanda: I think cursive is useless.
Commenters: Its not that big of a deal, but it is often a bit faster than printing by hand.
Amanda (comment 9): Why would you ever even write by hand at all?
Commenters: Wait, now you’re saying our modern world has no use for writing by hand at all? Let me give you examples where writing in notebooks is necessary.
Amanda: Well, I bet those people print.
Commenters: Maybe, but that isn’t the point anymore. We were responding to the part where you said why would you even write on paper at all.
Amanda: I never said that, why is everyone getting all butthurt?

Look, mostly I admire your posts, but sometimes it seems like you get really angry about people disagreeing with you. Calling people “butthurt” just seems like a way to be dismissive without having to really address the logic involved.

@Tenya #159: unfortunately, all the switch to e-records in my ED did was highlight just how poorly all of our doctors both spell and type.

@bananacat #158: I had a laptop in college, back in the dark ages when wi-fi was just the product of a fevered imagination and all I would have been able to do in class was take notes, but all of my notes were taken by hand anyway. In a tiny seminar, having that upright screen between me and the professor/the rest of the students felt incredibly rude. I also discovered that writing my notes in class followed by transcribing them onto a computer later that day led to way better retention than simply taking notes and then waiting until a finals cram session to look at them again.

I guess my former job—newspapering—is going the way of the dinosaur anyway, but I can’t imagine being able to do it without using cursive or shorthand. for instance, when you go hang out in a neighborhood for a narrative piece, being able to jot down notes without lugging a laptop or tablet is handy. plus I find I remember what is said at meetings better if I can write it as I’m listening. Typing on a keyboard is too distracting.

Bex & oldfeminist - word on the change.  We didn’t give out wrong change, we had just been tought how to properly do it.  It took me an afternoon to teach my daughter when she went from working a grocery with modern registers to a farm stand with an antique.  Either way, her count out had to match receipts, so it was an important skill.

Cursive?  I can take it or leave it as long as the kids learn some writing system that is generally legible.  For me, printing is the way to go as my cursive was never particularly legible.

I think the main things that primary education has to instill are literacy, writing, arithmetic, and problem solving skills.  This is not the thirteenth century - literacy and numeracy should be the bare minimum education that all people in our society achieve.  The method used to teach this, using tables or whatnot, should adapt to the student to ensure proficiency.

Foreign languages and keyboarding skills are not a bad addition to primary education either.

Oh, and I’m not really seeing any “butthurt” on this thread - just general disagreement.

Corner cases, Dunc. Everybody eats.

And if you try explicitly to argue that cursive is as important a skill as cooking, I shall laugh in your face and mock you for a fool.

As a counter-example, lots of people regard cooking as something we don’t use any more and which is just a pain in the ass, but that’s usually because they simply haven’t been taught to do it properly.

When is the last time you killed an animal, skinned it, and cut it up properly?  Those things used to be part of cooking, but now we only bother to teach them to a small percentage of people because most people don’t need to know those things.  What difference does it make if I buy fresh vegetables and chop and clean them and then cook them, or just use some pre-cut frozen vegetables and heat them up?  I don’t bother to grow and harvest the vegetables and nobody is lamenting the loss of that skill.  The difference is just what you personally are used to versus things that see unnecessary even to you.

“A printed personal note is loutish”? You say so, grandpa. I think that’s just a rich people thing.

Not a rich people thing as much as a bourgeois/middle class thing. It’s the basics of civilized etiquette to write someone a handwritten note. I will probably have less of an expectation of that, but I am still going to send a handwritten birthday card or thank you note, written in cursive, to my relatives and friends. I will leave the hand-printed or computer-printed notes to the next generation.

Corner cases, Dunc. Everybody eats.

Eating : cooking
Reading : writing

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that not learning cursive in particular is some great cultural loss, I just really don’t get what the big problem with learning it in the first place is. Maybe that’s just me, maybe it’s the way we’re educated in the UK, but to me, learning cursive is on about the same level as learning to tie your shoelaces. The notion that having to learn it is some kind of hardship is completely alien to me.

Serious question: at what age do they generally start teaching cursive in the US? Here, we usually start around age 6. Maybe it’s one of those things that’s easier if you start young?

@170: Don’t be a fucking moron. They do teach you how analogies work over there, right?

@171: I do grow my own vegetables, and I most certainly am lamenting the loss of that skill. (Fortunately it’s coming back into vogue with a vengeance over here. They’re teaching it in primary schools now.)

There’s very little opportunity for hunting in the UK unfortunately.

I’ve got no problem with cursive not being taught in favor of typing. Typing is a much more valuable skill. Besides, most people I know (and I know none of my generation-I’m 33*) who write in cursive do so in a sloppy way that is difficult to read.** I’d rather see good, fast typing skills and legible printing. Cursive can go the way of extra-curricular arts.

*Most of my contemporaries use a combination of print and cursive, and I think all use cursive for their signature. Signatures, of course, are nearly all unreadable.

**My mother is the one exception. She was not good at spelling, but she was good at penmanship in school. Every letter perfectly spaced, at the same height and exactly as it’s shown in the school books.

@Tyro I’m the only one of 15 or so cousins and “cousins” who still gets gifts from one of my Aunts, because I’m the only one who still sends thank-you notes for Christmas and birthday gifts at all. (Handwritten, because a few lines of handwriting will handily fill up a small card with a pretty picture on the front, but would look short and inadequate when printed on a letter-size sheet, no matter how nice the paper stock.) I think my brother and his wife managed to get their wedding thank-yous done before the anniversary last month. Maybe.

@171: I do grow my own vegetables, and I most certainly am lamenting the loss of that skill. (Fortunately it’s coming back into vogue with a vengeance over here. They’re teaching it in primary schools now.)

That’s because you’re pretentious and privileged enough to have plenty of time and room to do it.  But you certainly don’t grow all of your food, so lose the holier-than-thou attitude and stop lamenting that others don’t have a skill that you don’t have anyway.  When you start growing and grinding all of your own wheat and making your own bread, then maybe you can judge others for being lazier or less skilled than you, but most likely you’d just realize how much of a freaking time sink it is and that it’s actually a good thing that not everybody does this because if everyone grew and cooked all their own food from scratch, nobody would ever get anything else done.  It’s more efficient when someone else grows enough broccoli for multiple people, and likewise it’s more efficient for someone to cut and clean enough broccoli for multiple people.  Having a garden is certainly a fun hobby, and it’s a great thing for people to do for fun, but most people could never grow enough to meet their entire need, and plenty of people simply don’t like to do it.  So I don’t lament that farming has become a cute little hobby instead of a major life skill, and I don’t really care if people want to learn it or not because it’s just not important.

You really just can’t grasp the idea that just because you personally enjoy something doesn’t mean that everyone else should be just like you.

Comment #20 - I wish I had been taught short hand! It would have been great for taking notes in school, and later I actually took meeting minutes as part of my job and I would have loved to know short hand then.

As with most other people, I don’t really see butthurt, just different perspectives.  My perspective re: cursive - it’s unnecessary to spend hours teaching kids to *write* it, but it’s probably worth an hour or so to teach them to *read* it, given that many adults still use the form.

There is some hyperbolic/myopic language (particularly from Amanda), such as “why on earth would you” ever write rather than type.  As has been pointed out, that’s perhaps true for some people; for instance, bloggers.  Thus, it’s clearly argument from the “I don’t use this, therefore it’s useless”, which Amanda derides in others.  Furthermore, for the many, many people who will go into any sort of scientific field, it’s completely inaccurate:

1) You just can’t take typed notes in any higher math class or chemistry class.  There are tons and tons of symbols, and even shortcuts still aren’t fast enough because they take multiple keystrokes, and the professor can’t move slowly enough for students to use them, because the class would never get through the material.  Plus, last time I checked, there isn’t any way to diagram out electron movement with a keyboard.  Stylus and tablet, sure…but that’s still writing.

2) Similarly, in a lab notebook, you have to write.  The whole point is to document everything you’re doing, so you need something in which to paste images, etc.  Furthermore, you need to at least take notes on a printed protocol when you first do it.  Your laptop + carcinogenic compounds = bad.

3) For that matter, all such STEM people do need to know and use their multiplication tables.  Life is much, much easier when 8x7 is automatic and doesn’t require hunting for a calculator.  Furthermore, if you’re going to teach young kids any math at all, it’ll have to be memorization-based.  They don’t have the cognitive capacity (i.e., abstract thinking) to do equations.  So, again, this is a valuable skill (even if it isn’t for Amanda) that is worth being taught, but probably shouldn’t be emphasized as much as it currently is.

/soapbox

@177:

You really just can’t grasp the idea that just because you personally enjoy something doesn’t mean that everyone else should be just like you.

Actually, I totally can. You seem to be reading something into my comments which simply isn’t there, as far as I can see. I think an understanding of how to produce at least some of your own food, from seed to plate, is a worthwhile thing to have, for all sorts of reasons. However, I don’t think that not having it implies some kind of moral failing on anybody’s part, and I’m certainly not judgemental about it. There’s lots of shit that I think is worth knowing that most people don’t know. It’s not their fault, we just happen to live in societies with an overly-narrow attitude to education, in my view. There’s lots of stuff that people never get to find out whether they like or not, because they’re never given the opportunity. I think giving people opportunities to try lots of different things is a good thing.

If you want to rant at me about “the holier-than-thou attitude”, you might want to invest in a mirror first, and maybe dial back your defensiveness a bit.

I can see your point with multiplication tables, and I certainly think they shouldn’t be the way multiplication is taught. However. Once you get to more advanced maths (and I mean high school at the latest) it becomes a huge advantage, as far as time, resources and stress goes, to be able to recognize squares and factors on sight. I don’t know how to achieve this without a long familiarity with multiplication tables. (and I don’t think “have them do everything on a calculator” is very efficient, or a good way to teach maths either - although I do think calculators are part of the solution)

I’m not exactly defending the way math is taught in elementary school, because certainly learning the multiplication table by rote and forgetting it after the test won’t help either. I want a better solution too. I’m just not sure that “stop learning the multiplication table” is that solution.

@174: I’m not being. Wanted to ensure the same of you; I’m never too confident of that around here.

Why do I think it’d be better not to teach cursive? Not because it’s a hardship, because, unpleasant as I remember it being, it really isn’t. Rather, because they teach it here around the same age they do there, and because it’s a skill with only niche applications, it’s a waste of the scarce time during which humans learn best. If you’re going to teach a communication skill, teach keyboarding and some basic clue about how to figure out a computer—yes, even to the kids from families too poor for a PC of their own; in fact, perhaps especially to them, as they won’t have the opportunity at home to acquire what’s already becoming as necessary a job-hunting and -keeping skill, at least in the US, as simple literacy.

Caravelle: You could start, I think, by hiring math teachers who know the first fucking thing about math. Maybe it’s changed in the years since I went to school, but I never encountered one who even seemed to have a clue until the 11th grade, and he was ineffective for entirely different reasons. (Mainly because he was a burned-out calculus professor who really shouldn’t have been exposed to high school students at his time of life.)

Note: By “didn’t seem to have a clue” I mean couldn’t answer questions, never did anything outside the curriculum, complained out loud in front of a classroom in some cases about having been reassigned to teach math and not knowing anything about it, and like that—shit that isn’t remotely equivocal, shit even a ten-year-old can pick up on easy. I’m old enough by now that the fact I still suck at math is nobody’s fault but my own; that said, though, I suspect I’d be at least decent at it if someone had been able to give me a decent start with anything more than the most basic of arithmetic.

Kirjava :

Furthermore, if you’re going to teach young kids any math at all, it’ll have to be memorization-based.

Not so. Adding and subtracting can be taught visually (and indeed I can’t imagine how teaching them any other way would leave children with an understanding of the concept). Moreover, there are many tricks that make adding easier that can also be taught, and can also be taught visually or tactile-ly. I don’t remember ever learning “addition tables” or “subtracting tables” (although I think my brothers learned some). Sure, re-adding things every time isn’t as fast as knowing the answer automatically is, but re-adding things isn’t that time-consuming and you’ll do it so often you end up knowing the answer anyway.

Multiplying, now that isn’t as fast to re-derive from scratch. That said it can also be taught visually, and there are tons of tricks, that I don’t remember learning from teachers - I actually remember learning some from older students, which surprises me - to help derive the answer to one multiplication problem from related multiplication problems.

I think knowing those tricks is much more useful than knowing the multiplication table, because for one thing they help re-calculate the multiplication table, but mostly because knowing those tricks, and knowing why they work, leads to a deeper understanding of mathematics.

Of course this is all a bit idealized - I don’t have much experience teaching multiplication to students (just adding and subtracting - but that was to kids who don’t have number conservation; I expect that teaching multiplication to older kids is very different), so I don’t know what the best methods are to teach those things to children, and which can actually be expected to work in a classroom environment with imperfect teachers.

But in principle I don’t see that teaching mathematics to young children “has to” be memorization-based.

@183: OK, fair enough - I picked the cookery example because it’s a topic which regularly attracts roughly similar controversies around here, only with Amanda taking the opposite view, not because the topics themselves are directly comparable.

I can totally see your point that there is a question about where best to fit basic keyboard and computing skills into the curriculum. That certainly wasn’t an issue when I was at school…

I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to see keyboard and mouse go the way of the mechanical typewriter over the next couple of decades though. We’re on the cusp of the next big computer interface revolution, and I don’t think anybody knows where it’s going to end up. Writing by hand (in whatever form), however, is a skill that has very much stood the test of time, and I don’t honestly see it going away any time soon (if anything, the touchscreen revolution might well do for handwriting what the computing revolution did for typing). I guess the thing is that I don’t see cursive specifically as being a distinct skill - it’s just part of learning to write, for me.

One of the first things students of spelling will learn is that English is a patchwork monster whose component languages can still be discerned, and that can be quite interesting and informative.

Word. Most of my vocabulary skills (perfect language scores on the SAT and ACT, bitchez) came not from memorizing vocab words themselves, but from—HORRORS—rote-memorizing Greek, Latin, Norse, and Old English word roots. Boring as shit. Endless flash cards. Wouldn’t call it “torment,” but it was certainly not my most favoritest thing evar.

As adults, though, my classmates and I (we are still in touch) barely ever need to touch a dictionary.

Kirjava -
If you had turned in your Physics or chemistry notebooks to either of the colleges I attended (both state universities - 1980s inland west coast and mid-late 1990s MA) you would have failed the assignment.  My lab partner for Physics at the later did, twice, for lab reports.  Even in high school in the 1970s and 1980s, we were required to do our lab notebooks in print, not cursive, handwriting.  Writing on paper /= cursive.
If you gave me drawings, site notebooks or survey books in cursive, I would make you redo them before I accepted them - as would most of my drafters, site engineers and managers.  I am currently a deployment managing engineer. 
My daughter worked in the pharma inductry for 5 years and her notebooks and other documentation were required to be print, not cursive as well. 
Are you a student or a working STEM professional?

Actually, I suppose if your cursive really was as legible as most print, no one would care.  But most people’s really, really isn’t, no matter what they think.

Wow, can’t believe people are so defensive about cursive of all things.

First of all, gonna go ahead and say that looking at primary historical documents is not a valid reason for everyone to learn cursive unless everyone should also learn archaic vocabulary, archaic spelling, and archaic definitions of still common words.

While I don’t know anyone who takes math or science notes on a computer, I also don’t know anyone who takes their math notes in cursive. So that’s one anecdote against the others.

That said, I can only imagine what my signature would look like if I had never been taught cursive. My signature is the one thing that I still always write in cursive, and it is both barely legible and extremely distinguishable. Most people would have a really hard time convincingly forging it. I was the victim of some fraudulent activity involving my checking account in the 1990s, and it only took the fraud investigator one look to immediately determine that my signature had been forged on some stolen checks.

Most likely the reason fraud investigator was able to immediately determine this actually has nothing to do with your signature.

The investigator probably looked at your account and saw a typical hallmark of fraudulent activity. I’m not sure what that hallmark would be for check related fraud. As an example, for credit cards they might see super small purchase, immediately followed by a huge purchase. Then they probably checked the signature and saw an obviously bogus signature. They probably checked the signature against your signature, but didn’t really need to because it was obviously fraudulent.

Your bank probably watches your account for hallmarks of fraud. They don’t watch signatures because you probably accidentally produce a half dozen bogus-looking signatures a year because it is impossible to produce a consistent signature on a faulty touch screen.

Here are some examples of what I’ve seen presented as a signature in cases of fraud in descending order of frequency:
- A straight line
- Something completely illegible that looks more like tangled up yarn than a signature
- A curvy tilde-like line
- An X
- Dots
- name on card printed
- name on card in generic cursive, no attempt to ape someone else’s writing
- The day of the week the purchase was being made
- A name other than the name on the card

In two years I have never seen:
- A forged signature

The way fraud works today, the person stealing your account information may never have even seen you or your signature. They could even be using your card in a setting that does not require a signature, such as the online purchases.

Besides that, it’s possible to have a unique signature without cursive and an easily forged one with.

If students surf the web during her class then there are two possibilities: 1) The student is irresponsible and either isn’t cut out for that major or they need to fail a test and learn to pay attention and stop surfing the web or 2) The teacher’s lecture are not interesting or useful and students can easily pass without paying attention, in which case she shouldn’t care if students are surfing the web as long as they are learning the material.

3) I have whatever is on your god damned screen flickering in the corner of my eye all through class. Not sure if that’s an issue in large lecture classes but it annoyed the piss out of me all through school.

ARGH, #179, I’ve already made this friggin point, but I guess I’ll make it again.

1. Cursive is not necessary for taking notes, and for a lot of people is NOT that fast. When I’m writing as fast as I can, I have more of a hybrid style with some cursive-ish letter forms (like my f’s and l’s) and some printish letter forms (like r’s). It’s a slanted hand rather than a cursive hand, because lots of the letters we are taught in cursive are not actually faster to write; having to lift the pen is not death to quick writing. Seems like it would be better to teach people a smooth printing style rather than block letters.

And in any case, how many people end up taking higher level math or chem classes? Not many! I say this as a scientist: we are a minority.

2. See above. No one is saying that handwriting should go away. Anyone who writes in cursive in a lab notebook is doing something very wrong.

3. Actually, as has been said multiple times already, lots of us STEM people can do simple multiplication in our heads because we’ve had a lot of practice through actual use, not because we were taught our multiplication tables in elementary school.

Oh, and for good measure:

Furthermore, if you’re going to teach young kids any math at all, it’ll have to be memorization-based.  They don’t have the cognitive capacity (i.e., abstract thinking) to do equations.

If you are teaching math by memorization, you are not teaching math. Most 2nd and 3rd graders can’t do equations per se, because that’s a ridiculously complicated idea for them; but most of them ARE completely capable of a conceptual understanding of basic arithmetic functions such as addition, subtraction and multiplication. There’s no need to teach multiplication tables in order to teach multiplication, which is good because teaching them doesn’t teach multiplication at all. Why not teach the kids how to do it and present them with lots of practice that will ultimately make those simple, common multiplication problems stick in their memories? Which, incidentally, will not 100% fun all the time for all kids - the argument is not simply that multiplication tables are bad because they’re not fun, it’s that they’re bad because they’re not fun AND don’t actually teach math.

Katherine :

Are there really 150+ comments on whether or not to teach children joined up handwriting?  Is it something unique to US schooling that makes learning joined up writing (which I assume is what is meant by “cursive”) a horrible horrible experience?  I don’t think I’ve ever had a conversation with anyone here in the UK about how awful it was learning to write.

I don’t think the issue is that it’s “awful”. To give you an example, I learned cursive in elementary school. I remember being surprised because the letters I was learning were different from those I had known before (presumably from learning to read). But I promptly forgot about my surprise and proceeded into my life as a person who knows how to write.

Then I started teaching reading and writing to pre-schoolers, and it actually took months before I realized that we were teaching them printed letters - and that those were significantly different from the cursive I’d learnt in elementary school, which I still used but half-assedly (basically, around eigth grade I saw a girl who took printed notes, and I thought she had the prettiest handwriting so I tried to emulate her, leading to my current ugly half-cursive half-print handwriting). To the point where the kids often didn’t understand my writing - obviously, we weren’t using the same letters.

So now I think it’s important that children learn that letters can be written differently, and that they learn it fairly early on (and it isn’t just cursive vs print - there’s also the two kinds of “a” for example). However I’m not sure cursive is so important a skill that it needs to be taught to children instead of printing. If you were going to teach children a useful handwriting skill I’d suggest teaching shorthand. That’s something else I was never taught formally; I just picked up some abbreviations from teachers and other students.

In addition, from what I remember of higher education and what I hear of teachers today, illegible handwriting is a true and significant problem. And if cursive is more likely to yield illegible handwriting I’d say that’s a positive reason to stop teaching it.

3) For that matter, all such STEM people do need to know and use their multiplication tables.  Life is much, much easier when 8x7 is automatic and doesn’t require hunting for a calculator.  Furthermore, if you’re going to teach young kids any math at all, it’ll have to be memorization-based.  They don’t have the cognitive capacity (i.e., abstract thinking) to do equations.  So, again, this is a valuable skill (even if it isn’t for Amanda) that is worth being taught, but probably shouldn’t be emphasized as much as it currently is.

I know there are a lot of comments so I can’t blame you for skipping some, but please go back and read my comment at #68.  I have taught children who are too young to go to school how to do basic arithmetic.  The only memorization required is counting, which is only required up to about 21 or so (or up to 11 for languages where the pattern starts early).  It’s easy to teach most kids arithmetic if it actually has meaning.  Kids that are too young to even write the numbers can easily figure out 12/3 if I present it to them in the real world, and it doesn’t take them long to catch on.  I start with 12 toys divided between me, the child, and my cat and show them how it’s done.  Then when I say “If you have six bananas and three monkeys,” the kid will literally shout out the answer “2” before I even have a chance to finish asking the question and say “how many do they each get?”  It’s a small sample size, maybe 10 or 12, but every single one of those kids picked it up really fast.  The concept is more important than the numbers.

Also, I’m in a STEM field.  Guess what?  We do have multiplication facts memorized.  But I and most of my colleagues absolutely did not remember those facts by intentional rote memorization.  We learned them through using them so often that they became meaningful and stuck in our brains without any intentional effort to memorize them.  That’s the difference between learning and memorization.

Lily :

Besides that, it’s possible to have a unique signature without cursive and an easily forged one with.

My grandmother, who worked as a secretary and was regularly required to forge her boss’s’ signature (hmmm… that sounds wrong now that I say it…), told me that a carefully-written signature was much harder to forge than a fast scrawl. I always found that surprising, but then I’ve never tried to forge anyone’s handwriting. Submitted for your consideration…

Word. Most of my vocabulary skills (perfect language scores on the SAT and ACT, bitchez) came not from memorizing vocab words themselves, but from—HORRORS—rote-memorizing Greek, Latin, Norse, and Old English word roots. Boring as shit. Endless flash cards. Wouldn’t call it “torment,” but it was certainly not my most favoritest thing evar.

As adults, though, my classmates and I (we are still in touch) barely ever need to touch a dictionary.

Huh. I also got a perfect SAT verbal score, and didn’t spend a minute rote-memorizing a damn thing. And to this day, I too, seldom need to check a word in the dictionary. So, no memorized roots, at least not consciously, but I did spend my entire childhood with my nose in a book. I’d say yeah, that sounds like horrors indeed; I think I got the better end of that deal.

So maybe there’s more than one way to effectively learn these things than by rote, or by deliberate memorization at all? Maybe there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach? I’m not trying to say memorizing things isn’t useful or important, but simply doing flashcard memorization doesn’t work for a lot of people, because flashcard-type ideas aren’t very sticky.

We’re on the cusp of the next big computer interface revolution, and I don’t think anybody knows where it’s going to end up.

I don’t think anyone even knows yet where it’s going to start; has anyone identified a paradigm which stands a chance of displacing the present one? I don’t buy handwriting recognition in that role because it is not a new paradigm. Might become part of one, I suppose, but even once the technology really arrives, typing is so much faster that I can’t imagine stylus scribbles getting any real uptake except maybe generationally; handwriting has held on not because it’s particularly efficient, which it mostly isn’t even in cursive, but because it’s always been necessary. (I don’t see it vanishing any time soon, but then neither does anyone else; I’m still trying to figure out where the hell this thread got the idea Ms. Marcotte was advocating the end of handwriting entirely, as opposed to the end of a waste of good learning time.)

Well, what?—I never took an SAT, but I also scored a perfect 36 on the ACT language section, and I wouldn’t know an Old Norse word root if it jumped up out of the ground and slapped me. Rote memorization may be of benefit, but it is certainly not required.

Seconding bananacat, too: I can handle what’s usually on a multiplication table in my head, but that’s not because I spent any time paying attention to multiplication tables when I was a kid. Hey, whoever’s arguing that you have to teach this stuff by rote memorization because kids are too stupid to understand the concepts behind it? Do you even remember your childhood? Or are you just a closet Prussian who believes children have to be bent into the proper shape if they’re to grow up an asset to the state?

Bagelsan :

Typing “the quick brown fox” a million times did nothing that breathlessly exchanged middle-school-girl fanfics didn’t do a thousand times better. :D

I’m not up to the latest on typing methods, but if you learned to type by typing “the quick brown fox” a million times I think someone must have been doin it wrong.

I learned to type on a computer game, for some reason my mother decided I should learn touch-typing and I’m endlessly grateful to her, because it’s still a skill that sets me apart from others and I would never have learnt it at school. And I didn’t even finish the game; it’s true my current speed is due to long practice. However I don’t think I would’ve learned the basics on my own.

IIRC it involved typing specific combinations of letters using two fingers, and they’d add letters and fingers progressively. It’s absolutely mind-numbing in principle but I think making it a computer game alleviates that to a good extent.

Caravelle, when you say that the ability to touch-type “sets you apart from others”, what exactly do you mean by that? I mean, I can’t even remember the last time I met somebody under forty who didn’t know their way around a keyboard without having to hunt and peck. What about having been trained to touch type, instead of having simply developed the skill through using keyboards all the damn time, is different?

Note: I never used any touch-typing trainers because at that age they were the most boring thing I could possibly imagine doing with a computer. Yet I can easily sustain 90 WPM with a reasonably low error rate, or 60-70 WPM if I’m correcting errors as I make them.

There is no “basics”. There’s just muscle memory. The typing trainer just gives you a shortcut.

(And it’s not even a shortcut! It’s just drill.)

I think it is probably a better use of time for schools to abandon teaching cursive, but there are many people who still use it - I do on a regular basis, as I like to write letters to my aunt who is deaf. I am amused, but not surprised, to see that the things I excelled at effortlessly during my school years have become irrelevant.

Multiplication…I had to memorize tables, and I’m glad I did because I never would have made it past all my pre-high school math classes if I had to think about it every time. I understood what the purpose of multiplication was, but I had to be an adult taking a remedial pre-algebra class in college to finally understand the patterns that occur with numbers. I am just so left-brained, math was a huge problem for me until I was an adult.

Comment #189: helen w. h.:

I didn’t say you had to do notebooks in CURSIVE; I said you had to do them BY HAND.  I said this in response to Amanda’s comment wondering why anyone would write by hand anymore.

And yes, when I worked in industry, printing was required.  In academia, no one really cares, but I don’t know anyone who does a notebook in cursive.  In any case, it’s irrelevant to my comment.

Americans of the US-born, white, middle class variety tend to regard solving tasks by doing memorization-heavy rote learning is somehow “cheating.”

As I said, I don’t even think that eliminating required cursive classes is a bad thing, my I hardly regarded the penmanship lessons as “torment.” I even say this as someone who is left-handed, meaning that the lessons were not really “meant” for me.

These things are skills like any other. You want to learn how to shoot free throws in basketball? You do it by shooting free throws over and over again.

Americans of the US-born, white, middle class variety tend to regard solving tasks by doing memorization-heavy rote learning is somehow “cheating.”

I actually think it’s just the opposite.  In high school, so many students tried to make it through science classes by memorizing equations and then plugging numbers into them.  And they could pass a test but never understand what actually went on, but the teachers encouraged it anyway.  And this was a white middle-class school.  I was never good at memorization so I did mediocre in physics until I took calculus and understood where the equations for velocity and acceleration actually came from.  But in 7th grade I excelled at comparing fractions and could do it in my head in a snap, and my teacher actually told me not to tell the other kids about it because it would confuse them, since reasoning it out and visualizing it so different than memorization that it would just seem bizarre to them.  My teacher did it in a way that I felt like I was in some secret club of understanding concepts, but the other students preferred and were expected to use memorization and they probably did feel like I was the one who was “cheating”.

Tyro :

One of the things I’ve been blessed with is the fact that I didn’t understand math intuitively. A lot of concepts didn’t “take” for me, and instead of complaining about how this was tormenting, I just did problems over and over again—by rote—until it became second nature.

But see, what if it hadn’t ?
Some people get something; their brain understands the abstract principle immediately. Others have to practice and practice before their brain generalizes the abstract principle. Still others practice and practice and their brain never comes to generalize the principle. They’ll get good results because they know the answer by rote, or they’ll get terrible results and think they’re stupid.

I think it is possible to get people to understand the abstract principle offhand or with limited repetition, instead of hoping they’ll generalize it subconsciously with enough practice (which is more likely to happen with people who enjoy the subject anyway). I think if we understand why something is true, and how different children learn, it should be possible to make that process of getting it much more efficient.

I think memorizing and repetition can be important because it enables one to do things faster and more accurately - but I don’t think it should be relied upon to teach actual principles if we can avoid it.

Tyro, where does the class, race, and nationality come into it? Is there some other paradigm that’s all about rote memorization and it’s blowing the socks off us, only we’re just too provincial to know about it?

Your example proves nothing except that drill trains muscle memory, and that’s not even in contention. Can you demonstrate that rote memorization is a good method for learning cognitive skills?

Caravelle: Thank you! The way you teach abstract concepts like mathematical operations is not by making somebody do them without understanding a thousand times in a row and just sort of hoping they’ll pick up the common thread by osmosis. Why is this such a controversial assertion?

Aaron :

Caravelle, when you say that the ability to touch-type “sets you apart from others”, what exactly do you mean by that? I mean, I can’t even remember the last time I met somebody under forty who didn’t know their way around a keyboard without having to hunt and peck. What about having been trained to touch type, instead of having simply developed the skill through using keyboards all the damn time, is different?

Oh, I’m sure it doesn’t set me apart from others everywhere ! It just has been my experience in university and afterwards that people would marvel at my typing speed and ability to do it without looking at the keys often enough to surprise me. It’s not as if I’m good at touch-typing.

It may be that in France in my generation computers were used much less in school than in the US - outside of some lame computer classes I don’t think I’ve ever needed a computer for schoolwork until three years after high school. So maybe it’s just that young people of my generation (i.e. late twenties) didn’t need to type in great volumes until university.

RE #184: My daughter is in school to be an elementary school teacher, and she is consistently horrified when she visits classrooms by what passes for math education. In one class she was observing, the teacher said “Okay, kids, today we’re going to start the unit on fractions. I know this is really scary, but we’ll get through it.” I would have given up before I started had my teacher presented the subject in that manner! I think a lot of elementary school teachers are afraid of math, and pass that on to their students.

Heaven knows one can’t learn to be proficient in both keyboard and cursive.  I know that, when I was a child, I learned to write in cursive, and then I learned to type when I was 12, but I was and remain exceptional.  Since the rest of America’s children seem incapable of learning both, then we should eliminate one.  Yeah, the proposal makes perfect sense.  A dumbed down society is a better society.

One of my very good friends in college said that, in the Dark Ages, people who could do math were considered magicians because it was such a rare skill.  He said that would be the case again one day when calculators became so common that we no longer taught people how to do arithmetic.  I suppose the same will be true of cursive writing, which will become a kind of secret code language.  These are the days of miracle and wonder.  Medicine is magical and magical is art.  It’s the boy in the bubble and the baby with the baboon’s heart.

@205 - go back and read your comment again.  You said cursive in the 1st paragraph.  You said write but did not say by hand, print or cursive in your comment about notebooks.  If write by hand was your meaning, we agree, and I apologize for misunderstanding.

And now a story from my personal history.  I was in the eighth grade back before they discovered electricity and we had a new teacher come in for the second half of the year.  He was, and remains, the stupidest person I ever had as a teacher at any level of education and when I think of him, as I sometimes do, I think, “This man shouldn’t have been allowed inside a classroom to learn, let alone to teach.”  His name was Matthew Hinson.  Hinson, on his first day, taught us about compound interest, except he said that, if you had an annual interest of 5% and you put $100 in your account, then you would have $5 in interest after one year and $25 in interest after five years.  I raised my hand to correct him and was told in no uncertain terms that I was wrong and I should STFU.

This was in 1972.  Teachers today are no worse than they ever were.  There have always been good and bad teachers.  They are still mainly good and the constant attacks on teachers are the work of scoundrels.

Also, I’m in a STEM field.  Guess what?  We do have multiplication facts memorized.  But I and most of my colleagues absolutely did not remember those facts by intentional rote memorization.  We learned them through using them so often that they became meaningful and stuck in our brains without any intentional effort to memorize them.  That’s the difference between learning and memorization.

When I was taught introductory mineralogy, on the final exam (where mineral samples were passed around the room) you received a higher score if you listed the diagnostic properties of the mineral and got the name of the mineral wrong than if you simply nailed every ID by just writing the correct answer and didn’t note the properties. Every time that final exam was given there were some ringers among the samples: a common mineral that was not the colour you’d find it in 99% of the time. The point was to show that simply memorizing the common features of a given mineral wasn’t enough: you had to know what to look at so that (a) if you couldn’t identify the mineral, you knew how to look it up, and (b) if it was a mineral you should know the properties of, you’d be able to recognize that something was different with that particular sample.

The way you teach abstract concepts like mathematical operations is not by making somebody do them without understanding a thousand times in a row and just sort of hoping they’ll pick up the common thread by osmosis.

You can’t expect anyone to competently do math if you just teach them the concept and expect them to be able to solve problems.

The nature of mediocrity is that most everyone can be mediocre. What separates the mediocre in math classes from the people who can solve lots of math problems is that the latter group drilled themselves on it over and over and over again. The mediocre ones were those who told themselves and were told by their parents that they’re just “not good at math.” and those who do get good at math are considered to be not really good at math, forgetting that memorizing and drilling are inherent parts of the learning process. No one wants to feel their kids are being “traumatized.”

Yes, people who just get taught times tables and don’t get to do the “fun parts” of math are missing out, but the people who are going to grasp the concepts without a lot of drilling are rare beasts.

bananacat :

I was lucky that my chemistry teacher in high school never made me memorize a periodic table.  I still can’t list all the elements and yet I excelled at chemistry and became a chemist.  But I have memorized facts about oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, and a few others simply by using them so often.

I memorized the periodic table in eighth grade because I’d bought a magazine with a cool periodic table poster (it had the Lanthanides and Actinides IN the table, which was perfect because I never really understood before what they were doing outside it) and I decided it would be awesome.

Later in high school my class was made to memorize the first twenty elements of the table, so I blew that off. And also, during the chemistry exam to get into engineering school I was able to smugly ignore the section that gave the atomic number of the arcane element under consideration.

Other than that, it’s been mostly useful for crossword puzzles.

Oh, and a useful mantra to recite when I was bored or waiting for something.

Seriously, I don’t regret memorizing it for a second and I’m glad I know it, but do people actually memorize the whole table in school ?

Jenny Dreadful :

Does anyone else remember being to taught to print in the “d’nealian” style? It was supposed to make it easier for you to learn cursive later on. You made your capital As like lower case As and you put loops on your lower case g’s, y’s, and q’s. It was a terrible way to teach kids how to write, I swear that all it ever did was make my printing illegible.

*raises hand* Me ! Me ! I never thought it was terrible, but then I never thought things could be different. Now I still wouldn’t call it “terrible” but I’ll agree it turned out to be rather superfluous for me.

It’s sometimes amusing for me to remember primary school, and all the things that were important then, and now they’re hardly part of my life at all.

Scrumby :

It’s the one where this is the word, this is the definition, this is how it’s spelled, memorize it. That’s not a dominant teaching method but comes back in every couple of years when parents start freaking out that their kids can’t spell or define words correctly. Then they realize that kids have a harder time learning new words and start pushing phonetics again. I always felt phonetics was better for actually enabling kids to read; you don’t get stuck on words you don’t know.

I don’t understand why the debate is always framed that way. How is it not obviously both? The alphabet is a phonetic system. English spelling is an abomination as far as sign-sound correspondence goes. Someone once pointed me to a site that defended English spelling because it was guessable 85% of the time - people, THAT IS TERRIBLE for a supposedly phonetic spelling system.

So anyway, when you see a number like “85%”, it’s obvious that neither all-phonetic nor all-word-based methods are going to work. You need both. I mean, insofar as either works on their own it’s because phonetic learners learn the exceptions by rote by encountering them and word learners abstract the phonetic principles through practice. I.e. they’re using both anyway.

In high school, so many students tried to make it through science classes by memorizing equations and then plugging numbers into them.  And they could pass a test but never understand what actually went on, but the teachers encouraged it anyway.

Then, like many physics students, they’ll hit the university course where the professor cheerfully informs them that the tests and exam will include a handout where all the common formulae will be provided, and of course they can bring a calculator, and they think it “Man, that will be a breeze” and then they hit the first problem…and suddenly realize they have no bloody clue what they have to do.

Tyro :

You can’t expect anyone to competently do math if you just teach them the concept and expect them to be able to solve problems.

Ah, but that’s not what Aaron said is it ?
Knowing a concept and knowing how to apply it are two different things. Being able to apply it consistently and accurately is another thing again.

However, what you talked about was learning a principle through mindless repetition. Human brains are capable of learning that way, and I’m glad that for you it worked reliably enough for you to end up good at maths, but everyone isn’t that lucky.

Moreover, applying a principle one understands is much less unpleasant and stressful than applying a principle one doesn’t understand. It will also lead to more accurate results - repetition helps accuracy, but understanding what kind of result you should get and why enables one to check one’s result, which helps even more.

Tyro, there’s a difference between “constant drill without context is not the best way” and “all drill everywhere is evil no matter what”. For one thing, I’m not contending the latter.

@213: Oh for Christ’s sake.

Then, like many physics students, they’ll hit the university course where the professor cheerfully informs them that the tests and exam will include a handout where all the common formulae will be provided, and of course they can bring a calculator, and they think it “Man, that will be a breeze” and then they hit the first problem…and suddenly realize they have no bloody clue what they have to do.

Exactly.  And our school system is so biased toward rote memorization that it’s setting students up to fail.  So anyone who thinks we’re snobby and biased against rote memorization is clearly out of touch with reality.

Amanda, you went from asserting that schools should not teach arcane skills with limited practical application to arguing that schools should not teach things that kids find difficult and boring, because requiring—requiring—a student to apply some effort without being instantly gratified constitutes “torment” and crushes children’s souls, kills their creativity and turns them into obedient, beaten-down drones.  And you also said this:

“I wish I’d learned Spanish instead.”

Really, Amanda?  Well, I am surprised, because learning a foreign language involves more rote memorization than any other skill set I can think of.  I realize, people who don’t actually know any foreign languages often like to say that the “correct” way to learn one is to do so “naturally”—by reading books, watching movies and interacting with native speakers.  Alas, were that the case, we would all be polyglots.  In reality, the “natural” method works only for students who are already fairly advanced and possess a basic command of the language.  Acquiring that basic command entails mind-boggling amounts of memorization and repetitive drills—and a lot of time and patience.  No, sorry, your vocabulary won’t learn itself.  Memorizing word lists is tedious enough, but verb conjugations?  In a Romance language?  Fuggedaboutit.  Also, to the extent that you claim that learning should be “exciting”, I have to say that the beginning phase of learning a foreign language is massively underwhelming—and it’s a very long phase, at that.  You would have to do years of short, choppy sentences and embarrassingly stupid dialogue scenes (“I am a student.  Are you a student?  I like bread.  And you?”) before you get to do exciting stuff and exercise your creativity.  And when it comes to humiliation and feeling like an idiot, that’s just par for the course when you are learning a foreign language.  Don’t get me wrong—having the ability to communicate in several languages is way cool and an amazing thrill.  But getting there involves years of hard, repetitive, tedious work—precisely the kind of mental exercise that you claim is detrimental to children.

Your “torment” argument has actually been the prevailing philosophy of secondary education in this country for several decades.  The idea that mental exertion without immediate gratification damages a child’s self-esteem and extinguishes his creativity has lead to the abysmal scaling down of math, science and—incidentally—foreign language programs.  It is the major reason why American school students at all levels are among the least educated and capable in the world, and certainly the worst among the industrialized nations.

I’m 213.  What do you mean?  The magical part, or the part about learning both?  Just asking.  Not looking for an argument.

I write in a hybrid cursive/print, but as far as handwriting goes, what matters is whether you can do it efficiently and be legible. Who cares whether that means cursive or not?

But you really do have to memorize multiplication tables and other such things, one way or the other. And there’s a lot of evidence that repeating something many, many times, over and over again, is the way to internalize it. Repeat performance really does reinforce the facts, and once you’ve internalized the basic stuff, you can build on it from there.

Great job Amanda, now that you’ve mistakenly gifted us such incisive thinking on Pandagon, rather than its initial destination at Slate, you’d look like some SEO content farmer if you posted it there now.

Nah, just kidding.  This was an idiotic screed.

Also love the liberal usage of ‘butthurt,’ a term that evokes equal parts homophobia and the trivialization of rape.

Your “torment” argument has actually been the prevailing philosophy of secondary education in this country for several decades.  The idea that mental exertion without immediate gratification damages a child’s self-esteem and extinguishes his creativity has lead to the abysmal scaling down of math, science and—incidentally—foreign language programs.

Rote memorization is torment specifically because it doesn’t give any “gratification” at all.  It’s simply not a useful way to learn most things.  I’ll give you an example.  I know what 12 squared is.  I don’t know what 11 squared is.  There was a time when I memorized that tidbit, and then promptly forgot it.  But 12 squared has come up often enough because I live in the united states and we still deal with units like dozens and grosses.  I don’t encounter grosses every day or even every year, but it only takes a few times of actual, useful, real life exposure for 12^2=144 to stick in my brain.  All that time I spent memorizing 11^2 was wasted.  You clearly do not understand how learning works. 
The facts that are applicable to actual things will just naturally stick, while stuff that is intentionally memorized will disappear as soon as the test over.  This isn’t about a bunch of spoiled princesses who don’t want to do any work; it’s about doing work that actually achieves something, rather than doing tedious pointless work just for the sake of some ridiculous philosophy of doing work for character or something.  But if you care about making those little brats work hard and suffer more than you do about actually doing things that are actually useful and helpful, then I guess you won’t understand.

Bananacat, have you by any chance read John Taylor Gatto? If not, I’d recommend to you his Underground History of American Schooling, which is free to read online.

Also, I love the conservatroll usage of “homophobia” and “the trivialization of rape”, neither of which they give a fuck about, and both of which they crib from their betters in a laughable attempt to argue that a little mud on a shoe sole is exactly the same as wallowing up to your neck in a pool of rotting pig shit.

And DBK: I mainly meant the magical stuff, but if I’d had a little more patience, I’d have asked whether we still teach kids to use typewriters or Napier’s bones.

“Rote memorization is torment specifically because it doesn’t give any “gratification” at all.  “
“You clearly do not understand how learning works.”
“But if you care about making those little brats work hard and suffer more than you do about actually doing things that are actually useful and helpful, then I guess you won’t understand.”

Bananacat:  First of all, I said “mental exertion without immediate gratification”, not “rote memorization”.  Just sayin’.

Second, I clearly do not understand how learning works, which is why I am only fluent in four languages.  Foolishly, I thought that while understanding how a language’s grammar works is essential, you also need to, you know, actually memorize words, and lots of them.  For example, if you understand that Russian is a synthetic language where words are formed by combining roots with a few dozen different suffixes, prefixes and endings, and you know that the root of for woven containers is “korz”, you still have no idea how to say “little basket”, or even simple “basket”, unless you actually memorize the word.  But, clearly this was idiotic on my part, and had I not spent all that time memorizing vocabulary and conjugations in addition to learning about grammar, I would be able to acquire foreign languages at a lightning speed and perhaps know as many as you do.  How many is that, incidentally?

Also, I am so busted and you cracked my dark little secret, you Einstein, you:  It’s not like I know anything about learning, it’s just that I absolutely hate little kids and have dedicated my life to making them work and suffer.  Congratulations, you’ve discovered my sinister plan.  In reality, kids don’t need to work or ever do anything unpleasant in order to achieve whatever they want.  All they need to do is dream!  And then dream some more!  Effort, however, isn’t actually required.  Being a hateful bitch, I wanted to keep that a secret, but alas, I failed.

There’s a difference between a technology and a skill.  Math is a skill.  The calculator is a technology.  Technology changes, but the skills remain the same.

Oh for God’s sake, Strawberries, either get down off your high horse or get the fuck out. There was a pretty good conversation going on here before you started shitting the place up.

DBK, some skills lose their utility in a given environment; for example, I’ve never needed to know how to dig a well or gut a deer, because my environment doesn’t require those things. I’d learn them if I needed them; there’s an argument to be made that if I ever really need them I won’t be able to acquire them “just in time”, but if things have got that bad then I’m so poorly adapted that I’ve already died of something anyway. (Knowing me, probably simple carelessness.)

In the world I grew up in and continue to inhabit, cursive is an optional, niche skill, like well digging or deer gutting. It can be nice to have and if you have it you’ll probably find ways to use it, but if you don’t have it then you’re really not lacking anything that’s going to cost you later in life. (Unless your career ambitions revolve around calligraphy, I guess?)

That being the case, the time spent on it during early education is in my opinion a complete waste of an opportunity to teach something that’d be useful for anyone, and not just for people who end up doing one of the few remaining jobs where you really do need very good handwriting or the ability to read hundred-year-old manuscript.

The facts that are applicable to actual things will just naturally stick, while stuff that is intentionally memorized will disappear as soon as the test over.

That has not been my experience at all, so please don’t generalize it.  I remember 11x11.  I also remember 7x8.  I remember all my times tables from 0x0 to 12x12.  I also remember most of the French vocab I had to drill over and over again when I was a kid.  In fact, rote memorization is, in my experience, an excellent way to get facts to stick in my head long after they’re useful—I remember my great-grandmother’s phone number, and she died 22 years ago—and while I did dial it every so often, I learned through rote memorization.  (Not the capitols of the states though, I expect because I don’t care or find it at all interesting information.  But you know, I wouldn’t have found it interesting or cared if I had been taught it in some kind of organic way, whatever that would have looked like.)

As for whether or not children can understand abstract concepts—I certainly could, and it’s been my experience that the children I’ve taken care of can, too.

If someone wrote their lab notebook in cursive and then I, at some point later, had to read it, I would hunt them down and murder them in their sleep. Well, okay honestly I’d wake them up first to scream “WAS THAT 10 MILLIGRAMS OR 10 MICROGRAMS YOU INSUFFERABLE FUCK??” in their face and then I’d murder them, but you get the gist. :D

I like to think of the written word as a method for communicating. Which written cursive (particularly speedily written cursive) absolutely sucks at. I rest my case.

Did anyone read the blockquoted post within my post, or just get all het up about the mention of test scores and begin the furious typing?

The rote memorization of roots was only part of the deal; teaching roots (which yes, we had to memorize) taught us practical linguistic knowledge that we now use to puzzle out the meanings of unfamiliar words, pretty much unconsciously. It formed a basis for the “learning-by-doing” that all y’all are so adamant is the only way.

It is ONE way of doing things, borne out with some success.

I’m all for progress. Fuck cursive, man. Fuck the abacus. Some things fall by the wayside. Learning styles, however, are not a single “thing.” The eagerness to supplant ALL things pre-existing is just a tad bit disturbing. Not everything from the past is an abysmal failure.

1) Since it came up, in my school we first learned to print and then just use printing for everything. Then we learned cursive starting in 3rd grade (so, age 9-10). “Handwriting” was it’s own class with a letter grade (never higher for a C for me) and after learning it, everyone was forced to use it for the remainder of their time in the (K-8th private) school, regardless of what actually worked best for them.

2) As I’ve said, I am Dyslexic. I am also Dysgraphic. For someone like me, writing cursive is much more complex than printing. It was very difficult and tortuous to learn, it made writing much more difficult than it already was and added a whole other layer of difficulty to assignments I was already struggling with (and, even though it was known I was LD and had problems with cursive, I was still not permitted to print). As someone with learning disabilities, being forced to learn and use cursive represented not just a minor inconvenience, but a major hurdle in my education. One that provided me with no practical benefit whatsoever, and was happily abandoned the second I was able to.

It was stated above and I’ll restate it here, being able to learn and use cursive writing without much difficulty is a privilege of those without learning disabilities. And, while I know it was not the intent, it is really, really grating to hear people going on and on about how cursive is no big deal, when I know full well that that is not the case for all kids.

3) In my spare time I translate Japanese. I learned it mostly “naturally”, using very little rote memorization.

This is, in fact, unsurprising since it mirrors my learning of English. Simply by watching adult oriented TV shows (mostly Nick-At-Night reruns of 60’s/70’s shows) I picked up a massive amount of vocab/grammar and was consistently complimented all through out grade school for having an “adult” level vocabulary at such a young age. So combining simple studying of underlying Japanese grammar rules and basic vocabulary with practical examples of language usage, TV, movies, songs, radio, books, comics, and more recently, Twitter.

Much faster, more efficient, and massively more fun (even in the beginning) for me. Because, again, not everyone learns the same way.

Which is why, as per Amanda’s original point, we shouldn’t just stick to the same old learning style for no reason other than tradition, but also explore new methods that may be better.

p.s. Guess what, you can spend your childhood with your nose in a book AND ALSO attend classes at a school where they occasionally require you to do something that isn’t silent reading. Which I imagine you did, since that is what most people who are likely to comment here did as children.

Unless you are being literally truthful, and at no point in your childhood were you required to put down your leisure reading in order to perform a different task. And then yeah, I guess I’d say you had a better childhood than I did.

Whoever said this topic was like food, in that it turns everyone into super-defensive snots, was onto something.

In fact, rote memorization is, in my experience, an excellent way to get facts to stick in my head long after they’re useful—I remember my great-grandmother’s phone number, and she died 22 years ago—and while I did dial it every so often, I learned through rote memorization.

But there was a payoff for remembering that: you knew that said 7 (or 10) digit number meant something. And, although rare, you did use it. Now compare that to some other random 7 digit sequence. Any reason to remember it? How about this one string of digits: 314159. I bet a good many people will have no problem identifying and remembering those, because that string of digits is associated with something else, as opposed to (and I used a random number generator) 831844. Unless, of course, those numbers in some context mean something to them.

That’s the problem with the rote memorization of facts without context: it’s easy for it to slip away. There’s lots of ways of teaching basic multiplication skills without simply having a context-free table of numbers.

For instance, take the sevens: seven days in a week. You can work on that basis (“There are 4 weeks in February…how many days is that?” and so on). You show there’s an actual use for the calculation, instead of simply remembering for an entirely context-free reason. Or that there’s a neat trick with the numbers: multiplication by 9 always results in a number that is made up of digits that add up to 9 (multiplying from 1 to 10).

It’s not like this is groundbreaking stuff: there’s a reason why the mental tricks used to remember long sequences of things (such as a random list of words, or a long sequence of digits) involves associating with them something else, allowing the brain to make some connection to something else. But even though we know this works with absolutely pointless things (like a random list of words), we don’t use it for teaching stuff that is important, like basic multiplication. Instead “3 times four is twelve, three times five is fifteen, three times six is…”

Ok, let me add yet another take on the rote memorization issue here.

Rote memorization is valuable as a means when it’s necessary for some other valuable task or lesson that cannot be done otherwise.  Some examples:

1. Memorizing multiplication tables is a means to be able to do large multiplication by hand.  There is an algorithm that allows you to multiply arbitrarily large numbers if you know how to multiply single digits.  If we’re going to teach kids to do general multiplication by hand, well, they have to know the multiplication tables by memory.

2. Learning the conjugations of a language like Spanish is a means to be able to speak that language.  There are dozens of model conjugations, each with something like a dozen tense-mood-aspect paradigms, each of these again with 5-6 inflected forms.  Want to speak Spanish close to like a native does?  Gotta learn them.  And don’t forget the genders of nouns!  (And the exceptions: la mano, el problema, etc.)

3. Rote memorization of the exact dates of historical events is dumb.  The important thing to understand in history is the relationships between the events; which events influenced which others.  For this you can usually get away with knowing the sequence of events and roughly what year or decade they happened.

4. Rote memorization of a bunch of “grammar rules” for your first language is wrong because (a) the “rules” actually taught in school are bullshit, and (b) you already speak your first language!

Well, what?—that’s not how you presented it earlier; you just threw it out there, like “this is what I did and I’m super smart so it must work good!” And your blockquoted bit isn’t anything like universal, either; maybe you and whoever you quoted went to better schools than I did, in fact I’m all but certain of it, but when I was taught spelling, nobody was much interested in drawing generalizations out of it. It was all about passing the weekly quiz. Same goes for math, which is why so many people are complaining about multiplication tables.

You’re right; rote memorization is indeed one method. I have no argument with that claim, now that it’s the one you’re making. Moreover, it’s a method which apparently can reward a good teacher better than I thought it could—but it’s also a method which makes it trivial for a bad teacher, a teacher who doesn’t know the subject matter or who doesn’t give a damn about what he’s doing, to assign endless drudge work without even trying to connect it with anything, give it any context, or explain how to draw and test inferences from it. Maybe some of it will stick, but there’s nothing at all wrong with resenting being forced to do shit work without so much as an explanation of why it’s necessary—and moralize about it all you like, but students who resent their teacher, their situation, and what they’re doing right now are not at all likely to be learning.

That’s a disservice to students, and it’s a waste of the resources that go into paying for that teacher’s classroom and wages, and even just to judge by what people have said on this thread, it is also an outstandingly common failure mode for this particular method of teaching. In my admittedly rather pragmatic opinion, that makes rote memorization a shitty teaching method, even if it occasionally works out great for some teachers and some students.

The person I quoted said there was something that could be learned about English from rote spelling/vocab lessons—namely, that it teaches kids subconsciously about the patterns and origins of the English language. This was in response to several posters arguing that spelling was as useless as grammar and multiplication tables (I happen to think none of these subjects is useless, but whatever). 

I merely wanted to echo it: yes, done properly, you can learn a damn lot of useful shit about English when you memorize the root words that build it up. You can probably do the same thing organically—If you see the root vers- in your regular reading a thousand times over 15 years you will eventually have some intuitive knowledge about it, because the words it forms will mean related things. This is the “oh nobody taught me, I just learned from constant private reading ‘cause I’m better” school.   (KIDDING)

Do you really think awful teachers are going to do a better job at teaching abstract conceptual context for vocabulary and mathematics? Awful teachers are awful at teaching and the problem of needing creative, competent, unhindered teachers is unrelated to the individual learning styles of the students. Students resent the teacher who blithers on about “concepts” ineffectively and assigns them poorly-designed “hands-on” projects just as much as they resent the one who drills them on verbs. I promise you, and with classroom experience to back me up, that this is true.

Moreover the kind of loose, student-directed practical learning most people are agitating for on this thread is just fucking impossible when you have one teacher and anywhere from 30 to 40 students.

The waste of resources is not in rote memorization vs. Montessori-style organic learning. The waste of resources is in a crop of poorly and unequally funded schools, undertrained and overburdened teachers, and endless useless testing. Better teachers, with smaller classes, in functioning schools, will be able to target which kids need what, and adjust their instruction accordingly.

Aside:
I would gather that this thread also shows some substantial self-selection as well, and should not be taken as proof that memorization fails a vast majority of students…but that is not empirically a true thing, just my guess. (How many STEM fielders have posted here? One billion?)

Also: I regretted mentioning the test scores the moment I posted it, because I realized everyone would see red over it.

The intention, which wasn’t clear, was just to say “these things help me now, but also they led to more ‘standard’ success back in the day.” Because one of the commonest arguments I see is that [any given educational practice] harms students’ abilities to score well on placement exams, and then they won’t get into college, and OMG their lives will be ruined.

Well, what?—fair enough, and I agree with you regarding the real nature of the problem. I don’t think there’s a magic method by which crap teachers will become excellent teachers and do right by their students. But I have a suspicion there’s got to be a method at least a little more resilient against bad teaching than doing everything by rote. Granted, I have no real domain knowledge on which to base that suspicion, but a lot of my work (as, yes, a computer technologist, good call in my case at least) involves precisely that: building systems which are very good at passively defending themselves against ignorant, careless, disinterested people.

I don’t imagine it would result in inspired teaching, and it’s incrementalist and weak as hell and that bugs me too, but a large part of me cries out that at least it’d be something—assuming it’s possible, of course, which I suspect you may be better able to evaluate than I, given that it’s been mumblety-cough years since I’ve had a “classroom experience” of any remotely relevant sort. (Last time I was in one, it was a preschool in July with the A/C turned off, and I was sweating through my boots and trying to figure out what the hell the original network installers were on when they did the so-called job. I don’t think that counts for much here, though.)

When my 8 and 10 year old kids had to practice cursive for homework this year, I actually said to them “I don’t know why they’re making you do this.  I haven’t written in cursive in years.”

I think that in maths for example or physics actually trying to make students understand principles instead of throwing tons of rote memorization and repetition in the hopes that they’ll assimilate it eventually would be definitely harder to do by awful teachers. In fact, the kind of teacher who’s awful because they don’t understand their subject well enough* would be unable to teach this way.

The only way that putting such teaching methods in place would be effective is if that kind of ignorance in teachers were screened out or educated, preferably at the training stage.

In principle it makes perfect sense to me - cutting down on the crutches of excessive memorization and repetition and making teachers teach the principles in many different ways to help as many students as possible get it won’t turn ignorant teachers into knowledgeable ones, but it will absolutely reveal the ignorant teachers for what they are, which means they can be weeded out or retrained.

However this isn’t something that would work in practice, not in the short term, not if we change the teaching method and nothing else. Not that drastic changes in the educative system ever work in the short term, really. Or that teaching methods can be changed without teachers’ input or cooperation. Improving educative systems is hard and there are no magic wands.

Still, don’t they have teaching schools? There’s a place one could start.

*I’m specifying one kind of “awful” teacher because I read an article some time ago about evaluating teachers which made a lot of sense to me, and basically they found out that a good teacher needed two things : good classroom-managing skills, and a thorough, intuitive grasp of their subject. Having just one of the two wasn’t sufficient. Obviously I’m talking about those who lack the latter here.

KeithM, I haven’t used that phone number in well over 22 years.  I’m not sure why you think it “means” something where as 7x8 doesn’t; it means seven groups of eight.  But a phone number is random; the numbers don’t have any relation to each other at all, mathematically.  The fact is that I memorized my multiplication tables 25 years ago, by rote, and I still know every single one of them now.  I haven’t forgotten a single one; I even remember that, for whatever reason, 7x8 was the last one I learned, and I remember how excited my mother was when I finally got it.  If you’d like me to memorize a string of six numbers, I’m sure I still could, though it probably wouldn’t come as easily as it did when I was young.

The point is that a blanket statement that rote memorization doesn’t work because you forget it after the test is simply incorrect.

Generally, to teach in the USA, one needs at least a BA or BS or BSEd.  Usually from an ccredited university with a college of education.  Many states require testing prior to licensing.  Some states require a masters or acquiring a masters within a certain time frame.  Even in the more stringent states, however, substitute teachers often do not require more than to have graduated high school.  In practie, even the substitutes tend to have 2 or more years of college, at least where I have lived as an adult and where my parents have taught and/or been education administrators (ID, MA, MT, WA & PA).

EG01, if you remember that 7*8 because it is seven groups of 8, that wasn’t rote memorization, it’s applied.

“What separates the mediocre in math classes from the people who can solve lots of math problems is that the latter group drilled themselves on it over and over and over again.”

O.o

um, no.  For example, I didn’t have to spend a lot of time doing math homework in order to figure out how to do geometry proofs well and quickly.  That part just sorta happened. No, seriously, like fucking magic, people.  And not because I am super smart, specifically, but because geometry proofs - more than almost any other kind of schoolwork - just fit the way my mind works and remembers things.

However, two years later when my pre-calc teacher tried to make me memorize shit instead of working it out each time - that was an absolute unmitigated fucking disaster.  Shockingly enough, my c- in that class did not prevent me from - just a few short years later - graduating with honors in physics from a snobby college.  just saying.

More than anything else, I really wish people would understand that different people learn in different ways, and that the worst thing you can do is not any particular teaching style, but being so inflexible in that style so as to not be able to reach learners whose styles are different than yours.  Including both the ones who thrive on memorization AND us one in a million kids who “just get it.”  My pre-calc teacher’s dominant method did work well for a significant number of students, and, if taken as a suggestion and not the gospel truth, likely would have helped me some with some skills I was lacking in.  It was just completely contradictory to how my mind worked, and so strict adherence on my part was never going to happen or be a good idea.  What was needed was not so much for her to completely change her general teaching style, but to not be the kind of ass who tried to tell me that my mind didn’t work well because it didn’t work like hers.

My abysmal pre-calc teacher aside - most educators I know do know this - it seems to be everyone else that has issues with this concept.

The whole “standardized testing” thing - especially the part where scores are scaled based on the results from a homogeneous bunch of kids that are part of the dominant culture?  Yeah, that does not help.

EG01, if you remember that 7*8 because it is seven groups of 8, that wasn’t rote memorization, it’s applied.

How do you mean?  I didn’t actually apply 7x8 to anything.  I didn’t count the number of days in 8 weeks or anything.  I didn’t remember that 7x8 = 56 because it was 7 groups of 8.  I just knew, 25 years ago, that that’s what multiplication means.  It didn’t actually help me remember the answer.  I had to memorize 56.  If you and others are saying that kids shouldn’t just be told to memorize a slew of numbers without being told how multiplication works, then I’m quite appalled that there are kids out there who are not being told what multiplication is, and sure, you’re right.  But understanding what multiplication means and how it works does not automatically confer a knowledge of the answers to times tables.  I had to learn those by rote memorization.  I mean, I understand that 16x23 means sixteen groups of 23, but that doesn’t tell me what the answer is.  If I wanted that knowledge to come to me automatically, I’d have to memorize the answer.

I tend to prefer cursive to print because my print still looks atrocious. My cursive looks much better.

Are there really any students who are being taught 6x3=18 without also learning that’s because 6+6+6=18? A lot of the rote memorization I had to learn wasn’t instead of theory but as shortcut so you don’t always have to apply the theory for the stuff you used most often. I know that 6x3=18 and it’s all just adding so 18x4=6x3x4=6x12=72 It’s the same with spelling. Just memorize the spelling behind common words and modifiers. Learn a little about the etymology and how it factors into word construction and then use both sets of info to make an educated guess about the correct spelling of antidisestablishmentarianism.

Did a lot of people do those little multiplication time tests as kids? I’m alright at math but I was teeerrible at those! 1 minute isn’t a very long time when your OCD ass spends the first 30 seconds scribing her name as carefully as possible, then tries to answer with flawless handwriting… I don’t (in retrospect) mind memorizing but the way they tested proficiency was awful! :p

No one remembers that 7x13=91. It’s just sad. Or wait: it’s just silly.

fortunately for the children of america, ms. marcotte isn’t in charge of the educational curriculum. unfortunately for some students in indiana, they have people who are in charge of setting that curriculum who are getting ready to lower those standards farther than the bush administration. in fairness, i’ll assume (and i could be wrong) that ms. marcotte’s personal, first-hand experience with educating children only extends to her time in K-8, as a student, and she has no teaching experience, or children she’s responsible for in those grades. this would explain her failure to understand why some things she believes to be relics best left behind are actually still taught. relics such as learning how write cursive for example.

cursive writing is still taught for a couple of reasons: 1. it’s faster than printing by hand (and oddly enough, quicker than typing and printing, especially for informal items)., and 2. learning how to write in cursive makes it easier for you to read cursive.

multiplication tables are still taught, as are addition, subtraction and division, so you understand the basic theory and can successfully do all of the above, by hand, should you find yourself without advanced technology to aid you.

the cpa exam consists of 4 parts (ethics is an open-book, do it on your own time section, not part of the formal exam setting), each part including multiple-choice and essay questions. you have an exactingly controlled,  finite amount of time to complete each part. you are allowed only pen, pencil and eraser in the exam room. if you can’t write or do basic math functions quickly, by hand, you stand no chance of ever passing it.  the same holds for the LSAT and bar exams.

granted, not everyone will enter a profession requiring decisions/calculations made on the fly, without benefit of advanced technology at their fingertips, but everyone should be well grounded in the basics, before they become permanently tethered to that technology, on the off chance that one day, the electricity goes out for longer than 5 minutes.

Far as I’m concerned, jennygadget’s comment finished the conversation. What else is there to say?

scrumby, it’s not so much that people weren’t taught what multiplication is, as that nobody particularly bothered to teach any of the higher-level stuff like that nifty shortcut you rattled off that looks like it makes mental math a hell of a lot easier, in general, than I’ve been finding it for most of my life. Or even to give a firm enough grounding that we can start to infer such shortcuts for ourselves.

cpinva, all of your points have already been answered upthread, so welcome to the conversation I guess? The short version is: 1) isn’t enough of a benefit, and the need of 2) is increasingly rare as cursive handwriting generally falls out of use. As for your argument that a good solid knowledge of the times tables will save my life when the shit hits the fan, well, that’s…something, all right. And no one of whom I’m aware is advocating we replace mathematics classes with Calculator Operation 101.

I have to fall on the side of specific teaching of grammar, My country got rid of it before I was in school (I’m 25) thinking that the best way for it to be learnt was indirectly, but this has proven to be not the case, and so it is being brought back.

cpinva - no, cursive is not, necessarily faster for everyone.  It really was only faster when every time you lifted a pen you had to blot it to avoid leaving the blots on the page - not an issue really with a ballpoint, which is what most people use.  I can read all sorts of print without needing to be able to reproduce them, that’s avbsolute bunk.
EG01 - sadly, yes, there are children being asked to memorize the tables without it being explicitly explained to them that multiplication just means there are A number of groups with B items in them.  Also, reasoning skills the fact that 16*23 is 16 groups of 23 which is 10 groups of 23, plus 5 groups of 23, plus 23 and is therefore 230 + 115 + 23 which is 368 are at least as important as knowing 7*8 (after all, that is only 5*8 and 2 *8, much easier).  I did this in my head while reading your post. 
The threes were really easy for me, as were the sevens, thanks to school house rock.  Even if the memorizing is important (and I think it is), it needs to be made less dry than a table and explicitely explained so that it has some basis in reality.
Also, yes, teaching grammar, at least the basics of it so that we have a common, agreed language is really valuable.  More so even when the existance of dielects are respected and explained, as it helps explain why one dielect and another are different and say the same thing in different ways.

Sorry if I’m repeating anything from upthread, although I doubt very many people are still commenting at this point.

I’m surprised at the bimodality here between cursive and typing.  Just because it’s basically impossible to type notes in a math or engineering class doesn’t mean that cursive is necessary.  As long as one practices printing enough, like as much as it took you to get really fast as cursive, it is perfectly sufficient.  I still write by hand a lot (in college I often wrote first drafts of papers by hand because removing myself from my keyboard is sometimes necessary in order to remove myself from the internet) and it’s not like printing is a hindrance.  There were some professors that made me wish I knew shorthand, but I doubt cursive would have made much of a difference there. 

The other thing about math and engineering classes (at least in my experience) is that while you can’t really take notes on your laptop, you also don’t need to take quite as detailed notes as in some humanities courses require because most courses (at in least undergrad) have a corresponding textbook that can fill the gaps.  You just don’t need to be as speedy. 

And I know this is probably unnecessary at this point, but while I agree overall with this post, I have to defend multiplication tables.  I was definitely one of those kids who thought I would NEVER absorb them, but what I have realized since is that I learn concepts fastest and best by encountering them repeatedly in different contexts.  So even if their first encounter with multiplication tables is superficial and doesn’t stick very well, there are probably some people out there who really benefit from that initial priming.  I’m sure there are people for whom it’s completely pointless, but everybody learns differently, and that’s why it’s important to introduce these ideas many times and from many different angles.

Also, reasoning skills the fact that 16*23 is 16 groups of 23 which is 10 groups of 23, plus 5 groups of 23, plus 23 and is therefore 230 + 115 + 23 which is 368 are at least as important as knowing 7*8 (after all, that is only 5*8 and 2 *8, much easier).  I did this in my head while reading your post.

Well, each to her own, but that seems like an unnecessary pain in the ass to me, when for the first I could just sit down and multiply 16x23 using a pen in about ten seconds, and for the second memorize 7x8.

It is a shame that there are kids who are not being taught what multiplication means, but that does not seem to me to be a problem with times tables, but with failing to teach basic concepts of arithmetic.

They really need to start teaching kids what “butthurt” actually means so they don’t grow up to embarrass themselves in front of smarter people.

I’d much rather be able to multiply in my head than have to get pen and paper every time. The real problem to me is people who literally couldn’t do 16x23 without pen and paper or a calculator. It might take longer and/or be more annoying, but it should at least be possible.

I’m a little surprised that it took over 250 comments before someone mentioned Schoolhouse Rock, but it could just be another data point in support of the theory that I Am Old.

For me, I thought of SR immediately, because whenever I see 7 * 8 I hear Blossom Dearie’s voice in my head with the answer.  If we had sane copyright laws, every elementary school student would get a DVD of Schoolhouse Rock in about 15 years, when 50 years will have passed for most of the shorts.

And yes, it must be those specific shorts.  They worked for me, therefore they would work for everyone else, and nothing else would work.

He cut loose the sandbags, but the balloon wouldn’t go any higher.

Meh, when I was younger, I could do lots of arithmetic in my head, but as I’ve gotten older, my brain has gotten less flexible.  I like pen and paper, and I always have some to hand.  Which brings us full circle to the original topic!

EG01, I’m in my mid40s, and it has gotten harder as I’ve gotten older, but not that much harder.

As I said, each to her own.

Dunc: Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that not learning cursive in particular is some great cultural loss, I just really don’t get what the big problem with learning it in the first place is. Maybe that’s just me, maybe it’s the way we’re educated in the UK, but to me, learning cursive is on about the same level as learning to tie your shoelaces. The notion that having to learn it is some kind of hardship is completely alien to me.

Yeah, but we’re British. This entire thread (and the OP) reads like Americans defending their pisspoor education system because hey, it DOESN’T MATTER if American kids don’t know how to write and can’t do basic arithmetic, because, er, MODERN ELECTRONICS!

The reasoning bears more than a passing resemblance to Americans defending their pisspoor healthcare system or their pisspoor social welfare system: they’re convinced their system is the Best In The World, and therefore can’t conceive that other countries ... do it better.

The idea that it’s difficult to learn to write legibly in joined-up handwriting? Well, yes, it can be: my handwriting was an awkward kind of copying printed letters, because I learned to read before I went to school and I think I must have taught myself to write by copying the words in the books. This handwriting was all but unreadable when I went fast. Eventually my teachers decided they really couldn’t deal any more and I got assigned to remedial handwriting. The teacher normally taught kids who had problems with reading/writing much worse than mine, but she got me to form my letters legibly by rote repetition over a period of months, one hour a week and homework at home. The plus for me was that my mum, asked which class she was OK with having me exempted from in order to do handwriting, told them “Religious Education” - I’d been complaining about the boring-as-hell Religious Education lessons I had to sit through for an hour every week (something we do worse, I fully admit: British schools are required to “teach Christianity”...) and the remedial teacher was a Lord of the Rings fan, so besides learning my Ps and Qs, we also got great fannish conversations about Gandalf and hobbits.

And I have good handwriting.

This entire thread (and the OP) reads like Americans defending their pisspoor education system because hey, it DOESN’T MATTER if American kids don’t know how to write and can’t do basic arithmetic, because, er, MODERN ELECTRONICS!

This sort of thing comes up a lot in a lot of different forums, and I think the problem not American culture but more of an “online forum culture” where people online are speaking out about something because they want to have their voice heard in a world that does not acknowledge their status as a special snowflake.

Less cycnically, voices online tend to be ones that are expressing things that are about how someone doesn’t fit in to the mainstream and giving a voice to that non-mainstream experience or complaint. No one posts online about education and says stuff like, “people told me to study hard and do my work, so I did, and it all worked out for me!” Not to mention the fact that this is considered by many Americans to sound pretentious. The school experience is supposed to be a narrative about alienation, socially/intellectually/academically. “I was having trouble until I had a mentor/parent that worked with me over and over again until I got it” isn’t a compelling narrative, unless it somehow involves having your specialness recognized allowing you to do something in a totally new way.

Tyro, except for spelling and penmanship, my school experience was great and I had few problems, so um, no.
What I see is that people on-line, in this forum at least, have very little patience for people having insisted they learn something that has no bearing whatsoever on anything they do in their lives as adults. 
If I had had half the time I spent practicing cursive moved to practicing spelling in fourth grade, I would have been much better off.  If reading (in which I should have been in the highest group) had been de-coupled from spelling (where I should have been in the lowest), I also would have gotten the appropriate level of instruction.  Instead, I was bored in reading and overwhelmed in spelling for a couple of years.
One hour a week.  God(s), if it had been but one hour a week….

Tyro: “I was having trouble until I had a mentor/parent that worked with me over and over again until I got it” isn’t a compelling narrative

D’oh! You’re right of course. Very dull story.

Helen: If I had had half the time I spent practicing cursive moved to practicing spelling in fourth grade, I would have been much better off.

Actually, it seems like you would probably have been better off if “practicing spelling” had been taught by getting you to write down the words you were learning how to spell, in your best handwriting. Multiple times.

In my own, as Tyro points out, uncompelling narrative, I could read and write before I went to school, and spelling, while patchy on the rare occasions when I was asked to write a word I had never read, was something I remember learning sporadically (for some reason I still remember the mental trick of how to remember how to spell margarine) rather than in special “now we’re doing spelling” lessons.  My handwriting was atrocious because self-taught from copying print. Most kids in my class learned to write in parallel with learning to read. Any written piece of work would get marks for legibility and spelling as well as content and accuracy.  Then, as I recall, any word you spelled wrong in wat you’d handed in, had to get written out several times in your best handwriting and handed back in. Teachers were always going on about “in your best handwriting” (and always sighing over mine).

What I see is that people on-line, in this forum at least, have very little patience for people having insisted they learn something that has no bearing whatsoever on anything they do in their lives as adults. 

It does sound like the US education system teaches children how to write really very badly, if so many people remember as adults having to “do writing lessons” that had no connection with their other work. Way more interesting to actually write things.

Actually, it seems like you would probably have been better off if “practicing spelling” had been taught by getting you to write down the words you were learning how to spell, in your best handwriting. Multiple times….Any written piece of work would get marks for legibility and spelling as well as content and accuracy.  Then, as I recall, any word you spelled wrong in wat you’d handed in, had to get written out several times in your best handwriting and handed back in. Teachers were always going on about “in your best handwriting”

How nice that this worked for you.  For my part, my spelling was always excellent, as was my reading and writing, and my handwriting was atrocious.  Always.  I did all the handwriting lessons.  I did all the assignments “in my best handwriting” in the words that, as you say, teachers repeated ad nauseam.  I wrote and rewrote words.  I got grades for legibility (poor) and spelling (excellent).  And my handwriting?  Still sucks.  Always sucked. 

And, seriously, one hour a week?  I believe that through elementary school, we had handwriting lessons every day beginning in…oh, I don’t know…3rd grade?  Maybe 2nd.

I really don’t think this reduces to an “American education sucks” soundbite.  I think this reduces to a “cursive is rapidly becoming obsolete” and a “practice doesn’t always make perfect” pair of soundbites.

And, seriously, one hour a week?  I believe that through elementary school, we had handwriting lessons every day beginning in…oh, I don’t know…3rd grade?  Maybe 2nd.

Really? Why? As Dunc says upthread, it’s my impression in British schools most kids learn handwriting, you know, as part of the ordinary curriculum, not as “special lessons beginning in 3rd grade” (primary 3). And where kids aren’t able to learn at the same speed as others and need a bit of extra help to get them up to speed, they should get it. The notion that kids shouldn’t learn how to write, or that writing is something terribly difficult and time-consuming that kids just shouldn’t have to learn these days - yeah, I think that does turn into an “American education sucks” soundbite. If your education system left you feeling that learning to write joined-up handwriting was too difficult and timeconsuming to be bothered with, as quite evidently it has, it sucked. Believing that this is a universal truth and being able to write legibly is an obsolete skill, or believing that because your teachers didn’t know how to make practice work for you it never would, is the classic American reaction to a pisspoor American system: you can’t believe that it’s your country’s education system that sucks. But it obviously does.

And it’s not that I think British state school education is particularly great, considered worldwide. I just think that, from all accounts including yours, it’s way better than the American system.

Comment 1
“I don’t think being unable to communicate fluently in writing…”

Neither do I, which is why I think that cursive should be dropped
If you look at a blueprint, everything is in all caps print
Dr.s still use cursive on prescriptions, which leads to mistakes

I realise that there’s probably very few people reading this thread any more, but one quite important issue occurred to me that I’d like to get out…

Lots of people seem to object to the idea of schools teaching things that most people never use again. On the contrary, I think that any school that doesn’t teach people a bunch of stuff they never use again isn’t doing it’s job properly. Education should not be about instilling the bare minimum of lowest-common-denominator skills which everyone will eventually end up using. What it should be about is introducing kids to as wide a range of topics, disciplines and ideas as humanly possible. Schools should teach art to people who are never going to be artists, music to people who will never be musicians, and sports to people who will never be sportsmen. (And I say that as someone who absolutely hated sports at school.)

And, seriously, one hour a week?  I believe that through elementary school, we had handwriting lessons every day beginning in…oh, I don’t know…3rd grade?  Maybe 2nd.

Really? Why?

You cannot possibly think I know.  My elementary school teachers did not share their teaching philosophies with me.

Believing that this is a universal truth and being able to write legibly is an obsolete skill, or believing that because your teachers didn’t know how to make practice work for you it never would, is the classic American reaction to a pisspoor American system

But…I can write legibly.  I print.  I really don’t understand what’s so barbaric about that in your eyes—cursive is not some kind of essentially higher mode of written communication.  I am not unable to leave notes for people.  I can communicate using a pen and paper just fine.  What makes cursive so special that it’s worth a whole lot of work and practice?  It can’t be speed, because I was able to take truly extensive, detailed notes in college using printing.  It’s not legibility, because I’ve seen anybody’s cursive that was as easy to read as that same person’s printing—and I did live in the UK for a year, so that’s not about a general problem with the US educational system.  What is it?

As for “a pisspoor American system,” I suspect that I have a greater knowledge of the elementary school I went to than you do.  Although I says it as shouldn’t, it was, and I believe, still is, one of the top magnet schools in NYC—and if you’d like to, you can sneer at that as “pisspoor,” but you’re speaking from a position of ignorance.  I can complain about a lot of things, but a pisspoor education sure isn’t one of them.

Lots of people seem to object to the idea of schools teaching things that most people never use again. On the contrary, I think that any school that doesn’t teach people a bunch of stuff they never use again isn’t doing it’s job properly. Education should not be about instilling the bare minimum of lowest-common-denominator skills which everyone will eventually end up using. What it should be about is introducing kids to as wide a range of topics, disciplines and ideas as humanly possible. Schools should teach art to people who are never going to be artists, music to people who will never be musicians, and sports to people who will never be sportsmen. (And I say that as someone who absolutely hated sports at school.)

Co-signed.  100%.  I just think that cursive is a purely utilitarian skill, and without that utilitarian purpose, I don’t see what benefits or intrinsic interest it has that justifies it taking up time in the curriculum that could be spent studying hieroglyphics, or astronomy, or pottery, or anything else.

@270, idiot ass.  That was a large part of it; try listening. 
My handwriting was so bad I could try to make it legible or think about what I was writing.  Not both.  It took insanely long to practice writing something ten times, then use it in a sentence; then do the next; for a list of 20.  And at the end, I still could not spell the words, because that method didn’t stick well for me in the first place and making the writing neatly in cursive part of it made it worse.
I was reading by the time I was 3.  Did nothing for my spelling.
I print very quickly or fairly neatly.  My cursive was slow or nearly illegible; still, in high school, after years of that method you seem to think would have helped.
@274 - all well and good, an excellent idea I could really get behind actually.  Cursive penmanship class for 5 hours a week for several years does NOT fall under that category.

But…I can write legibly.  I print.  I really don’t understand what’s so barbaric about that in your eyes—cursive is not some kind of essentially higher mode of written communication.

Well, it’s reportedly easier for dyslexic kids to learn to write if they start with joined-up handwriting.  Most kids do start out learning to write by printing capital letters.  But, still, as Dunc says: I used to assume that “cursive” was some terribly difficult kind of calligraphy, since Americans complained about having to learn it so much. When I found that what Americans call “cursive” Brits call “joined-up handwriting”, ie what you learn how to do as a little kid so you can stop printing, I just… don’t get it. It’s not that I think “leaning joined-up handwriting” so important, I just don’t understand how the US school system can be so sucky that American kids regard handwriting as something tremendously difficult.

I suspect that I have a greater knowledge of the elementary school I went to than you do. 

I expect you do! And from what you’re saying about it, it sounds really, really bad. How can a school struggle to teach kids handwriting?

Although I says it as shouldn’t, it was, and I believe, still is, one of the top magnet schools in NYC—and if you’d like to, you can sneer at that as “pisspoor,” but you’re speaking from a position of ignorance.  I can complain about a lot of things, but a pisspoor education sure isn’t one of them.

Well, you are complaining about it. The problem is that you seem to have the terrible American attitude that no other school anywhere in the world could possibly be any better than an American one. 

My cursive was slow or nearly illegible; still, in high school, after years of that method you seem to think would have helped.

I have no idea what method your school was using. If it didn’t work, then fairly obviously, a good educational system would have quit trying that method on you and moved on to try another method. Not every kid learns the same way, and it’s a pisspoor educational system that doesn’t recognise that. Which is where we came in. Your patriotism and school loyalty may make it impossible for you to recognise that your school let you down and you’d have done better if you’d gone to a better school, but it’s evident from what you’re saying that it did and you very likely would.

And from what you’re saying about it, it sounds really, really bad. How can a school struggle to teach kids handwriting?

Ah, so you judge the quality of a school…by its success in teaching cursive.  And you think my views on education are parochial?  Yours are simply bizarre.  I mean, I was always under the impression that the measure of a good education was not only its ability to teach the basics of reading, writing, math, science, and social studies, but also to stimulate critical thinking and engage children’s interest in a variety of topics, allowing them to discover their own areas of interest.  It never crossed my mind that…cursive…was the most important measure.  Little did I know.

Well, you are complaining about it. The problem is that you seem to have the terrible American attitude that no other school anywhere in the world could possibly be any better than an American one.

You seem to have the strange attitude that all American public schools are created equal, and that when multiple Americans from different parts of the country mention that they don’t like cursive, don’t use it, didn’t enjoy learning it, and have lousy handwriting, they are all the products of the same “system.”  No.  Amanda and I are about the same age—we grew up, from what I gather, about 2000 miles apart.  I would be genuinely shocked if we had at all the same elementary school experience.  Hell, my closest friend went to elementary school in a different borough than I did (Queens rather than Manhattan), and when she reminisces about her days in grammar school, I often wonder if we attended schools on the same planet.

I haven’t complained about my education—I’m complaining about how much I dislike cursive, which I think is no longer a necessary skill.  I mean, I didn’t like playing volleyball in gym class, either, but I wouldn’t exactly claim that saying so was complaining about my education.  And you are misunderstanding my attitude.  My attitude is that a) you’d have to go a long, long way to find an elementary school better than the one I attended; that has nothing to do with its being American and everything to do with the way it was administered, the funding it got, the way it selected students, the class sizes, the attitudes, interests, intelligence, and education of most of the teachers, the parental involvement and other such education-related things, and b) that no school, no matter how good, would have caused me to bloom into an adult with better handwriting than I currently have.  Followed up by c) who cares, because cursive is a largely unnecessary skill these days.

Again, what is so important about cursive that we should continue to teach/learn it?

God damn, EG01, could you maybe do a little less to clearly and succinctly exemplify every single thing Jesurgislac said?

@277, I went to 6 elemeentary school in two different states.  So, um, no school loyalty involved and you still are being a self-righteous ass. The method was the one you speified - writing my spelling words in my very neatest handwriting.  The only thing that helped for the spelling was tutoring, in 5th grade, focused on the rules adn exceptions with real examples and letting me do my practice BY PRINTING instead.

Also, I am mildly dislexic (mostly able to cope unless tired) as are two of my siblings and one of my children.  Cursive did not help anything, studies aside, and as my mother is a special education reading specialist, yeah, I’m already aware of them and the fact that it is not universal.

Aaron, other than the school loyalty thing, where did EG01 confirm anything else?  Seems to have refuted most of it, in fact.

God damn, EG01, could you maybe do a little less to clearly and succinctly exemplify every single thing Jesurgislac said?

Am I supposed to pretend I went to a lousy school in order to make Jesurgislac feel better about the UK educational system as compared to the US?  I’m really, really sorry to upset you both, but the fact remains that there are excellent public schools in the US, and not only in wealthy suburbs, either.  There aren’t enough of them, they’re not always easy to get into, and I wouldn’t claim the admissions standards are fair, but nonetheless, I did have the good fortune to attend one. 

Jesurgislac is free to continue to believe that had I only had the good fortune to go to school in the UK, I would now have beautiful, exemplary handwriting, but I’m gonna need a little evidence beyond “what they did worked for me!” if I’m expected to agree (he/she is also free to believe that developing that handwriting is the hallmark of a good school, but I stand by my assertion that that’s a bizarre notion).  I realize that it’s upsetting to hear that different people have different strengths and skill sets, but it is nonetheless the case.  The fine motor control needed to draw well and to form cursive letters in a pleasing fashion is not included in any of mine.

Wait just a minute here, EG01 and helen w. h.

I’m a goddam reactionary hick who would be perfectly happy to live as a citizen of an outright, acknowledged American empire, just so long as we were competent and ruthless enough to do empire right. I’m firmly convinced Teddy Roosevelt was one of the best presidents this country’s ever had, right up there with Abe Lincoln. And y’all are asking me to 101 you on what’s wrong with overweening American exceptionalism?

What’s wrong with this picture?