posted
Perhaps I'm sensitive to time management in the classroom having had to deal with it as a very real problem when I was teaching.
The school year generally has 180-185 days. Of these, 4-6 are devoted to standardized testing. Another 4-6 are lost to assemblies, guest speakers, field days, and other class disruptions. Assuming you give some sort of period-long evaluation once every two weeks (conservative), you lose an additional 20 days there. The instructional time spent in the classroom has now shrunk to 150 days. It's a safe bet to knock of 2 days at the start and end of the year, too, for going over classroom/school procedures and final "end of the year" cleanup/organization. So, 146 days of instructional class time - barring additional testing/assessment or field trips.
I'll assume an average academic instructional day of roughly 4 hours (taking out lunch, gym, art, etc). To take even 15 minutes out of every day is to take 1/16th of the time allotted for all the various and sundry topics that must be covered in elementary school. 1/16th of the time available works out to roughly 9 days of your 146 day year - on something that has little need outside the classroom.
It just seems pointless to be spending so much time on a unnecessary skill when that time could be spent on mathematics, science, history, or english.
I am curious, though, about the question posed earlier.
Do people write in script in other countries, but even more specifically in other languages? Do French students write french in cursive? What about writing german or swedish in cursive? Is there a greek cursive script, or an arabic one? Do any of the asian languages have separate cursive scripts, or does cyrillic? Is this a phenomenon native to english?
I know we have hatrackers who are not native english speakers - is cursive taught for other languages as well?
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
As someone who knows a significant amount of alphabets (working on the last patches of Cyrillic, a couple of coronal fricatives and their affricates yet baffle me), I can assure you that English cursive is a useful scripting-system. If you know how to write print "properly", it takes a long time to write. A "j" is written downwards, and the dot added afterwards; wouldn't it be easier to do it the other way round? Less of a "commute" than from the tip of the hook to the place of the dot. If any of you studied how to read and write in Arabic, you'd see how insane print can be.
Also, don't forget lowercase letters are also a way of shortening the time of writing. When I post snail-mail, I write "Jerusalem" in lowercase and "ISRAEL" in capitals, and even though the former to the latter has a ratio of 8:5 lowercase letters:capitals (taking the first letter off), it's still quicker to write. This resembles Aramaic print & script (which is the modern Hebrew alphabet). Lowercase is fater to write if you're not carving, cursive can be even faster - that's why it was developed.
Do you *really* think the trend would have developed and stuck in the first place if it had no use?
posted
yes - hebrew has print and cursive. but cursive isn't connected letters. cursive is easier to write because letters in print have corners, and cursive rounds them out and changes some of the harder to write print letters. everyone writes in script, and computers type in print.
Posts: 97 | Registered: Jun 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote: Do people write in script in other countries, but even more specifically in other languages? Do French students write french in cursive? What about writing german or swedish in cursive? Is there a greek cursive script, or an arabic one? Do any of the asian languages have separate cursive scripts, or does cyrillic? Is this a phenomenon native to english?
Latin languages all use the same general cursive, I've seen my grandmother write in Czech and German with the same basic cursive that I learned in 3rd grade.
Hebrew has one case, print and script - and like Crescent said, it's rounded letters. Greek is generally rounded in lowercase, and as far as I know there's script just for a few letters that *aren't* written in one stroke. Cyrillic is quite blocky, so I don't know, but I can ask a Russian guy in my grade, he might know. Arabic has print (computer-style), cursive (fast-written, one of, if not the most efficient and time saving alphabetic system, especially considering the letter-conservation) and calligraphy - which I am incapable of reading, and so are many non-natives. Arabic calligraphy is an actual art in its own right.
Posts: 2978 | Registered: Oct 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
I would assume almost every language has calligraphy, but that's more for artistic purposes than useful ones. Form over function.
This is interesting.
I'm curious why two different forms of writing developed, too. I mean, we don't have two sets of numerals - those are pretty universal, with only some variation.
If we're going for speed, shorthand is faster than cursive. If we're going for easy readability, print letters are clearer than cursive (you don't see stop signs in cursive, for instance).
Seeing that more than 99.99% of the words the average person sees every day are not in cursive, it seems like we should devote less than 0.01% of our classroom time to the topic. Knowing that teaching this topic takes more than 0.01% of the available time, it shouldn't be a part of the required curriculum.
If my students had 15 more minutes per day of fractions instead of cursive in elementary school, I'd have had a much easier time teaching them in middle school.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
I learned cursive in fourth grade and remember enjoying it. By seventh grade, I'd switched to it completely and my neglected print looked like a child's. I had two basic handwritings in high school: cursive for myself (quick, sloppy) and for essays (straight, neat).
Lately I've been using print more often, for notes to other people. So it's not childlike anymore, but loopy and occasionally illegible in an adult way. Also, I tend to use the same capital letters in print and cursive -- of the print style when there is a deviation (like G and S) but curvy with some flash.
Penmanship should be taught in schools. Not extensively, but handwriting is important. You don't want future co-workers puzzling over a note you left on their desks, do you?
Posts: 44 | Registered: Dec 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
I have to initial things at work...my cursive now looks very pointy and skinny. Actually, my handwriting for my signature looks a whole lot like my father's, which is kind of weird. Anybody else notice a writing similarity to his/her parents?
posted
Teshi, your meter's first problem is that you are spelling it wrong.
I agree with Ic. As a (former) teacher who required my students to take notes (they were collected and graded, although it was an easy A for most of my students), the ones who were comfortable with cursive -- whether the formal version that is usually taught, or some adaptation of their own -- did much better at note-taking than the vast majority of their printing peers.
The notion that so many people view cursive as non-useful astounds me.
Then again, I also agree with lma that usefulness should not be the only yardstick we measure by.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote: Anybody else notice a writing similarity to his/her parents?
Yes, to some extent. Due to the fact that my father was the main person helping me become legible in Years 6-8, some of my legibility in writing is taken off his amazing handwriting.
Posts: 2978 | Registered: Oct 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by pH: Anybody else notice a writing similarity to his/her parents?
Oh yeah. I cross my 7's mainly because I saw my father doing it and thought it looked cool.
Also, one of my friends and his father have almost the exact same signature: thin printed letters that look like they were constructed from sticks. Legible and very stark. But then, I think a lot of engineer/scientist types sign their names in print instead of cursive.
Posts: 44 | Registered: Dec 2005
| IP: Logged |
posted
Princesska, my boyfriend has handwriting kind of like that, but only sometimes. He prints in these very neat, small, boxy kind of letters that I thought had been printed by computer at first.
I think it's weird that I sign just like my dad, since he didn't really have much to do with my handwriting at all. 'course, handwriting was always my worst grade in elementary school. What a stupid thing to grade. It's legible; what more do you want?
posted
I think when something is significantly useful - as cursive is - it doesn't have to be "necessary" for life in order to have a place being taught in schools. To say that because we don't need cursive we should waste school time on learning it doesn't make sense to me. It is much faster than printing, and is useful to know; and we spend a lot of time in schools teaching things that they won't "need" but are useful to know and will be helpful in life.
I guess there are some people who never write anything but their signatures ... I guess they don't need to know cursive. I do write things, take notes occasionally, write letters, write stories sometimes (on PAPER!), make lists ... all these things are easier to do in cursive. I use cursive a heck of a lot more than I use trigonometry. It was worth my time learning it back then, to save as much time and hand-aches as it saves now.
Posts: 1522 | Registered: Nov 2005
| IP: Logged |
If speed is the goal, we should be teaching shorthand. If style is the goal, we should be teaching calligraphy. If clarity is the goal, we should be teaching print.
Cursive seems like a bastard child of these three reasons, sort of like an esparanto of the script world.
As for my parents, my mother uses very rounded loopy cursive and always has and my father uses an all-caps diagonally slanted block printing (mainly because he was a marine and police officer). Personally, I use a flowing print style that connects letters (looping into an "e" for instance, or going from the top of an "o" into the next letter), but it is far from the stylized script form (using print versions of "b", "f", "r", "s" etc).
quote:To say that because we don't need cursive we should waste school time on learning it doesn't make sense to me.
While teaching, I constantly heard the phrase "a mile wide and an inch deep" used to describe our curriculum. We covered all manner of useful topics - so many that no one topic could be truly covered in very much depth.
So much has been added to curriculums that could be useful, or might be useful, or can be useful that the topics that are absolutely needed get less time and coverage.
From a math teacher's perspective, the biggest jilted concepts are decimals, fractions, and division.
I've had high honors sophomores who couldn't add two fractions together, as they didn't get enough time with that concept in earlier grades. Division of decimals was so foreign as to be another language, and most didn't even know where to begin without a calculator - nor could they tell if their calculator-given answers were at all reasonable.
From an english teacher's perspective, the biggest jilted concepts are grammar, spelling and punctuation.
I have two friends who are high school english teachers who were never taught grammar in school. Never. They were never given rules for commas or taught how to use colons or semicolons. Those english teachers I've worked with teach grammar as a matter of personal principle, as there was nothing in the curriculum about the topic. Grammar has slowly slipped out of the required curriculum in school districts around the country.
When you have X amount of time and 100 topics to cover, you cannot give each topic the same attention as if there were only, say, 80 topics to cover. How we managed to drop grammar and keep cursive, I'll never know.
posted
My cursive takes about ten times the time that my hybrid-print takes to write. Am I the only one slower in cursive than print?
Posts: 3636 | Registered: Oct 2001
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
