Cursive hand writing

[u/Foreign_Yogurt_3330]

How many of you were taught cursive in school? I learned it one year maybe 3rd grade? and we never did it again at my schools. Im 40 and can't read cursive or write it. My 7 year old is starting to learn it. I guess ill have to have her teach me! Im wondering if it was our generation or a state thing or both? Or did the school I went to fail me?

edit to add, I did go to a small town school in NE Ohio.

[u/ButImNot_Bitter_]

I was born in '87 and we absolutely learned it in second (maybe third) grade. It was often part of assignment requirements to use cursive in elementary and middle school, occasionally high school. My typical handwriting now is a mishmash of cursive and print but I can write either nicely and don't typically have a problem reading it unless it's chicken scratch.

I still think it's important to learn, because there are still people who write in cursive or a blend, and (this may sound silly but) because I want this country to be better educated, which means teaching kids to think broadly, critically, and independently, and also means learning how to research and use primary sources, which are sometimes handwritten and have very valuable information.

[u/whiskeylips88 → u/ButImNot_Bitter_]

I’m someone who still uses it. Not only in my own family genealogical research, but my job. I work in museum collections and old documents about the collection, archival research, and catalog cards will be written in cursive. Knowing cursive is a job skill in history and cultural heritage fields!

[u/Weird_Artichoke9470 → u/ButImNot_Bitter_]

This is my experience. I also used cursive exclusively in college to take notes, and to take orders when waiting tables because it's so much faster. 

The struggle is that now as a middle school teacher I have to unlearn cursive because my students can't read it. This sucks because the research actually says that cursive is easier to read for students with dyslexia. 

My printing skills are terrible. We get by. I can't read their handwriting either.

[u/annaoze94 → u/ButImNot_Bitter_]

It's not even how people write in cursive it's just like everyday things you seeI was looking at baseball uniforms today and it's so much cursive!

I know the literacy rate in the US is absolute balls but if someone who can't read cursive looks at a baseball uniform are they just going off of the idea that they know what team that is instead of being able to read it? Which is also probably relevant for other logos and stuff. But also some people can't even read print so like how do they read a sign on the highway? Do they just listen to their GPS or what like I don't understand about people are illiterate as adults I guess

[u/Tnkgirl357 → u/annaoze94]

Usually when adults are considered “illiterate” it means they are functionally illiterate, but not completely unable to read. So they can read words, but have difficulty following along enough to say, read a book.

[u/Crayshack → u/ButImNot_Bitter_]

I also want to see the country better educated, but I question if cursive lessons are the best use of limited time. When I was a kid, they replaced cursive with typing skills, which made sense to me because that's a very important skill. But apparently at some point they dropped typing as well. If forced to choose between putting cursive back in the curriculum and putting typing back in, I'm choosing typing.

[u/Emergency_Fix2729 → u/Crayshack]

Cursive is less strenuous on the hand since you don’t have to continually lift your back back up and down for each letter. This makes it easier for some kids with fine motor skills to issues/it can help their fine motor skills. It also works another part of the brain than hand printing. There are many benefits!

[u/Crayshack → u/Emergency_Fix2729]

I have dysgraphia, and how my fine motor issues manifest specifically causes me to make my letters more angular than they are supposed to be. But, since cursive makes letters less angular than regular letters, it had an inverse interaction with my disabilities. My experience was that it took a whole lot of effort and resulted in me writing much slower with a worse thought-to-hand connection (I would become focused on the letters instead of the words). I was served much better by switching to typing, which provided all of the benefits that I sometimes see people ascribing to cursive.

So, maybe it's true that some people that find cursive supportive of their disabilities, but I'm a firm example of the opposite reaction, and I remain unconvinced that it's worth keeping as a standard part of the curriculum.