On Handwriting
A recent article from MSNBC came out over the weekend discussing the drop in familiarity with cursive handwriting and its future alongside courses focusing more heavily on computer-related skills. The article mentions that the American National Assessment of Educational Progress will soon have students fill in composition components via computer -- 8th and 11th graders switching over in 2011 and 4th graders by 2019. One wonders how many fourth graders receive an education on typing proficiency and what percentage of those students live in an environment where they receive constant opportunity to practice. I graduated from high school in 1998 (granted, a while ago now) and the first time typing became a necessity was in 9th grade, when all freshmen were required to take a keyboarding class. (I grew up with a computer and had taken a programming class during elementary school - LOGO on the Apple IIe - so was a bit ahead of my peers.)
Katie Van Sluys, "a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English" offers her thoughts on the matter with the following:
Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, she said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting.
"They're writing, they're composing with these tools at home, and to have school look so different from that set of experiences is not the best idea," she said.
You know, studying science and social studies in school is a lot different from the "set of experiences" students receive at home but I don't see anyone claiming we drop those from the curriculum. More seriously though, I was going to point out that greeting cards and official invitations are one area where handwriting can make a nice impression, though nowadays I suppose it's much more common to go to Hallmark's online site and have something printed up that only requires a quick signature in closing.
In fourth and fifth grade our teacher gave us weekly cursive homework made us write every assignment in cursive -- the use of printed script was an automatic '0' and we were also graded on how neatly we wrote. While it's true that I switched to using print when my family moved and I changed schools in fifth grade, I do feel thankful for having that experience. To go along with my personal story, another quote from the article that I found interesting was the assertion, "Most people peak in terms of legibility in 4th grade," coming from Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham. I had no idea about this, but it does make me wonder if there's any correlation between all the compliments I receive about my handwriting and the fact that I was graded so harshly on it during fourth and fifth grade. (The compliments have involved my English, Chinese, and Korean handwriting, though I'm not sure if handwriting in one's L1 can influence how well one writes in any subsequent languages.)
I notice, too, that my students here in Korea are always thrilled when they receive something with cursive handwriting. Our academy makes a note of each student's birthday and gives them a card on the appropriate day; while I use printed script for the inside message (ease of comprehension) I write their name on the envelope in cursive and have received several requests from students interested in learning how to write it themselves. (Then again, I also had a class clamoring on how to write their name in Russian when they found out I have a passing familiarity with Cyrillic.)
There are a few elementary students at our academy with absolutely atrocious handwriting though. I have one student in particular where I can barely understand his homework - be it in English or Korean - because his writing is so incredibly bad. We're talking chicken scratch here, to the point where he can't even read his Korean writing back to me when I ask him to in class. (And no, it's not Korean calligraphy either!) Fortunately he's in the minority among my students, otherwise I might go insane. Does anyone working at a Korean public school know how much emphasis is placed on penmanship in Korea? For that matter, I also wonder how much influence learning Hanja (Chinese characters) at an early age can have on developing a student's everyday handwriting.
