Cursive or Not?

Yesterday on the Today Show I watched a segment about cursive and what it said about one’s personality and how it is being taught in school.  The elementary school that my children went to taught cursive and then they moved on, and the children never used it again.  Now my children are both in middle school and the 6^th grade has then practice it again.  The 7^th grade requires them to write most of their responses and essays in cursive as do most of the 8^th grade classes.  The 7^th grade teachers last year told us parents that they thought cursive did a lot to improve children’s spelling and test scores.  They think it does a lot to improve children’s cognitive skills based on articles they have read.  I agree, but I thought I should look at what some have published on the matter.

An article in Junior Scholastics from 2006 says, “According to the College Board, the company that administers the SAT, this year's test yielded some surprising results. Only 15 percent of nearly 1.5 million students wrote their essays in cursive. The remaining 85 percent printed their responses. Who scored better? The essays written in cursive had a slightly higher average” (“Should Kids Learn Cursive Writing?”).  This article goes on to say that children should learn cursive even with the packed full curriculum that teachers must teach these days.

Writes Michelle Manafy in her article “Dreaming in TXT,” “A study released by Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham last November reports that a majority of primary school teachers believe that students with fluent handwriting produce superiorly composed assignments.”  She doesn’t necessarily agree, since she hated writing by hand and was taken to task in 5^th grade for horrible handwriting, but she at least acknowledges both sides.  I am not saying that everyone should be a superior writer or have beautiful handwriting, but I think there is something to writing by hand and in cursive whether pretty or not.

Some will say that with all the technology around that handwriting is less necessary than it once was.  That may be true, but I think that cursive does help with learning.  It does something in the programming of the mind.  I think there is something to learning a skill manually and then when it’s mostly mastered, it’s okay to use technology to make it more efficient. 

Take math for instance.  Children should still learn how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and then when they’ve mastered those skills, they can use calculators for the higher level math like algebra when it’s more important to put the equation together rather than show that you know how to multiply correctly.

I think writing by hand and then learning cursive and using it to write help with children’s development as writers.  Today, I mostly write on the computer, but there are times when I still write by hand.  Sometimes a computer isn’t handy or appropriate for what I have to write.  I have the skills to type, print or write in cursive, and I can switch quickly from one form to the other without so much as a thought.