Monday with a Mad Genius

We listened to the audiobook in the car.

The Magic Treehouse: Monday with a Mad Genius #38 by Mary Pope Osborne

Jack and Annie ventured into Renaissance Florence and spent the day with Leonardo da Vinci.  They watched him try to fly, scoured his notebooks for good ideas and helped him capture Mona Lisa's smile.  

Is Cursive Passé?

I was asked recently if I will be teaching my children cursive, after all, public schools consider giving it the boot.


Hmmm...I'm thinking back to the torture of teaching my students manuscript.  The long tear-filled hours of practice over what should have been a 10 minute drill, despite the name of the program "Handwriting Without Tears."  Handwriting became such a dull and painful assignment that we nearly "lost" one of our students to self-deprication that reached into all subjects.  


One of my students just decided to have beautiful manuscript writing one day.  From that moment on, writing was an exercise of pride, though slow and painful for mom, even to this day.  The other student truly hasn't progressed in handwriting in the last year and much of the work is near illegible.  Past torture has tainted the attitude toward writing in general.   I'm worn out teaching handwriting and I haven't even gotten to cursive yet!!


I remember being a third grader, learning the difficult slant and slope, loops and curves of cursive writing.  And after I'd finally gotten manuscript down, suddenly all of my teachers demanded that I write in only cursive. AND then, they piled on long division!  Third grade was hard!   I wondered why on earth I'd worked so hard on manuscript, when it was being stripped from me. By sixth grade, the teachers just asked for legible work.  I went straight back to manuscript and perfected a stylized, though minute version of the balls and sticks I'd learned in Kindergarten.  They never said it had to be legible without a magnifying glass.  Today my writing is some cross of the two, lazily dragging my pencil between some letters, but not others.


Some homeschool families skip manuscript all together, citing reasons like a young child's motor ability being more attuned to loopty loops.  Cursive also helps students with dyslexic tendencies to succeed in spelling and writing, as cursive letters can not be written backward and the constant flow of cursive, without lifting the pencil seems to guide their brain into the next letter without struggling to identify it.  We did not opt to begin this way, as I have a special  place in my heart for ball-and-stick manuscript.  And I don't even want to discuss D'Nealian.


One of my students, the one with the sloppy manuscript, has asked when I will teach the curvy letters.  I thought perhaps they would be easier to form than manuscript and thus make the handwriting neater, so I offered a few short lessons hoping to gauge whether script suited the one student better.  Most definitely not, it only gave permission for one sloppy letter to blend into and crowd another.


I usually advocate for tradition.  I like real books, with real paper and real glue and dust smells, but I see the convenience and have benefited from ebooks on numerous occasions.  Multiplication speed drills.  A little competition against the clock is good practice, even if it does "stifle individuality."


The truth is, I don't want to teach cursive.  I don't like it and believe the need for it is fading.  I see the need for this generation to learn to read cursive, and of course they must learn to sign their names.  But, I feel our time may be better suited taking a proper typing course.


Some argue that without cursive, how will those poor deprived students label geometric figures?  They'll pick up what is necessary, just like characters such as ∞ and π are learned as the situation warrants.   What about taking notes in meetings and brainstorming on the whiteboard?  Please!  Neither of those were ever done in proper cursive anyway.  Note taking dove into the digital gadget a few years ago and grocery lists and brainstorms (though I keep mine digitally, as well) will still be made of whatever slopified writing the author creates for himself (which I imagine will look very much like D'Nealian and is why I despise it).  Won't it be sad when our newest generation visits the National Archives and can't read the Declaration of Independence?  I hate to say it, but it's already illegible, from fading as well as an old style script.  I suppose this won't be much different than looking at any old document.  Scripts and styles change.  Old English script is almost entirely illegible now, as is old German.  And thank goodness, some good typist has transliterated the Declaration and its content is available all over the web.  


Yes, traditions change and some of us long for the old days for old days' sake.  If having amazon.com ship to my door, air conditioning, instant world-wide communication, online bill pay, and direct deposit mean that our children must give up the precious cursive in lieu of typing 90 wpm, fingerprint scans, e-signatures and debit cards, I'll (not too sadly) bid cursive instruction and the hours of tears adieu.  


On which side do you fall?