I have to agree - my first thought was that the writing looked "pre-cursive". As a late teen I abandoned cursive in favor of something that I could read.
These days about the only thing I write by hand is my signature. It's a squiggle.
I'm sort of embarrassed to admit it but I can no longer write anymore. I can barely hold a pen and make any letter at all... anyone else feel like this?
I also can no longer write in cursive, but I don't feel bad about it. It's an archaic and un-needed skill, a leftover relic of a bygone age. Also, I could never write in cursive particularly well to begin with... started getting nasty notes in my report cards about that starting from primary school, so as far as I'm concerned, "Good Riddance."
Has it really changed? Or do we just not keep up with it outside of/after leaving school any more? I'm a bit younger than her and was certainly taught properly (in KS1, not 2, if my quick search is correct that KS2 starts at form/year/grade 3) - I just quite quickly stopped using it and now my writing is an only-half-joined-up 'nonsense scrawl'.
My kids are in year 2 and 5. Year 5 had perfectly legible handwriting (not quite as good as the stuff in the image, but pretty good) until they forced the joined up shit starting in year 3.
Looking at other words on the wall confirms this is normal - writing goes back severely in KS2 because of this 1960s view that you have to be able to write large amounts of prose at speed.
I was born in 1997, I recall a faint effort being made to teach us cursive in about 5th grade, but neither myself nor anyone my age I know can write it.
I can only write print. I don't see the use for cursive, and I said as much when I was 10 (I already had a personal computer, if I was going to write something long it'd be faster for me to type it).
I've looked at some teaching materials and examples for KS2 and KS3 in England.
It seems there's now more emphasis on letter forms than there was in the 1990s, when I was being taught "joined-up writing". I didn't have to put a stupid tail on the left of the C at the beginning of "cat", or any other round initial letter. Let alone the tail on a lower case initial H, or any capital letters.
Yes, skilled penmanship and calligraphy is wonderful. But in my personal life, the majority of times I encounter cursive, I can not even read the handwriting, which is, to put it lightly, bad.
I find it interesting that I only ever hear that kind of complaint from Americans. Here in Europe, cursive/script is the basic way you learn writing, you automatically transition to something other later in life ... and we have zero hate for either variant.
As for lack of legibility: I would guess US teachers not enforcing good style in preschool and elementary school contribute to that.
I can't remember the last time I wrote anything long form without a keyboard. Is that still a thing enough people do to have strong opinions about this?
Then the zombies happened, and your message to the front couldn't be read, we fell to the hordes because of your lack of skill at cursive thank you the end.
Truthfully, there is a reason for cursive. Not lifting the pen is a big time save, and cursive is designed to be written without that. EG, F doesn't require a pen lift pause to make the lower bar, in cursive.
The way the letters are written are also for maximal speed, and of course, you don't have to lift pen between letters.
Any skilled cursive writer will tell you, it is many times faster to write legibly in cursive over block letters.
Do we need to learn it any more? Well, I'd say not for the speed benefits.
But discounting the speed benefits, acting as if they are a lie, is silly.
From my side, I see a lot of people complaining about leaning "dumb things" in public school, in these responses. Wow.
Totally don't get the point of it.
And of course if we removed what everyone on this thread complained about, in the public school curriculum, well, there'd be nothing to teach! Because everyone likes different things.
Which is part of what public school is supposed to be about.
Teach the basics, while seeing what you excel in, what interests you.
You know what cursive teaches, outside of itself? Fine finger control. Brain to finger control mapping.
It is an entirely different skill than keyboard pecking.
And while you are learning it, you are still learning grammar, learning to craft thought to speech, and so on.
Quoting slow children who can't read by the age of five somehow benefit, and rather than testing what children know we should punish them for not having outdated skills
> In the same way, bad handwriting leads to poorer test scores, according to a study by the Carnegie Foundation. The same thoughts and ideas expressed "in a less legible version of a paper" tended to be scored more harshly.
This form of writing belongs in a museum curation degree, not in primary schools
> It tested students by asking them to take notes from a lecture, using either a laptop or a pen and paper, and then tested their recall on both facts and deeper conceptual questions.
>
> Essentially, the study found that students taking long-form notes on pen and paper tended to process the information on a deeper level.
And that's what we (should) send kids to school for.
And that's what we (should) send kids to school for.
Is that what we expect out of 6-year-olds, though? Probably not. We expect elementary kids to play and learn basic concepts of things and about the world around them. There is a clear limit to how "deep" a 7-year-old is going to be simply because of maturity and lack of knowledge.
We expect more in later schooling years - and that is what your quote refers to. Older children, listening to a lecture. It doesn't mention specifically that this was cursive, either: They were comparing it to typing.
And we don't want to force it, either: Later in that same article, it mentions, "typing may help significantly increase exam grades, according to the British Dyslexia Association. And those with physical impairments have long used technology to record their thoughts."
Pretty much, writing is a tool that might help you learn assuming you have a neurotypical brain, and even then there are likely other tools you can employ instead.
The chancery/round hand style used in the Declaration of Independence is not a style of cursive much used in the last ~150 years. So it's potentially quite difficult without some practice.
A major part of why we teach (or taught) writing cursive is because it also helps teach you to read cursive. You may not need to write much, but until recently you would encounter written cursive all the time. In my experience it's still common enough. It'd be awkward to be unable to read the New Year's cards from my older relatives.
It is, in essence, a different dialect of writing. It is not illegible, you just don’t know how to read it. Deposit yourself in Edinburgh, Appalachia, or rural Minnesota and you’ll have various levels of difficulty understanding how people speak, is their speech wrong or is your knowledge of their language lacking?
That is perfectly legible. Many modern fonts are less legible than that.
I am curious about the opposition to cursive script that some people demonstrate, mostly in the US. In Europe cursive script is the norm; block letter writing by an adult is considered a mark of poor education.
"block letter writing by an adult is considered a mark of poor education"
Are you sure about that? It isn't uncommon to require it on forms. Also, Europe is a big and varied place - perhaps it is just one part of Europe? Where in Europe were you referring to?
In all European countries, adults are expected to be able to write cursive. Filling out forms in block letters is sometimes a requirement, for example to facilitate machine reading.
Not sure which cursive is taught in the US, but to me (having learned cursive writing in Southern Europe in the 90s) that looks surprisingly legible, if not for the quality of the picture in your link. Here's a high-res version: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/United_S...
Except for the "double s" that looks like an "f" (that ligature was common also in fonts for bookprinting at the times, so it's not hard to figure it out if you know that), the rest looks like a better version of the calligraphy I used to have when I was 9/10 years old (and that I wish I still had, now it's a much "simplified" - in shapes, not ease of reading - version of that).
Update: also the single "s" is a bit peculiar, since it's completely different at the beginning VS at the end of a word
My experience with my kids going through school in the US is that cursive is not taught. When I expressed surprise at this to the elementary school principal he told me very few parents could write cursive either.
I feel sort of neutral about it. I always felt like it took me more time so I stopped using it. But with others I don't have much preference one way or another. I guess I prefer non-cursive? But some of it is very beautiful.
There are a lot of children in my extended family, and at some point I noticed they were very confused by cursive, and saw it as a curiosity, almost like there was a secret alphabet adults used to use. When I asked around about it, I found out they were no longer being taught it, and then found articles about how it was disappearing from curricula.
It's mostly interesting to me because it was such a big part of my writing education, and my teachers were so adamant about it, and it was so common. So it's strange to me to see it just disappear.
If we're honest, most of the actual content of the first 5-7 years or so of schooling is unimportant and ultimately forgotten, save for reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. Ideally some basic computer use too. But it's not like every moment spent on cursive writing in primary school would be a moment taken away from some critical, core subject. Aside from those few key building blocks, most of what you're doing in early school is learning socialization and 'how to learn'.
Personally I'm glad I learned cursive in school, even though I'm terrible at it. Far more valuable than learning about the various species of local turtle, or 1000 other things we did in primary school that I've since forgotten.
My interest in computers didn't come from primary school; primary school didn't teach us very much about computers, except near the end in a one-off series of experimental lessons by a teacher who left not long afterwards. However, my interest in biology very much came from primary school; until then, I didn't know there was a field of study devoted to living things. (Sure, I could've found out later, but why should I have had to wait?)
My parents got me the first(!) home computer in seventh grade. High school had a computer club but no computer classes. There was one typing class, taught in a room with dozens of incredibly loud <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter>s.
I'm not arguing that primary school shouldn't teach a bunch of random things, just that I think cursive is at least as useful to learn as most of them. Having it in the curriculum doesn't mean less time for foundational material for later years.
Cursive is of absolutely no use to 99.9% of people
Writing short notes legibly is of course useful, reading is essential, typing is essential, learning how to research subjects (history, geography, biology etc) is useful
I don't write by hand much anymore, but I sure wrote a lot in university. I would think the same would be true for most students, which would account for more than 0.1% of people. Sure I could have printed my notes, but cursive was easier and faster. Could have typed them too (at least in most classes; some profs don't like it), but writing tends to result in better retention.
20 years ago people typed notes, let alone now, and the vast vast majority of those notes will not be written in "cursive", as most people drop that backwards skill as soon as they are allowed.
Maybe forgotten in an active sense, but those years are critical for instilling the passive behaviors and expectations which help make us into productive human resources to serve the economy as adults. Things like learning not to talk until called upon, learning to ask before being allowed to use the restroom or for other bodily functions, learning to be identified by an ID number, learning to answer a daily roll-call, learning that our personal possessions will be confiscated at any time, learning to walk through security checkpoints and metal detectors, learning to expect the presence of a School Resource Officer whose job is to perceive students as a possible threat and protect the institution, learning we must dress a certain way, learning to buy our own school supplies necessary to complete our assigned work units, learning that being poor isn’t an acceptable excuse for not having supplies, learning that food won’t be provided for free even though we’re required to be be at school for eight hours straight, learning it is never acceptable to leave school grounds once we check in for the day until officially released at the end of the day, learning that disruptive individuals will be separated from their entire social circle and sent to a stricter alternative facility, learning that authority figures will discuss you with each other behind your back and may form prejudices based on gossip or on your familial relations, learning how it’s best to surpass our peers and that we can’t get the highest grade unless others fail, learning not to read ahead of our current place in the curriculum, learning never to read from unapproved sources, learning that truth is whatever the curriculum says is Officially True, learning how authority figures will punish or shame us for questioning the curriculum or beyond the curriculum because they are evaluated on how accurately we know it and thus must defend it to survive, learning how cooperation is cheating except for group projects where it is instead a thing to dread, learning to expect no privacy, learning to sit inside all day and only have free time once the sun sets, learning to be punished as a group for the actions of an individual, learning to tell on our peers for gold stars from authority, learning that a bell controls our daily schedule but individual authority figures can decide to keep us late anyway, learning to get up uncomfortably early and do a daily commute, learning to survive on less sleep than we need, learning we will be equally punished for tardiness as for absence, learning somebody else needs to write a note to acknowledge when we are sick before it’s believed, learning to be segregated based on sex, learning to be segregated based on seniority and that the oldest cohort will be regularly pushed out with no say in the matter, learning we must find a clique for social defense because loners are weird and deserve bullying, learning how punishments are decided by administrators who don’t know us individually, learning how rewards and punishments may be arbitrary depending on social status within the microcosm of the school, learning that we must also think about school in our free time and use that time to prepare for what’s due tomorrow, learning that “extra-curricular” work is basically a requirement if everyone else is doing it too, learning to walk in long silent alphabetically-sorted lines with our hands clasped behind our backs, etc. You know, important life skills.
If you have a problem with any of that, you have Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Here’s some pills to turn your brain off so you might still have a chance to “‘earn’ a living” and pay off your original sin of being alive. All hail The Economy!
I do not, and my public school experience was probably one of the best and happiest I could have hoped to have. Apologies I wasn’t histrionic enough to trip your sarcasm detector. I’m saying ODD and similar labels are fake ideas sold to us by the same people who will accuse a person of having them if that person finds it difficult to exist in extremely inhuman unnatural ways designed to serve a shared economic existence more than a shared human existence. Everyone I know considers it normal because that’s what we all went through too, but the whole thing is kinda fucked up if you stop and think about it.
Some people, including some commenters down thread seem to think cursive is about being fancy. It’s not, it’s an efficiency play for writing faster. That’s of course useless in modern day with so little actual hand writing. So it’s less common in schools
That's a common misconception. It stopped being more effecient when we stopped dipping pens or quills in ink. Lifting the pen from the paper tended to cause splattering too so you wanted to keep the pen on the paper rather than lifting it for every letter.
I wrote a message in a bottle when I was young. I still have very dim memories of being excited at the possibility that somebody in another country years later would find it. According to my folks, however, there were some issues. First, I was four years old and couldn't write, and second, I threw the bottle into a small pond. But my parents didn't want to dampen my enthusiasm at the time.
An interpretation: Being told the details as a grown-up, you’re the finder of that bottle. Probably not many would appreciate the drawing you did as much as you can appreciate being enriched with the memory of yourself as a kid.
heh, beside the joke, I remember being utterly excited just seeing people talk over long distance ham radio by using atmospheric reflections.. someone in california randomly bumping into a russia far of Siberia after minutes of white noise.. super eerie.
That was incredibly attractive to me when I was a kid. Then when I was an adult I worked with some engineers who were hams and suddenly found I could afford the radio kit so I got a license. Almost immediately found out it was all racist old men talking about health problems and religious matters around antennas. Disappointedly I sold all the kit and never bothered again. I still keep the license up to date for when I get old and have health problems to talk about.
Much as most hobbies these days most of the ham operators don’t actually operate stuff as well. They just buy stuff and arrange it and post on QRZ forums about it.
I remember throwing plastic bottles off a river bridge with my class in 3rd grade. While it's true that the river connected to an ocean some 400km downstream, I doubt they made it further than the next best river bank.
I sincerely hope that since then schools have stopped encouraging children to throw plastic in waterways like this.
In the 1970s when I was in grade school we attached postcards to helium balloons to see how far they could get (some people got responses that indicated they traveled for hundreds of miles). That probably would be even less acceptable today in terms of littering as deflated balloons often get eaten by wildlife to ill effect.
I love when I do something that comes back around years later after I’ve almost completely forgotten it. Probably my coolest version of this was on a popular run/race in Arizona where I bumped into someone who remembered a software project I did a decade earlier. As I finished a segment, they gave me a high five and left a bewildered but soon amused runner behind.
I had a similar chance meeting on Craigslist in 2012 - I bought an SSD off someone who I'd been contemporary with on some Netscape/Mozilla forums in the early 2000s. This was before Craigslist implemented e-mail address obfuscation (don't get me wrong, this was a good thing), and he recognized me only by my domain name.
Savage. But accurate. We should start making articles about that. Person checks their nested nested spam, other inbox on Facebook and finds endearing highly relevant message from the turn of the decade.
I’d bet almost everyone who uses Instagram and/or Facebook has stories like that. It’s crazy how poor of a UX choice it is, and I imagine Facebook did it this way only because they’re so bad at spam prevention.
I have no use for LinkedIn generally (at least not now) but I've had an account for years with links to some old acquaintances I don't really care to be associated with anymore, due to several industry, geographical, and social changes. I checked it on a whim about a year ago and found an old message from someone I hadn't talked to in over 7 years, very professional message just trying to catch up. I have no other social media accounts and am not easily found through general searches, so it was the only way this person could reach me.
I felt horrible for weeks that I had never responded, then I sent off a reply. I then promptly forgot that I did so, and abandoned LinkedIn for another year. I checked again last week for some reason and I had a year-old response to my response. I forgot to reply and only just now remembered this situation.
I'm now trying to decide if I should bother responding and risk another long delay, or pretend I'm dead.
then just explain that you don't use linkedin actively, and go from there. if they are not bothered by that they will reply. then possibly offer to switch to a different medium like email that you are less likely to miss.
Years ago when I was a regular Facebook user, there was a language setting called "English (pirate)" that would turn your inbox into a "Bottle o’ messages". Not sure if it's still an option but I quite enjoyed it :)
maybe a message posted to an obscure usenet forum in 1996, bouncing around different servers eventually somehow surviving in google's archive to be discovered by someone randomly wandering around google groups...
"Nautically" speaking, if you must release your bottle from the shore and not in the middle of the sea, how/where should you do it to ensure it travels as far as possible? That's a question that comes to my mind whenever I think about message in a bottle.
I like futureme.org for the same reason as this woman described.
I try to write a letter every year, addressed to me, and open it on my birthday.
It gives you a lot of perspective. Especially when you read about things you were worried about at the time, most of which just sound plain silly and unimportant even only a year later.
What is your thought process to suppose they are fake? I would start with the assumption that they are fact-checked reports coming from reputable journalists.
Why don't you do investigations yourself instead of begging the question?
I mean. How many bottles are yote into the ocean? How many are found?/ And how many news outlets would love to publish stories like this? I mean, the other part here is that these found messages wouldn't get reported on before, or if they did, they'd be in local news instead of internationally accessible and googleable sources. Confirmation bias?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 125 ms ] thread1 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian
These days about the only thing I write by hand is my signature. It's a squiggle.
Looking at other words on the wall confirms this is normal - writing goes back severely in KS2 because of this 1960s view that you have to be able to write large amounts of prose at speed.
I can only write print. I don't see the use for cursive, and I said as much when I was 10 (I already had a personal computer, if I was going to write something long it'd be faster for me to type it).
It seems there's now more emphasis on letter forms than there was in the 1990s, when I was being taught "joined-up writing". I didn't have to put a stupid tail on the left of the C at the beginning of "cat", or any other round initial letter. Let alone the tail on a lower case initial H, or any capital letters.
As for lack of legibility: I would guess US teachers not enforcing good style in preschool and elementary school contribute to that.
The way the letters are written are also for maximal speed, and of course, you don't have to lift pen between letters.
Any skilled cursive writer will tell you, it is many times faster to write legibly in cursive over block letters.
Do we need to learn it any more? Well, I'd say not for the speed benefits.
But discounting the speed benefits, acting as if they are a lie, is silly.
From my side, I see a lot of people complaining about leaning "dumb things" in public school, in these responses. Wow.
Totally don't get the point of it.
And of course if we removed what everyone on this thread complained about, in the public school curriculum, well, there'd be nothing to teach! Because everyone likes different things.
Which is part of what public school is supposed to be about.
Teach the basics, while seeing what you excel in, what interests you.
You know what cursive teaches, outside of itself? Fine finger control. Brain to finger control mapping.
It is an entirely different skill than keyboard pecking.
And while you are learning it, you are still learning grammar, learning to craft thought to speech, and so on.
There is no loss here.
Someone defending this outdatd practice despite "the tide turning" against it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41927258
Quoting slow children who can't read by the age of five somehow benefit, and rather than testing what children know we should punish them for not having outdated skills
> In the same way, bad handwriting leads to poorer test scores, according to a study by the Carnegie Foundation. The same thoughts and ideas expressed "in a less legible version of a paper" tended to be scored more harshly.
This form of writing belongs in a museum curation degree, not in primary schools
> It tested students by asking them to take notes from a lecture, using either a laptop or a pen and paper, and then tested their recall on both facts and deeper conceptual questions.
>
> Essentially, the study found that students taking long-form notes on pen and paper tended to process the information on a deeper level.
And that's what we (should) send kids to school for.
Is that what we expect out of 6-year-olds, though? Probably not. We expect elementary kids to play and learn basic concepts of things and about the world around them. There is a clear limit to how "deep" a 7-year-old is going to be simply because of maturity and lack of knowledge.
We expect more in later schooling years - and that is what your quote refers to. Older children, listening to a lecture. It doesn't mention specifically that this was cursive, either: They were comparing it to typing.
And we don't want to force it, either: Later in that same article, it mentions, "typing may help significantly increase exam grades, according to the British Dyslexia Association. And those with physical impairments have long used technology to record their thoughts."
Pretty much, writing is a tool that might help you learn assuming you have a neurotypical brain, and even then there are likely other tools you can employ instead.
My third grade teacher thought I'd turn out ok, because I'd have a secretary. Sadly, secretaries were out of fashion by the time I graduated college.
Even [0], the US declaration of independence, is horrendous to read compared to this 8 year old girl's handwriting.
https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-declaration-of-independenc...?
A major part of why we teach (or taught) writing cursive is because it also helps teach you to read cursive. You may not need to write much, but until recently you would encounter written cursive all the time. In my experience it's still common enough. It'd be awkward to be unable to read the New Year's cards from my older relatives.
I am curious about the opposition to cursive script that some people demonstrate, mostly in the US. In Europe cursive script is the norm; block letter writing by an adult is considered a mark of poor education.
Are you sure about that? It isn't uncommon to require it on forms. Also, Europe is a big and varied place - perhaps it is just one part of Europe? Where in Europe were you referring to?
Except for the "double s" that looks like an "f" (that ligature was common also in fonts for bookprinting at the times, so it's not hard to figure it out if you know that), the rest looks like a better version of the calligraphy I used to have when I was 9/10 years old (and that I wish I still had, now it's a much "simplified" - in shapes, not ease of reading - version of that).
Update: also the single "s" is a bit peculiar, since it's completely different at the beginning VS at the end of a word
There are a lot of children in my extended family, and at some point I noticed they were very confused by cursive, and saw it as a curiosity, almost like there was a secret alphabet adults used to use. When I asked around about it, I found out they were no longer being taught it, and then found articles about how it was disappearing from curricula.
It's mostly interesting to me because it was such a big part of my writing education, and my teachers were so adamant about it, and it was so common. So it's strange to me to see it just disappear.
Also the right kind of pen. Cursive can be beautiful with a nib pen or some fountain pens, but it tends to be ugly with a ballpoint pen.
Writing short notes legibly is of course useful, reading is essential, typing is essential, learning how to research subjects (history, geography, biology etc) is useful
If you have a problem with any of that, you have Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Here’s some pills to turn your brain off so you might still have a chance to “‘earn’ a living” and pay off your original sin of being alive. All hail The Economy!
I mean it didn't work for me, my handwriting is still scribbled and anything but aesthetically pleasing, lol.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/J-ui6ybQ4gg/maxresdefault.jpg
An interpretation: Being told the details as a grown-up, you’re the finder of that bottle. Probably not many would appreciate the drawing you did as much as you can appreciate being enriched with the memory of yourself as a kid.
Much as most hobbies these days most of the ham operators don’t actually operate stuff as well. They just buy stuff and arrange it and post on QRZ forums about it.
I sincerely hope that since then schools have stopped encouraging children to throw plastic in waterways like this.
> The Norwegian sent a Facebook message for Joanna, but the former Peterhead schoolgirl did not spot it until Monday [January 2022]
This pretty much sums up Facebook/Instagram inboxes.
I felt horrible for weeks that I had never responded, then I sent off a reply. I then promptly forgot that I did so, and abandoned LinkedIn for another year. I checked again last week for some reason and I had a year-old response to my response. I forgot to reply and only just now remembered this situation.
I'm now trying to decide if I should bother responding and risk another long delay, or pretend I'm dead.
then just explain that you don't use linkedin actively, and go from there. if they are not bothered by that they will reply. then possibly offer to switch to a different medium like email that you are less likely to miss.
https://reface.me/hacks/make-facebook-talk-like-a-pirate/
Or that unread myspace mesage gets sent to you in a fishing scam.
Also I had a message from Japan in a Suntory Whisky bottle, but I cannot find it. Written in Nipponese it was.
Achually I have found at least 6 bottled messages. Most of them uninteresting and from nearby.
I try to write a letter every year, addressed to me, and open it on my birthday.
It gives you a lot of perspective. Especially when you read about things you were worried about at the time, most of which just sound plain silly and unimportant even only a year later.
"message in a bottle found after..." - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22message+in+a+bottle+found...
"letter delivered after..." - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22letter+delivered+after%22...
"postcard delivered after..." - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22postcard+delivered+after%...
At least some of these are fake, surely?
I mean. How many bottles are yote into the ocean? How many are found?/ And how many news outlets would love to publish stories like this? I mean, the other part here is that these found messages wouldn't get reported on before, or if they did, they'd be in local news instead of internationally accessible and googleable sources. Confirmation bias?