Kansas may halt cursive education

[Genocidicles]

When I was in school I was made to write with joined up lettering for everything. My handwriting was just illegible, and by the time I got to college I was told to switch to writing in block capitals for legibility.

But yeah, it can look pretty in rare cases, but in most it just looks crap.

 

[Queen Michael]

Wait... what?
A school cutting a subject because nobody has any use for it?
...when did the world suddenly start becoming better?

 

[aba1]

To be honest I still write everything in cursive. It is simply faster anyone saying printing is faster is only faster because they never write in cursive. As much as everyone says it is useless just prefers to print because really logically cursive has just as much use as print except it is faster just less popular.

 

[ohnoitsabear]

On one hand, there are enough people that still write in cursive that it's probably best to learn how to read it. But on the other hand, time spent learning how to type is going to be infinitely more valuable than time spent on penmanship, cursive or otherwise (after basic writing skills are learned, obviously).

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

Here in the UK "cursive" is normal. Very normal. Its almost a very small minority of people that dont use cursive all the time for everything. We only dont join up our words when we are very small and once we start with cursive we basically stick to it for life. However my handwriting is terrible. So i have had to learn block writing, im a very small minority. I find it pretty difficult not to let my pen flow into cursive. It just feels fluid and natural. Im SO astounded by the culture difference here. In the US cursive is weird and in the UK cursive is just what everyone does. It doesnt even have a name. Its just writing.

Its funny how you learn cursive as a weird thing and drop it while i learned cursive naturally and now find it hard to unlearn it for the sake of readability.

 

[Reginald]

I think cursive should carry on (wayward son). Writing in cursive is faster and more efficient than printing when it comes to expressing what's on your mind, and it looks fine so long as you don't have wacky spaz hands. Many a magnum opus has been penned in cursive, and it was used to answer many questions of my childhood without any real problems. Cursive is one of those miracles out of nowhere, and it should be preserved.

 

[soren7550]

From 3rd/4th grade onwards I wrote pretty much everything in cursive. But since I've been out of school (where I had to do a lot of handwriting) for a while now, when I do write something down, it's almost always in block. Either way, my hand writing sucks, but people tended to not understand my cursive because they didn't really remember how to read it.

More on subject, I think it's a bit stupid they're thinking of cutting it. It's just one of those things you probably should learn in my opinion.

 

[Chemical Alia]

Weird. I always write in cursive, it's meant to be quicker and easier than printing. My penmanship is terrible (due to a wrist condition), but it's not any easier to read if I'm printing. I don't remember it taking all that long to learn how to write it, and getting rid of it just doesn't really make sense to me. Many other countries still use cursive predominantly, and I know I wouldn't want to be unable to read hand-written things if I had to.

 

[renegade7]

Does anyone really use cursive anymore? It was taught to us in primary school, and for like a year or two it was demanded for major assignments. Then dropped entirely. I can't remember the last time anyone used it for something more lengthy than their signature.

In class, I write my notes in cursive because it's faster. One pen stroke, and my professors go through the material really fast, but that's just me.

But you can't use it on assignments though, since our professors instruct us to 'print legibly' because presumably they haven't read or written cursive in 20+ years.

 

[Aris Khandr]

In class, I write my notes in cursive because it's faster. One pen stroke, and my professors go through the material really fast, but that's just me.

I think the last time I took notes by hand was in high school around 1997. I got a laptop that summer, and have had one ever since.

 

[blah_ducks]

B-But if they get rid of cursive no one in Kansas can take the SAT!

Seriously it was kind of awful/ hilarious seeing a room full of juniors (myself included) struggle to remember our cursive to write the "I will not cheat yadda yadda" before we started the test. Of course they couldn't possibly change that to have the option of writing in print. You can lie if you write in print, it has to be cursive.

Yes I'm still bitter.

 

[Username Redacted]

As someone who is left handed all I have to say is: fuck cursive. Also fuck the shitty paper that I forced to use when learning how to write in cursive. So...um, yeah. Go Kansas.

 

[solemnwar]

Ugh, printing is a highly inferior form of writing by hand. Due to the fact that 99% of classes at my university have these stupid chairs with a piece of board to write on thing, it's pretty impossible to balance a laptop and your books properly, so writing notes by hand just became far more practical (not to mention there are fuck all plugs for laptops, and laptops are just even more weight on my poor back that I just don't need). Handwriting is so, so, so much faster than printing.

It's not like we spent huge amounts of time learning it when I was in school, either. We learned it in either grade 1 or 2, did some excercises right after lunch for a few weeks, boom, could write "cursive". We called it "handwriting" though, us silly Canadians.

 

[Joccaren]

Cursive is still a thing?

I remember being told that I had to 'graduate' to joined writing in year 3 & 4, but after that I went straight back to print. Its 1000% more legible [And whilst normally this would be an exaggeration, for me its not], and for me faster too; I don't have to worry about where each letter joins to, whether I can read what I just wrote, or any other number of things. I just write one word, slightly lift my pencil, and move it to the starting position of the next word.

At the same time, I think typing classes are pointless too.

My school tried to teach me touch typing one time with the fastest typing teacher in the school. I never listened to her, and just typed the way I always have. When she called me up on it, I told her I didn't need to place my fingers in certain positions to know where all the keys are, I knew from experience. To try and prove to me I was wrong, she challenged me to type out some sentence faster than she could. I did. Touch typing may help some people, but IMO a subconscious knowledge of the keyboard not tied to certain positions of your hands is more important.
I normally rest all my fingers on the spacebar as its a nice, relaxed position, and I have no need to place my fingers in certain positions to know where the keys are - if anything trying to do so slows me down. I just move my hands to wherever they need to be. If I'm typing predominantly on one side of the keyboard, my hands will both be more over that side, but thanks to the QWERTY layout they're generally pretty evenly distributed. I never look at the keyboard, and make no mistakes whilst typing unless I let my brain get ahead of my fingers, and start typing 3-4 letters ahead by accident. Typing lessons, IMO, should just be getting people to constantly type at a keyboard and write up large blocks of text, or play lots of keyboard intensive games so that they subconsciously learn the layout of the keyboard, 'cause that's a useful skill to have sometimes.

 

[Evil Smurf]

proper handwritting is an art! Silly America

 

[seventy two]

My cursive is terrible, my print is marginally better. I doubt cursive is really that much faster considering how much extra certain letters have. Plus since I am left handed I need to shift my hand as I write as to not rub against the page too much and that does not mesh with the flow cursive requires.

On the note of typing, typing classes were stupid, when I am gonna be typing and unable to see the keys or use backspace? When schools stop teaching typing like you are using a typewriter, I will be more supportive of teaching typing. I was a horrible typist throughout middle school(Grade 6-8) going from 15 to 35 wpm over the 3 years of computer classes, I got way faster just using my computer normally.

 

[RicoGrey]

I remember back in school( I am 31 years old), the girls who wrote their "final reports" in cursive, and then we had to "grade" each other's reports. I COULD NOT STAND THE CHICKS WHO WROTE IN CURSIVE. Could barely read their reports even though I am sure their cursive was really good, no one else wrote like that, so I never got used to it, so I always had a hard time reading it.

Cursive is useless beyond signature these days, and to be honest my signature is literally a bunch of squiggly lines. I have to sign so much crap for my job, that I purposefully developed a quick and easy signature that I literally scribble across the hundreds of forms I sign each day.

 

[Not G. Ivingname]

Does anyone really use cursive anymore? It was taught to us in primary school, and for like a year or two it was demanded for major assignments. Then dropped entirely. I can't remember the last time anyone used it for something more lengthy than their signature.

I use cursive.

However, it is from habit from being HAMMERED the stuff into me as a child. It is a habit I want to break so bad. >_<

So, yeah, I think this will free up a LOT of time that can be focused on actually useful skills.

Like Latin!

Or under water basket weaving! :3

 

[chris11246]

I dont understand why people hate cursive. It's how I normally write becuase I find it so much faster and easier than printing.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

I really have no problem with this.

Cursive has no real purpose as long as proper handwriting is taught.

In addition, most cursive I've read is so personalized, it's unreadable.