I don’t know why Republicans think it’s important enough for every Arizona child to learn to write cursive that they want to put the mandate into law. The only semi-rational reason I can come up with is the nostalgic notion that everything about education was better in the good ol’ days. “When I was a boy/girl, we learned to write cursive, and dagnabit, today’s children can learn it too.” Where will the time for all that extra penmanship instruction and practice come from? Certainly not from Teach To The Test time, which has been sacred ground since No Child Left Behind. So it’ll have to come out of less essential curriculum, like, say, science, social studies, music, art, free play. Things like that.
So what do you do if you’re a Republican and don’t have a salable reason for a bill other than “When I was a boy/girl, we did it that way”? You make shit up. In this case, the made-up reasons revolve around what’s best for kids and their grandmas.
Let’s start with the “grandma” idea, which is two giant leaps beyond ridiculous.
“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?
Then there’s the “science” part of the shit they’re making up.
“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?
Nothing, actually. She’s referencing research done by ASU professor Steve Graham on the subject of teaching writing, and she’s grossly misrepresenting his results. What he said was, an MRI can tell whether someone is writing on a computer or using pen and paper because the two skills use different parts of the brain. Printing and writing cursive show up identically on MRIs.
In fact, Graham says teaching kids to write on computers is a far more valuable use of their time than teaching them cursive.
“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.
“This just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to be putting all this energy into 19th century tools,” he said.
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 article appears in Mar 24-30, 2016.
Next I hope they require students learn how to make change and balance checkbooks. We have too may educated idiots out there with college degrees that can’t read them. This isn’t soccer where everybody gets a trophy. Up your value. Up yours.
Can you add a “where did that come from?” button next to the like/dislike buttons?
Can teachers still teach cursive? They dropped phonics. And then history. And then US Government. At least Science is still taught by grant recipients. Socialism won’t require us to write in cursive. Just wait by the curb for your food box.
For the record, I oppose that bill and its junk “science” … although (or _because_) I teach handwriting, I direct the World Handwriting Contest, and I’m a Republican (and have been one for at least 30 years).
I’ve asked fellow Republicans, who support the bill, why the party which claims to fight needless governmental micromanagement of everything is demanding that posterity’s handwriting be governmentally micromanaged. They’ve no answer to the contradiction — except for the ones who whine, “Oh, but we MUST tailor the science so it’ll endorse cursive, because otherwise cursive would not have a case!”
Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The research is surprising. For instance, it has been documented that legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility. (Sources for all research are listed below.)
More recently, it has also been documented that cursive does NOT objectively improve the reading, spelling, or language of students who have dyslexia/dysgraphia.
This is what I’d expect from my own experience, by the way. As a handwriting teacher and remediator, I see numerous children, teens, and adults — dyslexic and otherwise — for whom cursive poses even more difficulties than print-writing. (Contrary to myth, reversals in cursive are common — a frequent cursive reversal in my caseload, among dyslexics and others, is “J/f.”)
— According to comparative studies of handwriting speed and legibility in different forms of writing, the fastest, clearest handwriters avoid cursive — although they are not absolute print-writers either. The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all: joining only the most easily joined letter-combinations, leaving the rest unjoined, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree.
Reading cursive still matters — but reading cursive is much easier and quicker to master than writing the same way too.
Reading cursive, simply reading it, can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds (including those with dyslexia) once they read ordinary print.
There’s even a free iPad app teaching how: called “Read Cursive” — appstore.com/readcursive
Given the importance of reading cursive, why not teach this vital skill quickly — for free — instead of leaving it to depend upon the difficult and time-consuming process of learning to write in cursive (which will cost millions to mandate)?
We don’t require our children to learn to make their own pencils (or build their own printing presses) before we teach them how to read and write. Why require them to write cursive before we teach them how to read it? Why not simply teach children to read cursive — along with teaching other vital skills, such as a form of handwriting that is actually typical of effective handwriters?
Just as each and every child deserves to be able to read all kinds of everyday handwriting (including cursive), each and every one of our children — dyslexic or not — deserves to learn the most effective and powerful strategies for high-speed high-legibility handwriting performance.
Teaching material for practical handwriting abounds — especially in the UK and Europe, where such handwriting is taught at least as often as the accident-prone cursive which is venerated by too many North American educators. Some examples, in several cases with student work also shown: http://www.BFHhandwriting.com, http://www.handwritingsuccess.com, http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-WRITING.1.pdf, http://www.briem.net, http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com, http://www.italic-handwriting.org, http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html, http://www.freehandwriting.net/educational.html )
Even in the USA and Canada, educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers across North America were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37% wrote in cursive; another 8% printed. The majority — 55% — wrote with some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive.
(If you would like to take part in another, ongoing poll of handwriting forms — not hosted by a publisher, and not restricted to teachers — visit http://www.poll.fm/4zac4 for the One-Question Handwriting Survey, created by this author. As with the Zaner-Bloser teacher survey, so far the results show very few purely cursive handwriters — and even fewer purely printed writers. Most handwriting in the real world — 75% of the response totals, so far — consists of print-like letters with occasional joins.)
When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why glorify it?
Believe it or not, some of the adults who themselves write in an occasionally joined but otherwise print-like handwriting tell me that they are teachers who still insist that their students must write in cursive, and/or who still teach their students that all adults habitually and normally write in cursive and always will. (Given the facts on our handwriting today, this is a little like teaching kids that our current president is Richard Nixon.)
What, I wonder, are the educational and psychological effects of teaching, or trying to teach, something that the students can probably see for themselves is no longer a fact?
Cursive’s cheerleaders (with whom I’ve had some stormy debates) sometimes allege that cursive has benefits which justify absolutely anything said or done to promote that form of handwriting. The cheerleaders for cursive repeatedly state (sometimes in sworn testimony before school boards and state legislatures) that cursive cures dyslexia or prevents it, that it makes you pleasant and graceful and intelligent, that it adds brain cells, that it instills proper etiquette and patriotism, or that it confers numerous other blessings which are no more prevalent among cursive users than among the rest of the human race. Some claim research support — citing studies that invariably prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.
So far, whenever a devotee of cursive claims the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident as soon as others examined the claimed support:
/1/ either the claim provides no source (and no source is provided on request)
or, almost as often,
/2/ when sources are cited and can be checked (by finding and reading the cited document), the sources provided turn out to include and/or to reference materials which are misquoted or incorrectly represented by the person(s) offering these as support for cursive,
or, even more often,
/3/ the claimant correctly quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
Cursive devotees’ eagerness to misrepresent research has substantial consequences, as the misrepresentations are commonly made — under oath — in testimony before school districts, state legislatures, and other bodies voting on educational measures. The proposals for cursive are, without exception so far, introduced by legislators or other spokespersons whose misrepresentations (in their own testimony) are later revealed — although investigative reporting of the questionable testimony does not always prevent the bill from passing into law, even when the discoveries include signs of undue influence on the legislators promoting the cursive bill? (Documentation on request: I am willing to be interviewed by anyone who is interested in bringing this serious issue inescapably before the public’s eyes and ears.)
By now, you’re probably wondering: “What about cursive and signatures? Will we still have legally valid signatures if we stop signing our names in cursive?” Brace yourself: in state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the verification of documents, etc.) inform me that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest. Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.
All handwriting, not just cursive, is individual — just as all handwriting involves fine motor skills. That is why any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the print-writing on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.
SOURCES:
Handwriting research on speed and legibility:
/1/ Arthur Dale Jackson. “A Comparison of Speed and Legibility of Manuscript and Cursive Handwriting of Intermediate Grade Pupils.”
Ed. D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1970: on-line at http://www.eric.ed.gov/?id=ED056015
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May – June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
/3/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September – October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
Handwriting research on cursive’s lack of observable benefit for students with dyslexia/dysgraphia:
“Does cursive handwriting have an impact on the reading and spelling performance of children with dyslexic dysgraphia: A quasi-experimental study.” Authors: Lorene Ann Nalpon & Noel Kok Hwee Chia — URL: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/234451547_Does_cursive_handwriting_have_an_impact_on_the_reading_and_spelling_performance_of_children_with_dyslexic_dysgraphia_A_quasi-experimental_study
and
http://dyslexia.yale.edu/EDU_keyboarding.html
Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf
Ongoing handwriting poll: http://poll.fm/4zac4
The research most often misrepresented by devotees of cursive (“Neural Correlates of Handwriting” by Dr. Karin Harman-James at Indiana University):
https://www.hw21summit.com/research-harman-james
Background on our handwriting, past and present:
3 videos, by a colleague, show why cursive is NOT a sacrament:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE —
http://youtu.be/3kmJc3BCu5g
TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING —
http://youtu.be/s_F7FqCe6To
HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
(shows how to develop fine motor skills WITHOUT cursive) —
http://youtu.be/Od7PGzEHbu0
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone • 518-482-6763
DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest
CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
handwritingrepair@gmail.com
165 North Allen Street • First Floor
Albany, NY 12206-1706 • USA
I can’t believe people are throwing the baby out with the bathwater and overlooking one of the most obvious benefits of learning cursive: without it, you can’t sign your name. Anyone can forge print. How will you sign legal documents if you don’t know cursive? I’ve tried virtual e-signatures. Put plainly, they suck. So what are you going to do if you don’t know cursive? Mark your name with an X?
Should this bill pass the legislature? Not necessarily. It seems a bit like overkill. But should cursive be abandoned entirely? I think not.
as stupid as this law is, most elderly grandmothers are old enough and stuck enough in their ways, they’ll write cursive regardless of what you ask. you just can’t get really old people to stop doing stupid shit, and they’re the ones who’ll support this stupid bill.
Yeah, signatures are needed for the real world, woopdy doo. we’ll figure something out that isn’t useless cursive.
And you know what else? I know how to write cursive AND I STILL CAN’T READ IT.
Ex-Arizonan asks: “How will you sign legal documents if you don’t know cursive?” As any attorney will confirm, cursive in fact adds nothing to the legal validity of a signature: legally, your signature is WHATEVER you habitually produce when intending to produce your signature.
See http://tinyurl.com/LegalSig for legal material on this matter.
i think kids just need to know enough cursive to sign their signature. i learned how but within 5 years i was back to almost entirely printing my letters for hand writing. i can do my signature in cursive but that’s about it. i still have a very hard time reading cursive which is why i prefer to type notes and letters to make it more readable in the future.
I like cursive writing, and still wish mine were better. My daughter’s is quite beautiful. But What Again is changing the topic again. Since I still do not know – what is the source of factual data that “thousands and thousands and thousands of children of illegals” are out there? Is it a fact or a hunch? And BTW, an “uber liberal” and “fascist” are opposites historically, so no one could be both.
I’m a 60 year old conservative who thinks cursive, like this bill, is a waste of time.
Congratulations to the Grijalva’s, H.T. Sanchez and all the white guilt liberals that support them. They have been quite successful of purging the district of white kids, now it’s time to get rid of those whitey teachers. They’re getting in the way of the radical chicano doctrine in place at TUSD.
“While 69 percent of TUSD students identify as African-American or Hispanic, that is true for only 31 percent of the district’s teachers.”
“Meanwhile, Anglos make up about 21 percent of TUSD’s student population but 66 percent of the teaching staff.”
http://tucson.com/news/local/education/court-tells-tusd-to-improve-teachers-racial-diversity/article_ebcb0b66-5b5e-5bfa-8be2-5a47598c0d6f.html#utm_source=tucson&utm_campaign=most-popular-tabs-2&utm_medium=direct
Thinking_Allowed – isn’t it convenient that the public schools refuse to ask or report about immigration status?
Isn’t it convenient that news outlets like the Weekly and the ADS REFUSE to report the immigration status of criminals?
Willful ignorance?
And as far as fascists and liberals being opposites…not anymore. Liberals display every day their distaste for the bill of rights and rule of law.
They should teach coding. More useful.
What, Again: I can’t speak for the Weekly, but I would guess it has to do with you posting the same rhetoric over and over again, regardless of content. Maybe you should try to make your comments topical. Engaging in civil, relevant discourse versus hamfisted and baseless rhetoric would be nice, too.
They should teach how to launder money to get public money for private schools. They should require teaching how to hide dark money to give to political candidates and call it “improved transparency”. They should teach how giving schools less money than Constitutionally required is actually dramatically increasing money to public schools. Everything Ducey says is the opposite of reality.
So, cursive’s supporters in Arizona (as in other states where this cursive bill has been “independently” introduced) advance their cause by misquoting a researcher in their own state (Steve Graham is at ASU), and by misquoting him even under oath (in testimony to the state legislature).
Their eagerness to adopt such a weak and risky strategy certainly doesn’t support their belief that cursive makes people smarter.
From an international perspective, many countries still ensure that their students master cursive first, usually in both the language of the country as well as English. It’s a global economy now and those students will be future competition for jobs. They giggle when they see that north American children are only able to print like little children.
Cursive writing only needs to be taught in one grade, then it can be practised in Science, Social Studies and other subjects. The most frequently made comment by those who are proficient in cursive is that it is faster. That’s how cursive handwriting evolved..the letters ran together when more handwriting was needed and it needed to be produced quickly.
They just want to make sure that the next generation can read the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and other documents that are the foundation of this country. The libs don’t like it because uneducated people are easier to prey on.
This is not a Republican issue, it’s about giving our children the opportunity to learn an important skill that will serve them throughout life. Learning keyboarding is fine, but what about times when keyboards aren’t available? Natural disasters often mean no electricity to charge those phones and tablets. http://www.cursiveiscool.com
Public school children who do not learn cursive are at a disadvantage. Those whose parents can afford to send their kids to private schools get the brain development benefits that research shows comes with the fine motor movement required by cursive. Besides, kids love learning how to write–our cursive contest entries tell us that.
Sheila Lowe, president, American Handwriting Analysis Foundation
So true Sheila. So true.
So important to teach a second language for all prek-5 students. Coding would qualify as a 2nd language. Cursive perhaps let the parent decide importance.
script, read the comment by Kate Gladstone, above. Reading cursive and writing cursive are not the same thing.
What, Again: I was speaking more about how us as comment writers conduct ourselves. I believe the Weekly to be a left-leaning publication, and the lean seems to have become sharper in the past year or so. I don’t agree with everything the Weekly writes, but I do appreciate that we can all comment and debate in a civil, relevant manner.
For me, the problem is when we decide to attack each other using stereotypes and assumptions. We’ve become a nation of us vs. them, liberals vs. conservatives, and seem to have lost our moderation. I don’t mind anyone disagreeing with me, but when someone automatically disagrees with me because of my assumed political alignment – well that’s just silly. We’re playing into the two party system that benefits from a divided people. In the end our choice seems no more significant than between Coke or Pepsi.
I’d love to see statistics on resources spent educating illegal immigrant children. I’d also like to see what the return on investment is. Do these children finish school and go on to do productive work? And why are you so worried about white children? I really don’t see white children being ushered out of Arizona schools on a trail of tears.
I had made my living as a journalist and writer for many years before retirement – and was ONLY able to do it because my handwriting in cursive was not only left handed, but abominable. My printing by hand was readable, but was only for note keeping and was slow to record.
I bemoan the fact I never learned the fluid cursive handwriting of my parents and piers — as it did change my thought process to less flowing and rhythmical. The poetry of the written word was lost to me.
My unrepentantly unqualified thought is that children should be taught cursive — but mindfully teachers must be aware of problems of left-handedness, dyslexia and hand eye coordination interfering with the process and for some — render the use of cursive a non-gradable skill.
If cursive is so self-evidently wonderful, why is research misquoted in its defense?
Most of the cursive used worldwide, in other countries that use our alphabet (including most of the Rnglish-speaking countries), is very different from the conventional cursive of USA classrooms — so far different that, when I show UK or European or Australian cursives to people who have just praised those parts of the world for using cursive, those same people reject these as “printing.”
If poetry, creativity, or dexterity depended on cursive, the human race would never have waged long enough to invent cursive — or anything else.
They may have been talking about cursive language. That’s different.
Kate Gladstone, there is still the thorny problem, as I mentioned, of non-cursive signatures being far too easy to forge. Copying print or an X or some little symbol or what-have-you is much easier than copying a unique penmanship style that took you years to develop and perfect. Interestingly, I have found that the nearer your handwriting is to being completely illegible (like mine, actually), the harder it is for people to imitate it.
“The libs don’t like it because uneducated people are easier to prey on.” That’s rich, considering that’s exactly how Donald Trump has become the GOP front-runner. I swear to God, you have to be a raving moron to be a conservative and, with a straight face, blame liberals for YOUR failings. If you’re not rich, and you’re a conservative, you are a moron. There is no other explanation. Don’t try to argue, you’re too stupid to even know what I’m talking about, because it takes some knowledge to interpret the world correctly, and you have none.
Signing a document is the least of our worries. Ducey’s plan to sell off public lands, slaying the goose that lays the golden eggs, will put public schools out of business with or without cursive. I was invited to join in to a phone town hall last night. People were dangling $1 million for the teachers and schools, with principals and teachers raving about a lousy million dollars while forgetting that, once the land is gone, the fund that keeps on giving will be gone also. I think of all of the shortsighted thinking about education, this bit takes the cake. No more land, no more future income for education from this source and then what will they sell? They’ve already sold education down the tubes while making sure corporate Arizona gets tax breaks and charter schools get the funding. Sickos. I so hope the voters don’t fall for this ponzi scheme.
David W, print-writing is actually harder to forge successfully than most cursive, because the simplest handwritings are the hardest to forge successfully. An eLier message of mine noted this fact among others,