Don't they teach joined up writing anymore?

[unwillingphoenician]

Originally Posted by Unsettomati

This is incorrect.

First, cursive is still taught in the majority of elementary schools.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...0ea_story.html

Second, its decline (nothing new - the trend is nearly half a century old at this point) is because in the keyboard age it's become less useful. There's never enough time in a curriculum to teach everything, so the things that go are the less useful things. Allocating limited teaching resources out of a nostalgic fondness for cursive writing is unwise allocation.

Third, advanced math is about how to use mathematics, not about basic calculations - that is learned before one gets to advanced math. They used slide rules on the Apollo missions, but I highly doubt they use them in the International Space Station now. That's not a problem - it's just the embrace if now-available technology. And so it is with mathematics. By the way, I have two students who just graduated high school last year, and one more in high school this year, and the claim that no one is taught the utility of mathematics is just the usual flat-out false doom-and-gloomism from every aging generation that looks down upon the succeeding generation as inferior. No doubt the generation that preceded yours looked similarly down their noses at yours. But that says nothing about those succeeding generations - just about the fact that generations in general can't handle the fact that the next generation is as accomplished as were they, or that they're going about things in an invariably different manner.

I see your point about cursive and it's a good one, although I still wish cursive were taught everywhere. I used to be a letter writer and I never in a million years thought that knowing how to lay out a handwritten letter, with date, salutation, body, and signature would mark me as a dinosaur. Time does move on, that's for sure.

The math thing I disagree with somewhat. I've studied math through advanced multi-variate statistics, and I've taught math in high school. I'm one of those people who is astonished when I buy something that costs $0.87 and the clerk doesn't know enough to give me $0.13 change without using the register. I think we can all agree that that is a common experience in this day and age. However, I lived in South America for a few years, and there was a lot of street vending, and even very young children, who went to school for a couple of hours at night because they worked all day selling produce or whatever with their parents, could perform the same type of calculations instantly and correctly, every time. These are students who would be considered disadvantaged from an education standpoint in every way in this country, financially especially.

The difference, to me, was that in one case kids were actually working with numbers and they meant something, and in the other case they were copying numbers on tests or punching them into a calculator.

OK, so kids in the U.S. will always have calculators or computers or registers, so what's the problem? Well, without a little basic understanding, they have no way to check if they are making errors. You always have to "check your work" as the teacher says. But how do you know that the graph should go down, not up, or that you are off by an order of magnitude because you punched in an extra zero, if you don't understand what you're doing or know what the answer roughly should be?

Kids are definitely savvy today. They're not dumb. But they are learning skills that do not seem to be "real skills" all the time, at least to me.

[simbared]

Originally Posted by DewDropInn

We called it hand writing..... vs. printing.

We also called it longhand (vs. shorthand, of course).

[Nonchalance]

When Gilderoy Lockhart lost his marbles, he referred to cursive as 'joined-up writing.'

[in_newengland]

As a former elementary school teacher, it doesn't take very long to learn how to write. It's only a long process if you have to be perfect at it the way some of us had to be in school. But if you just taught them the basics of writing, they'd pick it up really fast.

If they learned the basics it would be their own choice whether or not to take it a step further and develop nice handwriting. They could do that on their own.

[banjomike]

Cursive is a lot faster way of putting letters into words and words on paper than printing is. Writing longhand is also like a person's fingerprints; everyone who learns writes differently than anyone else. Printing can be easily forged, but not longhand.
Ironically, using a fountain pen with some modern forgery-proof ink in it makes any transaction more secure than multiple layers of computer security does. A person's will that is written in cursive longhand is still the most secure of all, and is accepted over all others by the courts if any dispute arises when a will has not been notarized. A longhand signature is good, but an entire will is much better.

Teaching cursive writing wasn't a priority in my state for decades, but last year, a state Representative who is known for his beautiful handwriting did get a mandate passed that it would once again be taught in schools statewide.

He wrote everyone in the State Legislature a handwritten letter about the bill. And one to the Governor, who signed the bill into law in longhand.