Tuesday, March 29, 2016
“Are we really wanting to dumb down our students to the point where they can’t even read a card in the mail from grandma written in cursive?” asked Rep. Kelly Townsend, R-Mesa.I love that. A curriculum without cursive is dumbed down, according to Townsend. You know who Townsend is really calling dumb? Grandma. If she wants to send cards to her grandkids and they haven't learned cursive in school, PRINT! In big block letters when they're young, then in caps and lower case when they're older. HAPPY BIRTHDAY! How hard is that? Grandma knows how to print, right?
“The quality of handwriting and the quality of the written text can be detected and seen on MRI imaging,” said Rep. Brenda Barton, R-Payson.You can tell by reading that sentence that Barton has no idea what she's talking about. The quality of the written text can be detected on an MRI? What does that mean?
“Word processing offers so many advantages over writing by hand,” Graham said, not only because people generally can write faster at a keyboard, but there’s also immediate help with spelling, grammar and even finding synonyms for words. And there’s also the ability to share the composition with others at a distance to get feedback.Oh, those pointy-headed intellectuals! They always think they're smarter than Republicans who want to misuse their data and not be contradicted by, y'know, the guy who came up with the data in the first place.
“This just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to be putting all this energy into 19th century tools,” he said.
Tags: Teaching cursive , Rep. Kelly Townsend , Rep. Brenda Barton , Steve Graham