[HN Gopher] Gen Z never learned to read cursive
___________________________________________________________________
Gen Z never learned to read cursive
Author : fortran77
Score : 195 points
Date : 2022-09-18 03:42 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| ogogmad wrote:
| I once took a class taught by a Hungarian. He spoke in a
| monotone, and his script was unreadable cursive gibberish where
| "r" looked like "n", and "s" looked like "i". Please never again.
| psytortilla_ wrote:
| Must be this "Hungarian Notation" everyone keeps talking about!
| jwmhjwmh wrote:
| I'm Gen Z and I learned cursive in elementary school. I've
| forgotten most of it, though.
| Spivak wrote:
| Wat? Y'all _learned_ to read cursive in schools? Like your
| teacher just wrote words but in connected illegible italics and
| had you figure out what it meant? And yet y'all think we're the
| weird ones.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| If you write it, you learn to read it.
|
| And bad handwriting is a problem that transcends font.
| toast0 wrote:
| > And bad handwriting is a problem that transcends font.
|
| Are you saying my handwriting is transcendent? Thank you.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| It transcends a stone vessel of holy water.
| zbrozek wrote:
| I was in third grade in 1995 and was being taught cursive. I
| thought it was ridiculously old fashioned and a waste of time.
| I was punished for not doing copying assignments. I still think
| it was a waste of time nearly thirty years later.
|
| Handwriting in general, however, maintains merit.
| [deleted]
| ajuc wrote:
| I went to school in 1990 in Poland. We were taught to write in
| cursive FIRST. Like:
|
| "This is the letter "m", that's how it looks like, write it
| here in this line 1000 times in this pattern".
|
| Something like this: http://bystredziecko.pl/karty-pracy/nauka-
| pisania/5/szlaczki...
|
| I already could read books by then, but most kids didn't, so
| they learnt cursive first.
|
| BTW cursive isn't any less or more readable than printed
| letters by itself. It depends on how fast you write. Printed
| letters force you to go slower, so by default you write them
| clearer. But if you go slow with cursive it will be as clear as
| printed letters.
| csande17 wrote:
| I'm the same age as the students in the article, and I'm
| surprised that reading cursive is such an issue for them.
| Almost all of the letters closely resemble block letters
| except for R, S, Z and a few of the capitals. I mean, I don't
| use cursive at all in my daily life, but I still have no
| trouble reading things like https://commons.wikimedia.org/wik
| i/File:Letter.posted.in.189... using context clues.
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| I'm having a hard time believing this to be true... All the
| writing I do is in cursive, it's so much faster and neater than
| non-cursive. I don't have to worry about the spacing between the
| letters when writing cursive and writing common words isn't
| really a muscle memory of writing each letter but of the entire
| word.
|
| I'll have to ask a relative who's a teacher in the elementary
| school if this is also true here in Slovenia.
|
| Somehow this makes me really worry... Will the children in the
| future not even write using a pen and paper but just using a
| keyboard and a touch screen?
| ip26 wrote:
| I learned cursive, but rarely have cause to write more than a
| sentence or two with pen or pencil anymore. Anything long form
| is digital, such as a word doc. Even paper itself is used
| sparingly.
| DigitallyFidget wrote:
| When I was in highschool, I wrote a paper on how education lags
| far behind technology and modern era. In modern era, people
| write emails, type via messengers/sms, and use digital means of
| communication. Rarely is hand-written considered normal in any
| situations where transcribing is necessary.
|
| Even with maths, people don't hand calculate large, long,
| complex equations. We use computers, calculators, and
| technology to accomplish it with far greater
| accuracy/reliability and speed. Simple arithmetic is useful to
| learn to do in your head, but to solve a2+b2=c2, you can just
| google up a Pythagorean calculator. My point is that it's
| useful to know to find/use the tools to solve problems, not how
| to to solve by hand. This didn't exist 20 years ago, but it
| does today, and schools should teach for a modern and future
| era. It does no good to teach the youth archaic ways of the old
| which aren't in use anymore. If the parents believe it's
| important, then it should be taught by the parents to preserve
| a culture or value they believe in. But schools should spend
| time to functionally educate.
|
| Cursive is just one of those things that has been replaced by
| technology, for most it is much faster to type than it is to
| write, and the advantage cursive has over manuscript is that it
| was faster. Well, keyboards are faster than cursive, and print
| is more simple and clean looking in manuscript than cursive on
| a display using a font.
| LoveMortuus wrote:
| I think regardless of the year we're in, kids should still
| learn the fundamentals, because once we're gone and only the
| kids that didn't learn the fundamentals are left, how will
| they know if the result that Google gives them when they
| Google any equation like Pythagorean theorem are correct? How
| would they know to even question and doubt Google? So much of
| programming, mathematics and engineering that we (or at least
| I) do, is just auto checked by how you feel, because pretty
| much always you have an idea of what the result should look
| like, not the exact numbers but you have the idea. I'm sure
| you know what I mean, even when writing a code you know what
| to expect and if the result is an error you quite often know
| what's wrong before you finish reading the error message.
|
| Intuition
|
| I think way too often to people fall into the trap of looking
| at the world through their eyes instead of through eyes of
| someone who doesn't have that knowledge.
|
| Even now, I know what PI looks like, but I have no idea how
| to actually calculate it. I know that I get a very rough
| approximation with 22/7, but I don't know how to actually
| calculate it. I know what it is and what it represents in the
| real world so I would at least know where to start my
| research.
|
| Sure, cursive might not look that important because you can
| still just write it non-cursive. But it kind of feels like
| the first step towards no hand writing. Then what? There a
| prolonged power outage and you're tasked with getting the
| supplies. Now you've always just used you're phone to make a
| shopping list and you never really learn the write, because
| that's what the dusty people of old did. You can recognise
| the letters but you don't actually know or remember how to
| write them...
|
| I have that same feeling with Hiragana/Katakana/Kanji, I can
| recognise them and read them more or less without a problem,
| but if you tell me to write E in Hiragana then in lost, just
| because I almost never practiced writing any of these.
|
| Humanity should really quite a book - The Human Manual. Which
| would include all the fundamental knowledge that every human
| should know. From how to grow food, how often should you wash
| your body, what common wild plants, mushrooms and animals are
| edible across the globe to what compound interest is and how
| it works. A book with which the modern civilisation could be
| restarted if it ever collapsed.
|
| I fear that not learning cursive is just the shadow of a
| monster that we can't even comprehend.
| toolslive wrote:
| I (a middle aged European) feel a bit silly now. I've had an
| American send his CV to me which listed "cursive writing" as a
| skill. A was bemused as for me it falls in the same bucket as
| "tie laces" or "ride a bike". IE something that has no value
| because everybody knows how to do it.
|
| How wrong I turn out to be.
| [deleted]
| tverbeure wrote:
| I remember a science and technology TV program on Belgian TV
| back in the early nineties where they showed a PC program that
| could convert handwriting to text. Amazing!
|
| But when they showed it in action, it couldn't do cursive
| "because nobody writes cursive anyway", according to the
| American developer.
|
| At the time, I assumed that the guy just made that claim to
| excuse a serious limitation of his software: why would anyone
| not write cursive (which is faster)?
| ThePadawan wrote:
| Devil's confused advocate here - depending on the age of the
| candidate, that might have been intended to be a "fun fact"
| sort of addition?
|
| As in, it might have also read "Japanese calligraphy". Gives
| the HR person to ask about their passions a bit, figure out how
| they roll?
|
| (Disregard that idea if this was actually just listed as a core
| job skill like "Word and Excel experience")
| marvin wrote:
| Northern European here. I don't understand this at all and need
| an explanation. Maybe someone can provide the context I'm
| missing.
|
| I've heard Americans complain online about having to learn
| "cursive", for at least 20 years. Basically for as long as I've
| read forums online.
|
| In school, we learned something called "loop writing", literally
| translated. It's a technique for writing without lifting the pen
| from the paper very often.
|
| This technique is _much_ faster than writing out capital letters,
| or typing letters as they would be written by a printer or
| printing press.
|
| Soooooooo... How does this "cursive" thing fit into this? What is
| the alternative; what do Americans do when writing by hand? The
| "printer font" or "capital letters" options are a lot less
| efficient when writing. Do you just prioritize uniform legibility
| over time when writing? Do you almost exclusively type on
| computers? How is this resolved?
|
| I still write notes and messages on paper _all the time_ , and I
| can't imagine bothering to spend twice as long on it.
| mattnewton wrote:
| American here, I learned cursive in school (what we call our
| "loop writing") but it was clear it was going to be phased out
| to child me. I write about as quickly in block letters and can
| actually read the resulting words clearly, as opposed to my
| cursive which turns into a long line of m's and l's as I get
| faster. I find that slowing down to make the cursive legible
| takes longer than block lettering for my unpracticed hand, and
| have never needed it enough to justify additional practice.
|
| Both methods are about on par with phone typing or dictation,
| and far far slower than typing on a physical keyboard. I
| recently tried to switch back to a paper notebook because I
| found my phone was constantly distracting me when taking notes,
| but the loss of text search, ease of sharing/editing, and and
| speed when writing was too great so I abandoned this approach
| in favor of other methods for controlling distractions.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| > In school, we learned something called "loop writing",
| literally translated
|
| Yeah, this is what we call cursive.
|
| > What is the alternative; what do Americans do when writing by
| hand?
|
| We write the "printer font" or "capital letters" that you
| mention.
|
| > I still write notes and messages on paper all the time, and I
| can't imagine bothering to spend twice as long on it.
|
| Firstly, most people don't write on paper that much anymore.
|
| Secondly, this is sort of like when people on hacker news talk
| about using a tiling window manager like i3.
|
| They can't imagine going back to a regular window manager, they
| are so much more productive, etc, etc.
|
| But at the end of the day, tiling window managers remain niche
| because swapping between windows isn't a bottleneck in the
| workflow of 99.9% of people. They mainly contribute to making
| someone _feel_ more productive rather than _be_ more
| productive.
|
| In other words, writing speed isn't a bottleneck in the
| workflow of 99.9% of people so it just doesn't matter much if
| we do it inefficiently. If you were a court stenographer
| required to write by hand or something, then cursive would be a
| good investment. Otherwise, meh, not much point.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > This technique is much faster than writing out capital
| letters, or typing letters as they would be written by a
| printer or printing press.
|
| If you forced yourself to write using the "printer font" 100%
| of the time (we literally call this "printing"), you'd get a
| lot faster at it. It won't ever be quite as fast as your loop
| writing / cursive, but the margin would narrow substantially.
| slater wrote:
| I feel you could make the same argument re: stenography?
| fortran77 wrote:
| While I can read Gregg shorthand, it was always a _niche_
| skill, used by professional secretaries and others who had to
| take notes. In the 70s it was taught in high school, along with
| touch-typing.
| jollybean wrote:
| That was never a commonly accepted form of writing, which is a
| material difference.
|
| I think over 18 years of education it's reasonable to teach
| kids both forms of writing.
|
| There is no lack of curriculum space.
|
| Most things we learn we forget. Writing is one of those neat
| thing we keep forever.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Writing is one of those neat thing we keep forever.
|
| Hah! You must be a young 'un. My handwriting has deteriorated
| over the years, from a pretty bad start. And "neat" would be
| an eccentric description of my style.
| jollybean wrote:
| You can still read and write printed script and cursive.
|
| And if you had to do it for more than 3 days, your skills
| would be back.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| ...and RSI, and arthritis of the knuckles. I don't relish
| the prospect of 3 days of handwriting. And I've never had
| pretty handwriting; all that would "come back" would be
| the ability to scribble fast. The ability to write nicely
| would never come back, because it was never there in the
| first place.
| asasidh wrote:
| good for them. I never liked cursive anyway. In the US, there are
| at least 21 states that require cursive in public school
| curriculum. This is still too high a number. Just like art or
| coding it is good to keep it as an option for those who are
| interested and never good to be forced on the masses.
| schoen wrote:
| One interesting thing is that this problem has arisen many times
| in history, because the handwriting styles that are taught in
| school have changed so significantly and so many times.
|
| If you see handwritten documents from Germany or possibly
| Scandinavia before about the 1960s, they may be in this kind of
| script:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
|
| If you were taught to read and write in an English-speaking
| country, you'll probably not be able to understand most of those
| documents without practice!
|
| This has happened repeatedly as handwriting norms have changed
| enough to require conscious study, often called "paleography"
| when it's focused on reading older manuscripts.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeography
|
| But as the Sutterlin example shows, this isn't just about reading
| things from the 14th century or something. There are a number of
| cases where handwriting styles regularly used in the 20th century
| may not be transparent to us today, and have to be individually
| learned.
|
| So you might say this has just happened over again!
| raverbashing wrote:
| > you'll probably not be able to understand most of those
| documents without practice!
|
| No. It is because this system is objectively and obtusely hard.
|
| Really, C looks like an L, B looks like an L, T looks like
| whatever, V looks like anything but a V etc
|
| This is not about practice, this is about who invented this
| being obtuse (the polite word I'm using here)
|
| Fraktur is weird but _it is mostly readable_. Older cursive
| methods mostly are readable (I mean, except Kurrent - though
| even it looks like a bit better than Sutterlin - and the
| Russian system). This looks like a bad joke for real
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > T looks like whatever
|
| I felt compelled to check and indeed you are right.
| viraptor wrote:
| > C looks like an L
|
| I think it's just a matter of familiarity. They look as
| similar as our g and q, or a and d. (the cursive versions,
| not the one displayed here)
|
| > V looks like anything but a V
|
| It doesn't look like the current V we're used to. For them
| our V doesn't look anything like V either.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| This. The moment I am pushed to write cursive faster, then it
| ends up as unreadable waves looking like mmm mmmmm mmmmmm
| mmmm. Even I was not able to read it after myself.
|
| Swapped on writing single characters like a computer and
| readability went through the roof.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| My style has morphed into a sequence of separate letters
| derived from an italic style, but strung together as a sort
| of mock cursive. It looks a bit like really bad cursive,
| but I can't read my own writing.
|
| I'm 66; it's much too late to learn to write all over
| again. I wish they'd taught me copperplate, instead of some
| half-baked italic. Or maybe just taught me to write
| properly in the first place.
|
| Computer keyboards FTW.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| If you actually take the time to learn it, you realise that
| it is one of the most consistent handwriting systems and
| actually surprisingly legible across authors of varying
| social background.
|
| Can you give some sources regarding "objectively hard"? What
| objective measurement did you use?
| raverbashing wrote:
| > If you actually take the time to learn it
|
| "take time to learn" is a BS excuse from a readability
| point of view, unless you're talking about something very
| specific. Some things, yes, you learn. Some are just
| obviously hard. There's no reason for it being that
| different even from Kurrent
|
| > What objective measurement did you use?
|
| Similarity between letters (themselves across systems and
| others). Comparison with similar and preceding writing
| systems. All objective criteria and in most of them it
| fails miserably.
|
| Ideally you want letters that are similar to the printed
| form but dissimilar to each other.
| https://bighack.org/font-accessibility-and-readability-
| the-b...
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| The people who used the writing took the time to learn
| it, so it's not a "BS excuse". Your comment derided the
| system on a general level. From your point of view it
| might not make sense to learn it, but not from the point
| of the historic users.
|
| Once you learned it, you see that the similarity of
| letters is only superficial and you can distinguish them
| quite nicely, especially with context. You actually start
| to recognise patterns. And since the system gives you
| only very few ways to deviate, these patterns are
| surprisingly uniform across different authors. I haven't
| seen that with other cursive systems to this extent.
|
| It becomes a bit harder though with writing from after
| the war, when people started to mix Latin into their
| Kurrent or Sutterlin.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > Your comment derided the system on a general level.
|
| You're correct, I am deriding it because it is needlessly
| weird even compared with preceding writing system and
| there's no good reason for it. While this might have been
| weird "by accident", a system like that would not work
| (or be accepted) today.
|
| Again, "you have to learn" is a bad excuse if there's no
| good justification. There's plenty to learn on the modern
| cursive system, but I don't have to learn what squiggles
| that look similar mean. There's no reason why t, d, e, c
| look like the way they look
| prox wrote:
| Cursive probably comes from the time when ink and cursive
| where a great optimization. With an old ink pen and inkpot
| combo, cursive can be a lot faster and not to mention easier.
| The words flow easily from ink in pen to paper until the ink
| runs out.
| tdeck wrote:
| "Regular" cursive is obtuse too. Lowercase cursive S looks
| nothing like an S. Lowercase cursive R doesn't look like an R
| either. Uppercase cursive F looks like it's backwards for
| some reason (at least the way some people write it, it looks
| like a backwards E). So does uppercase cursive G. People get
| used to these things.
| alfnor wrote:
| This is far more common in Sweden, at least if you go back
| before the 20th century:
|
| https://wikiless.org/wiki/Kurrent?lang=en
|
| Source: My (Swedish) grandfather taught me how to do
| genealogical research.
| fortran77 wrote:
| The author of this piece, who teaches at _Harvard_ found that
| 2/3rds of her students couldn't read cursive.
| jhbadger wrote:
| It's about generations and what they are taught, not academic
| ability. I'm 52, have a doctorate, and only barely know cursive
| myself. Why would anyone expect young people today, raised from
| birth on computers, to know a frankly obsolete way of
| expressing text?
| shmde wrote:
| > to know a frankly obsolete way of expressing text?
|
| Why learn how to cook when you can get a packet of readymade
| food in the store. Cooking is obsolete.
| tester756 wrote:
| Cooking is incredibly useful and there's huge difference
| between packet readymade food and made at home. Especially
| when you start cooking for a few people
| npinsker wrote:
| Plenty of people don't know how to cook and do fine. But
| cooking has big advantages -- it's cheaper, and you can
| make it just how you like it. Maybe everywhere's closed.
|
| There might be some slight advantages to cursive (e.g. it
| feels better to write), but horse-drawn buggies have some
| slight advantages over cars also. I think calling cursive
| obsolete seems completely fair.
| wr4aqw34 wrote:
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| I was taught to read and write cursive in 1998-2007. Problem
| with cursive is ambiguity of characters e/l, B/E, S/Z, a/o,
| b/l, etc. and when you need to write faster because you are
| taking notes, then you don't have time to make those squiggly
| details of each letter and ends up with unreadable waves.
|
| I have personally dropped using cursive around 2004, because I
| was not able to read anything after myself.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| "e" is three times shorter than "l". "B" and "E" have nothing
| in common. "Z" goes far under the base line. "b" goes back up
| and has a flat connecting high while "l" connects low. Same
| for "a" and "o" but I could see them being somewhat similar.
| "a" has a vertical line and connect at the bottom while "o"
| has a crossed loop and connects high.
|
| These letters are not supposed to look like each others. It
| goes further than details.
| TheLoafOfBread wrote:
| Sorry you have no clue what are you talking about. I was
| writing with a cursive and those are exactly my experiences
| with it. The faster you will attempt to write, the faster
| it will start fusing into waves until you have only mmm
| mmmmm mmmmmm mmm mm like a Russian shorthand. Abandoned
| cursive and started using computer-like letters. Using it
| until today with my notes.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >These letters are not supposed to look like each others.
| It goes further than details.
|
| No, they're not supposed to. But in practice, in actual
| handwriting, they do, which is what the parent comment was
| talking about.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| I still take notes in cursive. The letters the parent
| points as looking similar most definitely don't unless
| your cursive is extremely incorrect.
|
| "c" and "e" I would have understood. Those are written
| nearly the same way. But apart from "a" and "o" all the
| pairing mentioned concern letters with widely different
| sizes.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >unless your cursive is extremely incorrect.
|
| what good does it to, to tell the majority that their
| cursive is incorrect? if a system results in most people
| doing it wrong, then the system is wrong, not the people
| plaidfuji wrote:
| This is all fine and good but...
|
| What are their signatures going to look like? Or is the plan for
| everything to be DocuSign Lucida Handwriting?
| seized wrote:
| I've had terrible handwriting and a wildly inconsistent
| signature for my entire life (late 30s now) and it's never been
| an issue. Anyone using a signature for actual
| validation/verification is crazy.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| your vote can get tossed in some states if the signatures
| don't match exactly. It's part of Texas' initiative to
| disenfranchise people of color and mail-in votes in some
| communities. It's similar in some other republican states.
| noirbot wrote:
| Who cares? Pretty much everyone gave up on _actually_ using
| signatures for any form of serious verification ages ago, and
| that 's before you get into people who can't do more than
| initial for various physical reasons.
|
| Outside of things like law and finance that are deeply stuck in
| the past, almost nothing requires a signature these days, or if
| they do you can just kinda scribble something that vaguely has
| shapes of letters in it. I learned cursive, but I'm definitely
| not writing proper lettering if I'm signing a check or some
| contract.
| Quixotica1 wrote:
| I think the push back is really just based around the feeling
| that by not spending a few hours a week for part of a school
| year, kids will never be able to read something. So I think in
| general it's just a weird feeling like if they decided learning
| any math after basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and
| division wasn't necessary and removed it for more relevant
| topics. It's easy to argue that long division will never be
| useful for most people, but it also feels weird deciding what
| future generations can be ignorant about it
| adenozine wrote:
| Yeah well, most of my generation (Gen X) can't do basic trig
| problems. Call it square. I think they'll be alright.
| [deleted]
| staticassertion wrote:
| Good, cursive is stupid. School already finds so many idiotic
| ways to waste your childhood, removing this one seems like a
| solid win.
|
| As for the "tyranny of relevance", sure, we shouldn't only learn
| things that are strictly "beneficial". Abstract thinking is
| important and I can buy an argument that cursive forces our brain
| to think about language differently. Well, I can't buy it because
| I see no support for that let alone support for it being a better
| investment than, say, an additional hour of reading, or an
| additional hour of learning a new language, etc.
|
| The discussion here is about whether this segregates the
| population into "those who have access to cursive materials and
| those who don't" but if anything that's a great case for _not
| having cursive_ - it was a mistake then, it 's a mistake now.
|
| I find it odd that one student would choose not to read
| handwritten letters altogether because they're in cursive. Surely
| there's a transcript, and if your goal is to glean the _emotion_
| from the weight of the penmanship, I don 't think that cursive
| will be a significant barrier. Or just learn cursive, I think an
| adult can likely learn cursive well enough to read it in an hour?
| It's... not hard. Reading crazy old cursive was _never_ something
| we were taught, so no one has regressed there, that shit that
| just looks like '/-/-/-///--/----/~~~~' may as well have its own
| name, it isn't cursive. I mean, I guess that's kind of critical
| to this whole article - it maintains that only a few will be
| trained it it, but it's _not a difficult skill_ and I suspect
| anyone who cares that they are "locked out" of that world would
| just pick it up in a weekend.
|
| IDK, I get the point, and for a lot of things I see this as an
| issue, but fuck cursive Rest In Shit
| rascul wrote:
| I wrote cursive for many years. In the end, I found it to be
| slower to write, slower to read, and uses more ink or graphite.
| Also there's a possibility to smear words when moving the hand
| back to finish the t's and i's, and the extra movement there also
| seems inefficient. In addition, with block letters I can fit more
| on a line legibly, using less paper in the end. I'm not really
| sure what the advantages are.
|
| I do think it can be useful to know. There might be less cursive
| out there now then there was, but I do come across cursive
| documents from time to time and I'm happy that I can read them.
| nynx wrote:
| I fail to understand why being able to read cursive as easily as
| print is important.
| As_You_Wish wrote:
| Do you know how to read cursive?
| jeltz wrote:
| Yes, but I almost never have to use that skill. It is pretty
| pointless unless you are doing historical research and then
| there are more scripts that are useful to know.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I don't know what that means; everyone's cursive is
| different, unless they're using some formalised script such
| as copperplate.
|
| [Edit] Have you ever watched someone writing copperplate with
| a nib? It takes forever. It seems to take about a minute PER
| WORD. It's beautiful, artistic script, and rather easy to
| read; but it's not much good for my shopping list, or my
| telephone notes, or my resignation letter.
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| I do, and I have to agree with the parent. The only time I
| ever read cursive is the occasional note from my
| grandparents.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Outside doing some historical research or reading historical
| documents. There is rather little use these days. Or receiving
| notes from someone who uses it.
| pookah wrote:
| If you're American all of your foundational and historical
| documents (Bill of Rights) are written in cursive.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| But they are also available in print? And it's 1 to 1 so even
| a 3rd grader could figure it out in a jiffy if that ever
| became necessary. I'm more worried about the shifting
| definition of words and historical context needing to be tied
| in.
| _dain_ wrote:
| So? They're all transcribed into legible writing in a million
| different books and websites.
| miked85 wrote:
| My handwriting has turned into a mix of block letters and cursive
| over the years, and has become increasingly less legible since it
| is so rare that I actually write anything that isn't typed. I
| don't really have a consistent signature anymore.
| xattt wrote:
| My understanding is that cursive learned in school is supposed
| to be a launching point for your own style of script. I.e. you
| learn the fundamentals and then you learn the shortcuts.
|
| I worked in a paper-heavy environment where quick and dirty
| writing was important to adopt in order to get stuff done.
| Telemakhos wrote:
| Besides faster writing, children also learn fine motor skills
| by practicing different forms of handwriting. We had cursive
| in third and fourth grade and half-uncial calligraphy in
| fifth grade, not because we were expected to illuminate
| manuscripts but because it gave us time to learn how to
| control our hands.
| beej71 wrote:
| My state has vote-by-mail only. A consistent signature is
| required to get your vote counted.
|
| So for me, it's about the only consistent thing in my writing.
| :)
|
| I'm starting to get embarrassed by my penmanship--I should work
| on that. Slow=smooth, smooth=fast, as the saying goes.
| kirykl wrote:
| Even being able to read modern cursive isn't complete knowledge.
| Try reading formal cursive written 100 years ago it's quite
| difficult.
| prox wrote:
| And learning it again and again as you gofurther back. It took
| me a bit but I can read 18th/17th century cursive well enough.
| [deleted]
| raldi wrote:
| > We will become reliant on a small group of trained translators
| and experts
|
| Within three years our iPhones will do it for us.
| Angostura wrote:
| Kinds in the UK still learned 'joined up writing', which is
| simpler than the more elegant style of previous generations, but
| is practical tool for writing quickly.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| I went to a school that taught normal handwriting and I had
| some of the neatest handwriting in the class. I changed schools
| where they insisted I wrote "joined up" and my handwriting went
| to shit - looks absolutely terrible even today unless I put in
| a huge effort. I blame the school for hampering my ability to
| write correctly.
|
| When I do write anything now I have to write slow and make a
| conscious effort not to write joined up. That way, it's
| actually neat and readable again.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I have the same experience; my cursive was deemed too messy,
| so they gave me personal handwriting classes. I ended up with
| a script that was a cross between formal script and spidery
| rubbish. Nowadays I try hard to make recognisable letter-
| forms, and I link them up if it seems flowing and convenient.
| It's a struggle; often I can't read my own shopping lists.
|
| Dammit, the buggers taught me to write so that nobody could
| read it. And this was an expensive school.
| thom wrote:
| This is what I've watched happen to my son in school.
| Genuinely neat, readable writing that was plenty fast, ruined
| by hours of lessons on joined up writing, all of which took
| away from actual learning.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Exactly the same with my kids, 3 years of great legible
| handwriting, then it all wen backwards because the national
| curriculum driven by 90 year olds thinks writing for other
| people is a key skill, despite well over 99% of written
| communication being typed.
| jeltz wrote:
| But cursive is not even very good for reading.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| Oh, the American "cursive" is something more elaborate? That
| explains why people would hate it.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yeah the American style is extremely ornate and traditional.
| The UK style is literally just print letters but joined up,
| nothing fancy.
| Tesl wrote:
| ohhhhh I didn't know this. I've seen these complaints from
| Americans about cursive a million times and I never
| understood why writing with joined up letters was so hard.
| marvin wrote:
| I wrote a comment of my own and scrolled through 700
| comments before I found this response. The whole debate
| has seemed incomprehensible to me, for the 20 years that
| I've been aware of it.
| VintageCool wrote:
| American cursive is an impractical "idealized" script. Some
| scholar a hundred years ago decided that handwriting would be
| faster if the pen never left the page, ever _. As a result,
| American cursive is full of tiny hand-cramping loops and
| loses legibility.
|
| _ With one exception, the capital I is unconnected. My
| teachers made me retake the cursive test every week for a
| year because I always tried to connect the capital I to the
| next letter, and it took that long before anyone told me
| which mistake I was making.
| agluszak wrote:
| "Baby Boomers never learned to read the Sumero-Akkadian
| cuneiform. How will they interpret the past?"
| irrational wrote:
| My kids said they spent one week on cursive in elementary school.
| They sign their names using print/block letters because they have
| no clue how to write their names (or anything else) in cursive.
| Cursive is almost like a secret language to them.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I'm a Hebrew speaker, too, and Hebrew nearly always hand-written
| in a "cursive" form that looks very different from the printed
| form. It's extremely rare for anyone to write the printed form,
| except if you're hand-lettering a sign, etc. (And even then, most
| will be in "cursive")
|
| Here's the "modern" cursive form
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_Hebrew And here's the
| printed form:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet#Alphabet
|
| I can do Cursive English, too, easily, because my education was
| in NY Public Schools. In Israel, where I am several months/year,
| if I have to write something out in English for a non-native
| speaker, I'll "print" it, but it never occurred to me I should do
| this in the U.S. for younger people. I'll take notes in cursive
| English (and/or Hebrew) when I'm in a meeting in NY.
|
| (My first language at home was neither English nor Hebrew but
| Yiddish! But this was largely spoken; when written it uses the
| same "cursive" Hebrew alphabet as modern Hebrew, with a few
| additions for letter variants.)
| Havoc wrote:
| I also differs by country / region. Went to a German school but
| not in physically in Germany. And nobody bothered to explain to
| me that the cursive we were taught was the German one (Kurrent)
| and isn't in use in the country. Same with mathematical notion.
|
| Chaos ensued when I hit uni
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| My friends from the German School here write a very distinct
| cursive too. They didn't know it either until I told them.
| beej71 wrote:
| Any other GenXers reading this feeling nostalgic thinking it
| might be fun to pick up the pen again?
| account-5 wrote:
| Title: "Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive"
|
| Second paragraph: "... The answer: about two-thirds [can't] ..."
|
| Bit click baity! And also seems to only be about the US.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| The author used to be the President of Harvard.
| soggybutter wrote:
| I would assume this has some effect on gen z signatures?
| kemayo wrote:
| Bear in mind that there's distinct meanings to "cursive" -- the
| dictionary meaning that just refers to a writing style with the
| letters all connected, and a common American usage that refers to
| some very specific stylized letter-forms that often bear minimal
| resemblance to the print forms of the letters. The latter is
| fairly illegible if you haven't been taught it, I feel -- it
| winds up looking like a series of minimally differentiated
| squiggly lines.
|
| e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HandwritingOfOneJohnJay(N...
|
| As someone who was educated in the UK in the 90s I was taught
| what was just called "joined up writing", which was us being
| encouraged to connect up the normal print forms of the letters. I
| never had any exposure to the American style. It might possibly
| have a speed deficit compared to the American style (I'm not
| sure), but it does have a clear legibility advantage...
| zem wrote:
| when i was a kid in india we called it "running hand", and
| yeah, it was pretty similar to print letters only joined,
| except a few letters like "r", "s" and "z".
| https://byjus.com/worksheets/cursive-letter-a-to-z/ is pretty
| close to the variant i learnt.
| kemayo wrote:
| This one is pretty close to how I was taught it, for what
| it's worth: https://www.barnesfarminfants.co.uk/_site/data/fi
| les/images/...
| troyvit wrote:
| My kids never learned to write cursive either. It's not a problem
| except that they don't really have a signature as a result, and
| they're starting to have to sign stuff for school.
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| Semi-related question:
|
| Most contracts and many kinds of forms that require a signature
| will have two lines, a first line that says something like "Print
| your name" and a second line for you to sign your name, which has
| always been understood to mean sign your name in cursive.
|
| What do young people do now? Presumably they just print their
| name and then (for no reason whatsoever) print their name again?
|
| Just something I've been wondering about...
| nemo44x wrote:
| Cursive is to writing as slide rules are to calculating.
| lizknope wrote:
| I'm 47 and I never really knew what a slide rule was for until
| a few years ago. When I did I thought "Oh, we've had
| calculators all my life, now I know why I never learned about
| them."
|
| They are interesting and I can see how they would have been
| hugely important 60 years ago.
| novakinblood wrote:
| I (43 yr) had a moment where I showed how important it was for
| our family to understand cursive when we had to transcribe
| recipes and letters from ancestors (mom, grandparents, etc.) for
| my daughters (16yr and younger) who wanted to bake family
| recipes.
|
| Side note is I realized I've stopped writing in my journals in
| cursive about 10 years ago and transitioned to print. I don't
| even know why other than being lazy or my handwriting has
| degraded and decided I wanted to be able to read my own
| handwriting.
| smeej wrote:
| I appreciate that the top image for the article is a bunch of
| things written in completely indecipherable cursive, even for
| those of us who _were_ taught to read and write it.
| johnisgood wrote:
| I have never seen such indecipherable cursive writings here
| (somewhere in Europe). Most of them look like signatures to me.
| Maybe they are cursive, but around here it almost never looks
| like this, if ever.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Eh if you read old historic stuff you get to see it in
| context. they clearly chopped these out from old manuscripts.
| When you stumble your way through a few paragraphs it comes
| pretty quickly as you get used to someone's writing. Not sure
| how our poor elementary school teachers read our reports in
| the lower grade levels though. :)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I studied typography seriously, some type design, and graphic
| arts .. the vocabulary of visual expression, and the lineage of
| cultures, are made richer and more plural by embracing cursive
| writing.
|
| Utilitarian and personal-aversion arguments are pushed to the
| front of the comments here, but do not represent all people or
| all arts.
|
| I will write cursive again today, after some pause, due to
| reading this.
| philiplu wrote:
| I write in cursive in one place only - physical checks. Had a
| subcontractor rip me off on a house remodel years ago, adding
| $1000 to a check I'd written with printing, not cursive. The bank
| reimbursed me, so no loss, but from then on I always write the
| check amount in cursive, careful not to leave any space to insert
| a change.
|
| Of course, I now only write a handful of actual checks a year,
| and that just because I pay someone regularly who prefers checks
| to Venmo.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I was always taught to draw lines to fill the blank space. I
| don't think you need to use cursive.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > For many young people, "handwriting," once essentially
| synonymous with cursive, has come to mean the painstaking
| printing they turn to when necessity dictates.
|
| It's not that big of a difference.
|
| Actually, going by this other atlantic article, cursive is only
| 10% faster.
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/yeah-...
|
| If you want a non-painstaking writing system for more than a few
| words at a time, you get a keyboard or use some kind of
| shorthand.
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| Personally, as someone who wrote only in cursive for 4 years of
| my life, I find that cursive is significantly slower and more
| cumbersome that print.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Same, falling in to classes when it was simplified, but still
| teached and almost asked. Also with my slight fine-motor
| control issue it was pain. I could "text"(hand writing)
| quickly enough for it never being issue in any test. And it
| being at least somewhat readable.
|
| Ofc, I do sign my name in cursive, but I don't think you can
| even read the name from that or it be consistent from one
| minute to next. Thankfully police didn't even care about that
| in ID card application. So what is the point anyway, if even
| the official sample isn't verified.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| The idea is very surprising to me. I still semi regularly had
| to write a dozen pages for two hours exams a decade ago and I
| don't see how I could have done that without writing somewhat
| fluidly. Print is very legible but it's so slow.
|
| Then again, I don't understand how you can learn to properly
| write cursive without using Seyes paper and for a reason I
| can't explain only France does that.
| jeltz wrote:
| It is just a matter of practice. I did that with print
| without any issue, and since I used print more than cursive
| my print was faster.
|
| I would guess cursive is slightly faster if you practice
| both equally.
| As_You_Wish wrote:
| I developed my own shorthand in university. Wow did that make
| note-taking easy.
| butokai wrote:
| Funny note: in Italy, the specific way Gen Z folks have of
| pronouncing vowels has been jokingly dubbed "cursive speaking"
| prox wrote:
| Really? How does that sound vs default Italian?
| 01acheru wrote:
| It is hard to explain how it sounds, you can still understand
| everything even if you never heard it before but the talker
| sounds ridiculous...
|
| That's the video that popularized "cursive speech":
| https://youtu.be/blLJ5UIu3r8
|
| For example: "buongiorno amico, come stai?" would be
| something like "buoongioOrniio aamiIicooi, comiee staAiee?"
|
| It is basically adding random vowels around, stretching them
| and using a childish voice.
| prox wrote:
| Haha, not Italian but I have a basic understanding (buying
| stuff and simple interactions) but I can hear the
| difference, it does sound very weird! At least it's not as
| fast as some Italian I've heard, the amount of times I had
| to ask a native speaker to slow down is high indeed.
| 01acheru wrote:
| I guess it sounds even weirder to us native speakers
| since we are much more used to hearing normal Italian.
|
| I think it is easier for you because all that stretching
| gives you the time to focus more on the single words,
| also Italian speech is different from province to
| province. Sometimes it is also hard for us to understand
| other Italians, mostly because each region's native
| speakers mix some dialectal sayings and pronunciation
| into their version of Italian. We have tens of Italian
| languages in Italy, but the more you live here the more
| you understand other Italians beside your own (closer
| regions sound more similar but going from extreme north
| to extreme south it gets really different).
| prox wrote:
| Is the a general "news anchor" general dialect that
| anyone can understand? Like on Rai Uno for example?
| 01acheru wrote:
| The general dialect is simply a correct form of Italian,
| following all the rules and without adding anything from
| your dialect. It is the Italian language you learn at
| school.
| chadlavi wrote:
| Wow that is terrible.
|
| I believe this is what they call vocal fry.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Is it anything like vocal fry in English?
| 01acheru wrote:
| I don't think so, it sounds quite the opposite. Vocal fry
| is low register, sounds educated and is somewhat sexier
| while "cursive speech" is squeaky, childish and sounds
| really stupid.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Good $DEITY. Ridiculous is an understatement...
| wildrhythms wrote:
| As an American I think we would refer to this as 'sing-song
| voice'.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Ha, that reminds me of my Swedish teacher, who loved to
| remark 'Swedish is a sing-song language!' whenever
| someone spoke too stodgily.
|
| Of course, she wasn't wrong!
| mmierz wrote:
| To my non Italian-speaking ears, it sounds like the speaker
| is using an anime/tiktok inspired "uwu voice"
| nkurz wrote:
| The description is used in English as well, particularly for
| musical vocals. Here's a Vice article:
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkyqkv/cursive-singing-
| tikto.... And here's a linguist explaining it more precisely:
| https://www.acelinguist.com/2021/05/dialect-dissection-
| indie.... The term to search for would be "cursive singing".
| gpderetta wrote:
| Interesting, I'm Italian, but haven't lived there for more than
| a decade. Any references?
| 01acheru wrote:
| I've posted a reply to you sibling.
| TedShiller wrote:
| Fixed title: Gen Z never learned a lot of things
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| This is sad verging on pathetic.
|
| I work with professional engineers that look like they can hardly
| write their own name. I'm embarrassed for them.
|
| Can you imagine writing or receiving a love letter or note that
| appears as if written by a child?
|
| It's hard to convey the extent to which someone's stature is
| diminished to me when I see them write horribly.
|
| Just saying, this opinion exists too
| sfled wrote:
| Script feels faster than block. Also, I enjoy using a good pen or
| pencil and just writing in script. My handwriting is OK. Funny
| thing though; If I use a pencil for writing it's better if I'm
| using a single sheet on a hard surface. When I use a pen my
| penmanship is better if I'm using several sheets of paper or a
| notebook.
| zuminator wrote:
| Way back in the 1960's Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called "Forget
| It," in which he goes over some of the things children used to be
| routinely taught in school that are no longer part of the
| curriculum. Such as the full range of arithmetic using Roman
| numerals. Such as dry weights, including 2 pints to a quart, 2
| quarts to a...pottle? 2 pottles to a gallon, 2 gallons to a peck,
| 4 pecks to a bushel, 2 bushels to a strike, 2 strikes to a coom,
| 2 cooms to a quarter, 5 quarters to a wey, and 2 weys to a last.
|
| Asimov makes the case that rather than teaching old information,
| we should be forgetting _more_ obsolete facts to make room for
| more modern and efficient material. We 're never going back to a
| world where cursive is in widespread use. Nor will we need to. By
| the time the last generation of cursive readers has died out,
| people will likely have available a "Google Lens" type augmented-
| reality translation on the fly of great-great-grandma Edith's old
| love letters.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Such as dry weights, including 2 pints to a quart, 2 quarts
| to a...pottle? 2 pottles to a gallon, 2 gallons to a peck, 4
| pecks to a bushel, 2 bushels to a strike, 2 strikes to a coom,
| 2 cooms to a quarter, 5 quarters to a wey, and 2 weys to a
| last._
|
| English customary units for mass, length and volume. I went to
| American public schools and I was never taught any of these,
| except I think a single quiz about them in the cooking portion
| of my home economics class (which was also cut from the
| curriculum a few years ago.) All the science classes were
| taught with metric, and no other classes taught units for these
| things at all. The only customary units I have an intuitive
| understanding of are pounds, miles, and Fahrenheit. Off the top
| of my head I can't even tell you how many feet are in a mile,
| and to me a yard is 'about a meter.' I estimate small distances
| in meters and multiply by 3 to give other Americans an estimate
| in feet.
| dv_dt wrote:
| This gives me hope that someday the US will more fully move
| to the metric system.
| Kye wrote:
| US schools taught metric back when I was in them in the
| 90s. Then I got out into the world-as-experienced where
| almost nothing uses it and promptly forgot along with basic
| French and Spanish and most math, and only retained stuff I
| personally took interest in.
|
| It's not enough to teach things in school without support
| outside the school.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Virtually all products in America have volumes and
| weights listed in metric, alongside the customary units.
| Even those packaged specifically for America. Many
| beverages specifically are packaged in whole number
| liters, with oddball fluid ounces listed next to that.
| e.g. a 1 liter / 33.8 floz bottle of coke.
|
| Where customary units seem strongest is in
| civil/mechanical engineering and adjacent trades, road
| signs (all in miles), and weather reports in Fahrenheit.
| [deleted]
| suprjami wrote:
| This is how everyone outside the US thinks as well. We do the
| same sort of rough maths for Fahrenheit (double and add 32)
| and pounds (about 500g).
| croes wrote:
| >By the time the last generation of cursive readers has died
| out, people will likely have available a "Google Lens" type
| augmented-reality translation on the fly of great-great-grandma
| Edith's old love letters.
|
| And nobody will recognize the errors Google Lens makes
| irrational wrote:
| Eh, people can read ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. I predict
| there will be people who will learn cursive either as a
| strange hobby, like calligraphy, or as a sort of ancient
| language.
| agambrahma wrote:
| Dunno, I feel some form of cursive writing is just a natural
| human thing to do.
|
| I was all for "maximum personal cyborg-ness" at an earlier
| stage of life, but I now feel the urge to be away from the
| screen+keyboard for some time, and pen-and-paper is a good fit
| for that, and ... cursive writing is just a good way of _using_
| pen and paper.
|
| As long as you are physically embodied, you're going to feel
| some satisfaction in "doing things with your hands" (i.e. other
| than typing or pointing).
|
| Making marks on a writing medium in a quick, _flowing_ way,
| using a writing instrument ... is a form of communication, or
| even a form of expression, that you can do quite well if you
| try a little bit.
| 8note wrote:
| For a standard modern pen, printing works well. There's no
| constraints imposed by the pen about how long your strokes
| should be, or if the pen will drip.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Its already existing for german cursive script.
| https://readcoop.eu/de/transkribus/suetterlin-uebersetzen/
|
| Nothing of value was lost. Over-complex communication usually
| was a attempt to keep others with less time to learn and
| practice out of the communication stream. Similar to kanji, who
| a peasant would not learn at scale and couldn't even improvise
| phonetically to written form.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| > a "Google Lens" type augmented-reality translation on the fly
| of great-great-grandma Edith's old love letters.
|
| Actually, your failover system makes me feel anxious inside.
|
| What if this proprietary tech gone missing or disappeared
| completely?
|
| What if this proprietary tech gone rogue and just refused to
| cooperate and render the service for end users for any given
| reason?
|
| I just can't trust one single vendor or corporation with such a
| critical part of our life but your main point remains salient
| though.
| 8note wrote:
| If this goes wrong, what's the impact? I'd expect if a
| critical part of your life goes wrong, you are likely to die.
|
| If this went wrong, you'd either not read the letters, or
| have fun figuring out how to translate them by hanx
| ben_w wrote:
| Sure, but this is what Joe Average already does with Latin.
| convolvatron wrote:
| this idiotic idea that everything has to be a service and no
| one can build anything except google will die eventually
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| Fingers crossed!
|
| We need more decentralization and redundancy in these
| services lest we see our future turn hostage to corporate
| financial or political interests.
| webmobdev wrote:
| > _We 're never going back to a world where cursive is in
| widespread use._
|
| I don't know about that - writing something out is still the
| best way to learn and retain something long-term.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| As far as I am aware of, we don't know.
|
| Many studies are done on students typing notes in class, but
| I've seen nothing on people proactively learning something by
| themselves on a computer for instance (like if we were
| summarizing learnings from a video with no time pressure to
| write it down)
| webmobdev wrote:
| _The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for
| Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of
| 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults_ - https://www.fronti
| ersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0181...
| [deleted]
| extra88 wrote:
| Okay but you don't have to handwrite it in cursive.
| coffee_beqn wrote:
| Cursive is optimized for fountain pens I believe. As long
| as we have pencils and ballpoint pens, using cursive is
| just a holdover from olden times with no actual pros
| compared to simpler writing methods
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Cursive is faster than separate letters. However, our
| need to write is sufficiently limited these days that
| it's not worth learning another system to speed up
| writing. However, kids should be taught to *read* cursive
| until we reach the point where the people who write it
| have died off.
|
| I have watched this in a different context in China: The
| government mandated the teaching of Mandarin (which is
| simply the Beijing dialect) but did not object to also
| teaching the local dialect. Kids learned the local
| dialects to communicate with those who only spoke the
| local dialect. However, at least in the cities the people
| who don't speak Mandarin have pretty much died out and if
| alive they aren't very active in society. The young
| generation sees no reason to learn the local dialects and
| the schools don't teach them anymore.
|
| For those who don't know the situation: The grammar and
| the like are identical, all that varies is what is said.
| Unlike an accent, however, they are not mutually
| intelligible. I have seen my wife (Shanghai-born, speaks
| half a dozen of the dialects from nearby cities) switch
| dialects to something she knew the person she was
| speaking to would understand but the eavesdropper she was
| trying to avoid would not. The written form was
| standardized (at least on the mainland, Taiwan still uses
| the old ways) earlier, even when two people can't
| understand each other they can communicate by writing.
| This results in the apparently nonsensical subtitling of
| Chinese movies in Chinese. It also results in what I call
| fingerwriting: when faced with a word the other person
| doesn't understand you will often see them take a finger
| and write the character on the palm of the other hand.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I use fountain pens in my daily life and don't touch
| cursive (although my handwriting has some elements of
| it). It's a misconception that cursive was made for
| fountain pens.
|
| Rather, cursive evolved because it was faster to scrawl
| words onto paper without lifting up the pen, and the
| formal version taught in schools was essentially a
| prescriptivist version of a quick scrawl. It was invented
| to help you write faster.
|
| In particular, I've heard the myth that if you lift a
| fountain pen up, it might drip on the paper, so it's
| better to write in one continuous motion. Fountain pens
| haven't been leaky for the last few hundred years (when
| well-maintained). By contrast, ballpoints used to leak
| tons of ink before precision manufacturing and plastics
| became cheap.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Cursive is still faster to write than typed fonts, and less
| taxing when writing a lot.
|
| On the other hand, I don't think the difference is huge, so
| the value of it depends a lot on how much time it actually
| takes to teach cursive vs teaching non-cursive.
| pfranz wrote:
| Sure, but does the improved speed increase learning and
| retention speed? There's additional time spent to learn
| and master cursive. If that's the only purpose, would
| that time be better spent elsewhere?
|
| From the Boomers, Gen-X, and Millennials I know who were
| taught cursive in school very few use it for note-taking.
| It seems like a huge waste if the only reason for
| teaching it has failed multiple generations already.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I'm 30-ish and not from the USA, but all of my generation
| has been taught cursive and used it all the way through
| college - even though I went to a computer engineering
| college. Some people's handwriting was using some more
| print letters (for example, I mostly use print capitals,
| but cursive for the small letters, with some exceptions
| such as y or x).
| pfranz wrote:
| From what I've seen, at least from 2000 forward in the US
| it was mostly expected that assignments would be typed
| and printed in high school/college. A lot of the length
| requirements specified it (times new roman, size 12,
| single space, one page). I imagine it was because of
| access (the colleges I know of had a computer lab),
| formality, and avoiding back-and-forth over legibility.
|
| After leaving college and not needing to write much after
| a decade or two, its jarring enough to get used to
| writing in block script.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I've expressed this in other places in this thread as
| well, but I just don't understand how you can turn in
| assignments in anything mathy (math, physics, chemistry)
| or diagram/table-heavy (biology, logic) in typed form.
| Even with tools like LaTeX or modern Word it takes so
| much longer than writing by hand...
|
| I can at least understand the idea of writing printed
| characters by hand - the difference between that and
| cursive isn't that large, and is non-existent for the
| above. But to forego handwriting entirely doesn't seem
| plausible to me, in these subjects at least.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Cursive helps you write faster. Some even claim that it
| makes you better at spelling, forming words and sentences
| and thus overall better writer (
| https://www.scholastic.com/parents/books-and-
| reading/raise-a... ). I can't attest to all that, but I
| recognize that it does create more neural pathways and
| involves more motor skills to learn which are beneficial to
| a young mind.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| No idea about whether it is of benefit, but it definitely
| takes more learning as you can only write decent cursive
| by muscle memory. Block letters can be written at any
| pace, cursive must flow.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| It's way more important for kids to understand how division
| works and it's place within larger patterns of algebra than to
| practice doing some specific pen and paper long division
| algorithm several hundred times per semester.
| [deleted]
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Whoops! Missed '2 pecks to a kenning'! Which is a half-bushel.
| 0xRusty wrote:
| > Whoops! Missed '2 pecks to a kenning'! Which is a half-
| bushel.
|
| How embarrassing not knowing that
| orblivion wrote:
| Someone's getting the paddle
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| It only makes sense, that the entire series is filled out
| 2:1 the whole way :)
|
| Definitely impressed by cooms, quarters and weys!
| gdilla wrote:
| learning cursive isn't.... rocket science. so i'm sure with a
| little effort one could get by just fine. Instead of google
| lens there'll be youtubers teaching you how to do it in 1 video
| and you'll be fine-ish.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Asimov makes the case that rather than teaching old
| information, we should be forgetting more obsolete facts to
| make room for more modern and efficient material.
|
| In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the
| opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite
| the first few lines. Why? What was the point of forcing
| students to do that? It's taking up precious space in the very
| limited memory banks. Instead, I can't remember if the
| arguments for the explode function has the string then the
| separator or the separator and then the string.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| The explode function is probably jumbled because the order is
| different in different languages you've encountered.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Thanks for the gentle let off on the memory problem. Now,
| how to find similar explanations for all of the other
| things that can't be remembered ;)
| mlyle wrote:
| > In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize
| the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still
| recite the first few lines. Why? What was the point of
| forcing students to do that? It's taking up precious space in
| the very limited memory banks.
|
| Some schooling focuses _way_ too much on rote, memorization,
| etc. But........
|
| IMO, we often get the main point of education wrong. It's not
| so much direct transfer of useful skills or a body of
| information-- though these are still important. Instead, I
| think the ability to be disciplined, systemic, and learning
| how to learn things and accept challenge should be the main
| goals.
|
| On a limited basis, practicing the skill of memorizing poetry
| and reciting it to a class can be a useful exercise. Now you
| know you can do that, how to do it, and about how long it's
| going to take. You were also forced to engage with that
| particular content in a deeper way than a casual, unmotivated
| reading by a high school student would have resulted in: the
| overall cadence and structure is cemented in your head as
| much as the very words.
|
| Education used to be _very_ memorization and recitation
| heavy. Leaving a little bit in seems useful, even though it
| was the kind of thing I hated most as a kid.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I agree. I hated the podunk backwoods country town I grew
| up in, but after 30 years, I have to admit that my
| schooling was not so bad after all. Actually, it seems to
| be an outlier in how well it actually prepared me compared
| to other people's opinion of their schooling.
|
| The thing that I appreciate most about the teachers and the
| curriculums taught was that they taught me (I would say us
| refering to all students, but don't want to presume) was
| how to learn. I should say, the math/science classes did
| this. The history/literature classes were all rote
| memorization BS. I did not like those classes an did not do
| well in them. However, the other classes where I learned
| how to learn allowed me to become what has been labeled "a
| self-learner". I can read subject material a few times,
| experiment, and then "know" it well enough to function.
| Practice and continued use makes for much better retention
| than rote memorization. I used to ask teachers for anything
| that was still unclear, now it essentially is replaced with
| SO searches.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I noticed an interesting effect in college that other
| graduates I talked with noticed, too.
|
| One learns how to learn. New material is learned faster
| and more accurately. One also learns what parts to focus
| on, and what parts can be dismissed, which helps learn
| more efficiently.
| mlyle wrote:
| Yes. Also, though, often you have a body of understanding
| that can be coerced to just handle the new task.
|
| Over in microeconomics... we draw budget curves, and all
| the operations on budget curves are a whole lot like
| operations on production possibility curves, so there's a
| lot of skill transfer.
|
| We spent 2 class periods on PPCs, and 10 minutes on
| budget curves. My students better understand how to learn
| economic concepts, _and_ they have a closely related
| skill that they can adjust for the new task.
|
| Every lesson, we're accelerating.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yes, the crossover effect is quite real. I remember my
| econ class, where the textbook spend a lot of time
| deriving derivative calculus. Except they never mentioned
| the words "derivative" or "calculus", because evidently
| that triggered math anxiety in econ students. So the book
| went around the horn doing it the hard way, using
| different terms like "marginal rate of return".
|
| Me, I had a good chuckle over that. I kept all my college
| textbooks except the econ one, which went in the trash.
| mlyle wrote:
| That's one way that I'm hamstrung by the College Board.
| All of my students know or are taking a calculus course
| (and those that are, are past the limit definition of the
| derivative by this point).
|
| I would rather be teaching this material with calculus
| and not just handwaving and saying "the marginal revenue
| curve is twice as steep as the demand curve!"
|
| But they're going to pass an examination where it's all
| done algebraically and visually.
|
| [I DO THINK there's some value in taking these algebraic
| and visual approaches, but there comes a point in the
| class where they get rather awkward].
| WalterBright wrote:
| Maybe I wasn't quite clear. The econ book _did_ derive,
| teach and use calculus, it just obfuscated it using
| different terminology and symbols, to hide the fact that
| it was calculus.
| mlyle wrote:
| I think we're in agreement in that --- the algebra-based
| microecon class I'm teaching is effectively using and re-
| creating calculus, too.
|
| I've already told students many times we're going to find
| the area of shapes on this graph, where I'd actually just
| subtract the curves and take a definite integral.
|
| And the graphs _are a really, really nice visual_ for the
| subject matter. Being able to point to consumer surplus,
| producer surplus, tax revenue, and deadweight loss as
| regions on the graph means you know how all these curves
| relate. But then we end up doing all this awkward not-
| quite-calculus stuff.
| ghaff wrote:
| I tutored a group of students in business school who
| were, shall we say, not mathematically prepared perhaps
| especially in microeconomics.
|
| Maxima and minima were certainly one issue because that
| required calculus, however simple a form thereof. I'm not
| sure even the simplest formulaic version ever got
| through. But we're taking about totally not getting
| solving simultaneous algebraic equations and one student
| told me I needed to explain "graphs" so it was all mostly
| a hopeless project.
| mlyle wrote:
| > Maxima and minima were certainly one issue
|
| Yup-- College Board's preferred approach here is
| memorization. You get -this- maxima when MC=MR. You get
| this -other- maxima when MU=0. You get this -other- one
| when Ed = -1.
|
| Don't even get me started on "this number is always
| negative, so we'll just pretend it's positive sometimes--
| though when you do a related calculation, make sure you
| preserve the sign!" (elasticity of demand vs. other
| elasticities).
| ghaff wrote:
| I actually think less technical takes on things like
| micro and statistics can do a better job of illuminating
| principles than getting all wrapped up in the math does.
| (I think I understood stats better when I took it in
| business school vs. my very math-heavy engineering
| version--though it was still rather frequentist-
| oriented.) But, ideally, you still know enough basic
| calculus to do the actual calculations.
|
| MBA programs have changed a lot since I did one. But math
| was definitely the real killer for a lot of first-years.
| STEM undergrads had it a lot easier.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I actually think less technical takes on things like
| micro and statistics can do a better job of illuminating
| principles than getting all wrapped up in the math does.
|
| I agree, but if they go to my room learning a bunch of
| rules-of-thumb for maximizing economic functions... and
| then go down the hall to math class and are learning how
| to optimize by finding places where the derivative is
| 0... it's kinda silly.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, but in this case they weren't going to those math
| classes. Though you could equally well argue, they also
| weren't going to be solving those microeconomics problems
| the instant after they passed (or didn't) that particular
| course.
| kergonath wrote:
| > One learns how to learn.
|
| A thousand times this! School is obsolete by construction
| if we only learn specific skills, which might not stay
| relevant for long. Learning how to learn is the truly
| useful thing that a good school should provide.
|
| I am baffled by all the comments about how children
| should learn <specific skill someone think is important>.
| How useful would have been an education where arithmetics
| would have been focused on how to use slide rules? And
| yet, that was a practical, critical professional skill
| for quite some time.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Learning to use a slide rule gives one an intuitive feel
| for logarithms that is hard to get any other way. Slide
| rules are still faster than calculators for approximate
| calculations.
|
| It also gives one an appreciation for calculators. It's
| like learning to use hand tools before machine tools.
| Hand tools impart a feel for the material being cut that
| pays off when using machine tools.
| mlyle wrote:
| I agree with you.
|
| Would you teach kids today to use a slide rule? It seems
| hard to justify for the benefit in intuition about
| exponents/logarithms.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I was taught to use a slide rule in 5 minutes. It's just
| one moving part, and you read the numbers off the scale.
|
| Yes, I'd teach kids to use a slide rule. It's not
| necessary for them to become expert at it, just get
| comfortable with it.
|
| Why learn exponents? People will never learn compound
| interest without getting comfortable with exponents. Not
| learning compound interest will forever financially
| cripple them. Hell yes, it's worth while.
|
| My accounting class was taught by a former used car
| salesman. He'd tell me stories about how poor people made
| very bad choices in financing, and when he'd explain how
| compound interest worked, they'd assume he was trying to
| cheat them.
|
| For me personally, knowing math and trig, etc., has
| provided me a lifetime of payback. Very, very worth it,
| in dollars and cents.
| mlyle wrote:
| I'm not saying that math and trig are not valuable....
| I'm merely questioning whether a slide rule has the best
| payoff of those few minutes vs. say, watching Powers of
| Ten by C & R Eames.
|
| I don't think you cultivate the kind of intuitive
| understanding of exponents and logarithms you're
| describing with a few minutes of casual practice with a
| slide rule.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It worked for me. I never spent much of any time with a
| slide rule, but played with it enough to see that yes,
| adding logarithms to multiply worked like magic. (This
| was in high school.)
|
| My first semester at Caltech had slide rules in the
| bookstore for $125 (mebbe close to a grand today). By the
| end of the semester, they were $5, and disappeared by the
| 2nd. I've never seen a tech revolution hit so hard and so
| fast.
|
| The trouble with calculators is they impart no feel
| whatsoever for the math behind it. You get a string of 10
| digits that is "The Answer". People get led astray by
| that all the time, including professionals. It's amazing
| how these people defend obviously wrong results because
| the calculator gives "The Answer".
| mlyle wrote:
| Yah, we don't use calculators much, either.
|
| Graphing calculators used to be nice to occasionally use
| to help build an intuitive sense of the "shape" of a
| function. Now I often use Desmos for the same thing.
|
| I was a long term sub for 8th grade science a couple
| years ago. It was fun to use Desmos for linear regression
| as they collected data points-- to see how each point
| changed the line of best fit before these students had
| learned L.R. in any rigorous way themselves. It made
| students excited to get each next point in our experiment
| and make predictions about whether they believe the line,
| etc. (And whether we can safely extrapolate past the data
| we have...)
|
| In the competitive math series I coach, one of the 3
| rounds allows calculator usage. Usually using the
| calculator is a trap instead of doing something clever,
| but sometimes the calculator is the best way. I think
| it's kind of neat that they built it this way, because it
| requires building the intuition to realize whether you're
| really facing a problem that is purely calculation.
| baq wrote:
| Hard science, i.e. math and its applications, teach you
| how to think, reason, etc. Rote memorization stuff builds
| identity, whether you are aware of it or not. It almost
| doesn't matter what you learn, what matters is that
| everyone around you knows the same stuff.
|
| In between stuff is weird, it's where people complain
| about 'politicizing science' and 'being fed up with
| experts', etc. It's where the wavefront of known facts
| changes too quickly for any kind of mass education to
| catch up.
| ghaff wrote:
| >Hard science, i.e. math and its applications, teach you
| how to think, reason, etc.
|
| Although, especially in high school but to a more limited
| degree in intro level college courses as well, you still
| end up memorizing a lot of formulas in a course like
| physics--one issue being that you probably haven't taken
| the calculus yet that you need to derive those formulas.
| Of course, you often end up knowing formulas you use all
| the time off the top of your head anyway. But you
| presumably could derive a lot of them if you had to.
| quacked wrote:
| You may enjoy this:
|
| https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:
| /...
| mlyle wrote:
| :D I've come across it before, but thanks for refreshing
| my memory of it.
|
| So, for background, I am now a teacher. This year, I'm
| teaching:
|
| * Middle School: Competitive math (MathCounts),
| Competitive robotics (FTC), Intro to Circuits
| (undergraduate EE curriculum slightly simplified and
| slowed down), Mechatronics Lab (3D design, embedded
| software, and controls).
|
| * High School: AP Microeconomics (College level economics
| course), Competitive robotics (FTC), Spacecraft Systems
| Engineering (hoping to get a launch grant to put a small
| satellite in orbit).
|
| * Clubs: HS Investment club, HS Space club, upper
| elementary math and robotics clubs.
|
| I'm all about things being student led and student owned;
| this is especially true in my team classes (robotics and
| math). Even the others, I try to attain this to the
| extent possible.
|
| On the other hand... Look, we've got a few hundred bodies
| around. We need a bell and to know where students should
| be. And my students do need to learn to work on things
| that are not necessarily their first choice of what to
| do, because for a lot of students this would be Fortnite
| 24/7. And for a lot of subject, there are pieces of
| information that are useless on their own until you've
| built a whole conceptual loop around them.
|
| The piece makes an argument for market forces.
| Unfortunately, market forces often push things in the
| "wrong" direction. Parents want their kids to take lots
| of AP classes because it is helpful to get into college
| and also saves college tuition. But I feel like the
| microeconomics course I'm teaching is a lot worse than
| the one I'd teach on my own... I dare not stray too much
| from the dictates of the College Board, though, because
| students need to pass that test. Parents also like
| "rigor" of students working meekly and quietly because it
| seems like it's a quality signal (and it often is, but
| too much of anything is crap!).
|
| What we really need is:
|
| * Rigorous, controlled educational research so that we
| can know what works and what doesn't in what populations.
| Spoiler: everyone is just _making it all up as they go
| along_ or, at best, _following new educational trends
| with very little research support for them_
|
| * An educational system that actually respects and
| implements that research.
|
| * Respect, safety, and adequate resources for teachers.
| (I do extraordinary things with my classes in large part
| I teach in a _very easy_ environment-- from class sizes,
| organizational support, resourcing, and student
| behavior).
| vladgur wrote:
| Which country and state you're in? I am praying I can
| look forward to something like this when my kid goes to
| middle school here in CAlifornia
| mlyle wrote:
| I'm in California-- SF Bay Area-- but I'm teaching at a
| private school.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Respect
|
| is a two way street. Teachers routinely blame the parents
| for any failures in the classroom.
|
| > safety
|
| absolutely.
|
| > adequate resources
|
| I never learned more than at Caltech where the material
| was taught with blackboard and chalk, and the students
| used pen and paper.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The best and most fun lecture I ever gave was with
| whiteboard and dry erase pens. The scheduled speaker had
| not shown up, and the organizer asked if anyone could
| fill in. I volunteered, and had done no prep and had no
| slides.
|
| What also made it fun was the interaction with the
| audience and I'd just go where those interactions led.
|
| I don't do this normally, because everyone expects
| slides, and the conference organizer provides no
| mechanism for blackboards.
|
| Also, blackboards are problematic for a larger venue,
| they work best in a normal sized classroom.
| mlyle wrote:
| I lecture a whole lot at the whiteboard. I use slides a
| lot, too. And demonstrations. Or I make students come up
| and demonstrate.
|
| It should be a little unpredictable what class will be
| like each day.
| WalterBright wrote:
| That all sounds excellent.
| mlyle wrote:
| > > Respect
|
| > is a two way street. Teachers routinely blame the
| parents for any failures in the classroom.
|
| I teach in a great environment, but my public school
| peers are frequently berated by parents of students that
| complete no work.
|
| Even in my environment, I am pretty constantly "talked
| down to" by parents-- there's the implicit assumption
| they're better than me. I have enough confidence from
| past successes in industry and life to shrug it off, but
| I could easily see it becoming demotivating. Someone with
| my skills can easily find more lucrative and less
| challenging work.
|
| > > adequate resources
|
| > I never learned more than at Caltech where the material
| was taught with blackboard and chalk, and the students
| used pen and paper.
|
| I teach computer engineering with pen and paper.
|
| I mean things like "a living wage", "time to prepare for
| your classes and go to the bathroom", "not sticking 40
| middle school students, including many with severe
| behavioral problems, in one room", and "not having to buy
| pencils and other necessities for your students with your
| own money".
|
| There's also a whole lot of nice-to-haves that make a
| difference. The $15 set of refillable whiteboard pens
| that have a very wide nib and make huge dark lines are
| very useful, but ain't no public school teacher going to
| get those over worn-out Expo markers. Candy bribes and
| stickers used judiciously as prizes to fuel classroom
| competition make a difference. Etc, etc, etc.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > berated
|
| Sure, there are rotten parents. No excuse for them. But
| I'm talking about a general disrespect teachers have for
| parents. This is manifested in not wanting any input from
| parents, not wanting to hear from them at PTA meetings,
| not consulting parents in any way shape or form about the
| curriculum. Teachers do want parents to volunteer, but
| only at their direction. No collaboration.
|
| As for pencils and paper, pencils cost a few cents each,
| and the playgrounds of the schools I attended were
| littered with pencils. Paper is so cheap people throw
| away reams of unused paper all the time.
|
| Me, I prefer the more expensive $5 gel pens, but they'll
| last me a couple months each.
|
| P.S. My dad taught at university for years. He grew up in
| the Depression, and his thrifty ways followed for the
| rest of his life. He'd bring home used paper - such as
| exams printed on one side of the sheet, and blank the
| other side. His notes and drafts and accounts and tax
| records were done on the blank side. I have many boxes
| filled with those papers. When they were inadequate, he'd
| buy boxes of newsprint, the cheapest paper possible, and
| write from edge to edge in tiny script. Nobody could get
| more out of a piece of paper than my dad :-)
| mlyle wrote:
| > But I'm talking about a general disrespect teachers
| have for parents. This is manifested in not wanting any
| input from parents, not wanting to hear from them at PTA
| meetings, not consulting parents in any way shape or form
| about the curriculum. Teachers do want parents to
| volunteer, but only at their direction. No collaboration.
|
| It's easy to blame teachers for this, but in public
| schools generally greater than 100% of instructional time
| is already spoken for. Administrators and regulators are
| heaping requirements upon teachers to cover material.
| Then, because not enough time is allotted, the only
| option is to cover it badly and quickly.
|
| Also, because many teachers have inadequate planning and
| grading time, it gets _really_ tempting to do what you
| did last year; veteran teachers tend to work >125% of
| contract hours already.
|
| I'm open to collaboration. Unlike most teachers, I have a
| lot of flexibility in how I run most of my classes. But
| AP Microeconomics? Pfft. I don't have the luxury of
| caring what your suggestions are about how I run that
| class. I have 34.5 equivalent-block-periods of material
| to cover in 35.5 equivalent-block-periods, and I'm sure
| there will be a fire drill or something that I need to
| reteach that will claim that buffer.
|
| This is just a snippet of the high level plan (lesson
| plans go into greater detail), showing how I'm forced to
| think about a class where there's explicit heavy
| curriculum requirements: https://i.imgur.com/YQk5LBP.png
|
| > As for pencils and paper, pencils cost a few cents
| each, and the playgrounds of the schools I attended were
| littered with pencils.
|
| That's nice. You are still trying to shame someone who is
| making below a living wage to purchase it, and many other
| things, for other peoples' children.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > I don't have the luxury of caring what your suggestions
| are about how I run that class
|
| You can't expect respect for that. (BTW, other teachers
| have told me their reason for not caring about parental
| input is they were trained professionals and parents were
| ignorant fools.)
|
| > You are still trying to shame someone who is making
| below a living wage to purchase it
|
| $4 to supply all your students with pencils. You brought
| up the pencil thing. Besides, you should move to Seattle
| where public schoolteachers make 6 figure salaries, have
| a pension for life, gold plated health insurance, and 2
| months off per year.
| mlyle wrote:
| > > I don't have the luxury of caring what your
| suggestions are about how I run that class
|
| > You can't expect respect for that.
|
| Rock vs. hard place? If I go off track in one of these
| classes where curriculum is tightly specified,
| quantitative indicators nosedive and I get crucified by
| parents.
|
| > Besides, you should move to Seattle where public
| schoolteachers make 6 figure salaries, have a pension for
| life, gold plated health insurance, and 2 months off per
| year.
|
| I make ~$59k/year for a 104% teaching load in the San
| Francisco Bay Area.
|
| Teaching my circuits class, I've bought a few hundred
| dollars in soldering irons and integrated circuits and
| breadboards for my classroom. The school borrows my old
| digital storage oscilloscope and other tools. I also end
| up pitying the robotics teams and buying them lots of
| stuff.
|
| I got rich in industry so this works OK for me, but...
|
| And yes, if I went and got a master's degree, I could
| make a _bit_ more in public education, in exchange for a
| much worse classroom environment and lower level of
| respect. Still would be nowhere near the pay I could get
| elsewhere.
| WalterBright wrote:
| You should have said you bought electronic equipment for
| your students in the first place :-) I can respect that.
|
| I see that pencil trope all the time. In Seattle, they
| run a school supplies drive every year and pencils figure
| prominently on the donation list. This is a school system
| that spends $16,941 per student, and yet begs for $.05
| pencils.
|
| "San Francisco Unified School District spends $17,464 per
| student each year" sez google. I infer your complaint is
| misdirected at the taxpayers, and should be with mis-
| spending by the school administrators.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I infer your complaint is misdirected at the taxpayers,
| and should be with mis-spending by the school
| administrators.
|
| I never directed a complaint at the taxpayers. Society
| expecting/normalizing teachers to pay for supplies out of
| their own pocket is the problem.
|
| Education keeps getting more and more expensive and lower
| and lower quality across the board. Especially in
| universities, but also in K12. Administration and waste
| gobble up more and more.
|
| It seems like your responses expect teachers to paper
| over all the systemic problems. Their employer demands
| they teach excessive amounts of curriculum? Well, they'd
| better listen to parents, too, even if this is
| impossible, or else get no respect! School districts
| don't actually buy supplies or resource classrooms
| sufficiently? Well, teachers had better fix that!
| mlyle wrote:
| > I see that pencil trope all the time. In Seattle, they
| run a school supplies drive every year and pencils figure
| prominently on the donation list. This is a school system
| that spends $16,941 per student, and yet begs for $.05
| pencils.
|
| Read actual teacher accounts of what they spend kitting
| out their classrooms.
|
| And yes, public school systems spend _massive amounts per
| student_ , and then still expect charity from everyone:
| employees, parents, the community, etc, to fund normal
| operations and provide normal supplies.
|
| Your digs at mandated curriculum, how cheap the supplies
| are, etc... are really beside the point. They're like
| yelling at the front-line customer service rep who has no
| power to affect the things that concern you.
|
| Public school systems are often kafkaesque. Classrooms
| with 40 students; administration that externalize all
| problems to the teachers and refuse to address behavior
| problems; IEPs for 20 of those students mandating
| "preferential seating" and individualized teaching
| interventions. Curriculum that is garbage and overspends
| classroom time. Asking teachers to develop massive
| amounts of materials themselves. Or alternatively to
| _only_ use provided material with no enrichment.
| Sometimes alternating between opposing harsh policy lines
| every few months.
|
| Yes, there's some moderately high comp'd teaching jobs
| out there (lol not mine) and some situations which fare
| better on respect and autonomy (like mine). But if it
| were such a sweet gig, we'd not have teachers leaving the
| field in droves and a shortage.
|
| [And the intrinsics of the job itself are _wonderful_ --
| teaching successfully _feels great_. You really have to
| try hard to screw it up to make teachers miserable, and
| that 's what our society does].
| staticassertion wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what was the transition from field work
| to teaching like? I always hated school (the school bits,
| I liked the socializing) and thought I might like to be a
| teacher one day for that reason. I have no idea what
| transitioning would even look like though, it's entirely
| foreign to me.
| mlyle wrote:
| It was an accidental process. I was volunteering running
| after-school robotics teams and my role steadily
| increased over a number of years.
|
| If you want to do this at a public school, you're going
| to need to go get a specialized master's degree and
| teaching credential. Of course, there's some value in
| what's taught in these programs (pedagogy, classroom
| management, practical experience, etc). I've studied
| rather intensely on my own.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Interestingly, none of the college professors I had had
| any education whatsoever in teaching. Neither did my dad,
| who was a professor for 20 years. They just knew the
| material.
|
| Feynman, perhaps the greatest physics teacher ever, had 0
| teaching credentials. I attended one of his lectures long
| ago, a privilege I didn't realize until much later.
| mlyle wrote:
| This works pretty well in an environment of highly
| motivated university students. But there are reasons why
| we expect teachers to be educated on how to teach in
| general.
|
| I highly respect you, and we seem to talk here a lot. But
| you have this habit of holding up various edge cases that
| don't quite directly relate to what we're talking about
| as "gotchas".
|
| I have 0 teaching credentials, too, and think I'm pretty
| great. The current systems we have for younger students
| require teaching credentials, and there's some good
| reasons to require some education-in-education before
| letting someone teach kids.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| There's no evidence teaching degrees make people better
| teachers.
|
| ::: It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one:
| Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher
| effectiveness
|
| Neither holding a college major in education nor
| acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary
| and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of
| the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers
| generally do become more effective with a few years of
| teaching experience, but we also find evidence that
| teachers may become less effective with experience,
| particularly later in their careers. These and other
| findings with respect to the correlates of teacher
| effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-
| added models that control for student characteristics as
| well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed
| effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in
| reading and math for Florida students in fourth through
| eighth grades for eight school years, 2001-2002 through
| 2008-2009.
|
| Research highlights > Majoring in education is not
| associated with teacher effectiveness. > University
| attended for college is not associated with teacher
| effectiveness. > Acquiring a master's degree is not
| associated with teacher effectiveness. > Teachers become
| more effective with a few years of teaching experience. >
| Teachers may become less effective later in their
| careers.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02
| 727...
| mlyle wrote:
| I've already read this research. The problem is that
| there's massive selection biases at work.
|
| It doesn't mean taking more people without teaching
| credentials results in an equal or greater quality of
| education.
|
| e.g. I am a high school dropout who's doing pretty-damn-
| well at teaching. I do not think this means we need more
| high school dropouts teaching, though.
|
| I've learned a whole lot reading the pedagogy literature
| and reading about the kinds of strategies that
| credentialed teachers are required to learn during their
| practicum and student teaching. It's difficult to imagine
| that these courses of study are not useful.
|
| (The research _does_ probably mean that programs intended
| to incentivize existing teachers to get graduate degrees
| are probably flawed, except for some special cases in
| e.g. secondary math education)
| WalterBright wrote:
| On the other hand, teaching is an innate human
| capability, and a big part of what makes us humans. An
| education degree is an extremely recent phenomenon.
|
| Clearly, some teachers are better at it than others. But
| if anyone did a study and found that Masters in Ed
| teachers did a better job than Bachelors in Ed teachers,
| I'd be genuinely surprised.
| mlyle wrote:
| > On the other hand, teaching is an innate human
| capability, and a big part of what makes us humans.
|
| I've spent my whole career "teaching" in that sense.
| Explaining things, mentoring junior engineers, etc.
|
| There's definitely skill transfer from that, but it's a
| bit different of a thing to try and take 25 12-year olds
| of vastly different backgrounds and ability for a year
| and get most of them to master a given curriculum.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Hm, yeah so a problem would be that I have no degree, nor
| any desire to attain one.
| webmobdev wrote:
| Yes, I too have come to this realization too. I too hated
| memorising something as I didn't consider it an
| "intellectual" task. But you are right that it is a
| necessary part of education to train kids. Indeed, now when
| I look at some professions as an adult - like the Indian
| administrative services (civil service bureaucrats),
| doctors, lawyers etc - I understand why the ability and
| skill to learn some fact quickly and retain it in memory is
| highly valued in such professions.
| bergenty wrote:
| I used to be against memorization too but to be honest it's
| immensely useful and an important skill that takes hard work
| to accomplish. There's a special flow to speaking with
| someone that doesn't need to stop to look things up on his
| phone multiple times in a complex conversation.
| hattmall wrote:
| I feel the case could be made that knowing the explode syntax
| is obsolete because you should have code hints. That being
| said, in language the general theme follows English language
| sentence syntax with the verb abstracted to the function
| name.
|
| As in verb(subject, predicate, preposition)
|
| Think of it as a sentence, you would say "Separator exploded
| the string"
|
| The verb is exploded, so that's the function, Seperator would
| be first, then the string, and any modifiers which would be
| equivalent to prepositions, as in "Separator exploded the
| string at the first occurrence".
|
| Anyhow that's what used to be taught as best practice if you
| were developing a new language.
| ghaff wrote:
| A nit: Canterbury Tales is Middle English and with the rhythm
| of the words and the many similarities to modern English,
| it's not that difficult and it's a good way to appreciate the
| language. I'd say the same thing about memorizing a
| Shakespearean soliloquy.
|
| Old English/Anglo-Saxon is the language of Beowulf and a
| modern English speaker would be effectively memorizing a
| northern European language like German. (It's pre-Norman
| invasion and therefore pre-Romance language influence.)
| dylan604 wrote:
| See, other information that can't be recalled! Now that you
| said, I do kind maybe (memory is fuzzy) something about
| Middle English. It wasn't until being forced to read
| Canterbury Tales that I personally realized how Germanic
| English is. This is probably around the time I learned that
| Romantic languages had nothing to do with feelings and
| kisses.
| SergeAx wrote:
| Our memory banks are effectively infinite, we can remember a
| lot of details from very early parts of our lives, all by
| ourselves or with the help of hypnosis and other techniques.
| Oftentimes (much more often than we like to think) we do not
| remember the exact details (see research about witnesses).
| Lessons on memorization allows children to train their
| memory.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I would argue that doing that kind of dive into foundational
| texts in the English literary cannon is more useful than you
| might expect. Things like the Canterbury Tales were often
| recited live by someone standing on a table, as you may
| remember from that lesson. The exercise of memorizing and
| orally reciting the couplets gives you a totally different
| intuitive understanding of the material. This also gives you
| a window through which you can better understand later works,
| like Shakespeare. Modern literature is also full of allusions
| and references to these foundational texts, so a passing
| familiarity gives you access to a deeper reading of newer
| works.
|
| Prior to Chaucer educated people in Europe considered English
| unsuitable for poetry. His work is part of the story of how
| English came to be an important global language.
|
| That's all to say that going deep on literary classics is
| valuable in a way that cursive is not.
| michaelgrafl wrote:
| Human memory doesn't work like that. Nothing gets pushed out
| when you learn something new.
|
| It probably works the other way around even. The more you
| know (and understand), the easier it gets to remember (and
| understand) new things.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >Human memory doesn't work like that.
|
| Probably right, but that's why we just need to be equiped
| with an M.2 port so we can upgrade our memory. Or maybe a
| bit of "better living through chemistry" will come up with
| a better swapping routine for memory
| psychphysic wrote:
| It's not really the case that memorising those lines have
| taken up useful brain space.
|
| On the contrary from all we know it probably made you better
| at memorising.
|
| Similarly being able to write cursive gives you better fine
| motor control in your writing hand.
|
| I learnt cursive at school, as well as use of a slide rule
| and log tables. They were obsolete by many decades when I was
| learning to use them. But are my arithmetic skills worse than
| the average zoomer who has a smartphone practically cemented
| into their hand?
|
| No, I'm fact I'm probably more efficient at using the
| calculator app on their phone.
|
| In theory computer algebra systems have obsoleted junior
| maths courses let alone times tables (multiplication tables).
| But good luck using one if you didn't do the wax-on wax-off
| leg work of memorising seemingly useless data.
|
| In my current job I oversee trainees who have to sit 3 exams
| (at great cost totalling about 10k). The recommended reading
| for those those exams is about PS25 question bank. Everyone
| who does it comes away feeling it was useless. The vast
| majority will pass and tell their more junior friends not to
| bother with it. And invariably the group that doesn't use it
| has more fails. There is bias here, those that are willing to
| work are more motivated and more likely to pass. But this
| always reminds me that 1) you don't even know what you're
| gaining when you do any kind of training 2) we rarely
| remember how we know something or why we came up with a
| particular idea. Usually the reason is some boring
| combination of seemingly unrelated grunt work.
| duifullg wrote:
| You can make the case than learning almost anything
| "useless" will help you with something else than everyone
| considers useful nowadays.
|
| Cursive helps with fine motor control. Chess helps you with
| memorization. Using an abacus might help with both.
|
| That's not the point. The point is kids have a limited
| time. I don't want my kids to learn cursive or the abacus
| because that will take time off from stuff that's almost
| surely more relevant. Perhaps I'm wrong and learning with
| an abacus is the best use of their time.
|
| I hated cursive with a passion and some of my teachers
| forced me to use it at different points of my primary
| education. It was falling out of fashion then and only the
| hardcore old-timers thought it should be forced upon
| children. I wrote a perfectly legible print, but for them I
| just HAD to do it their way
| michaelgrafl wrote:
| In my view fine motor control is actually very important,
| as it seems to have a big effect on neuroplasticity and
| the prevention of Parkinson's.
|
| I also want my kids to learn how to appreciate things
| that have no tangible purpose other than be beautiful.
|
| I think it's a shame though that you were forced to use
| cursive when you hated it. Although where I grew up
| writing cursive used to be the norm. But it's not anymore
| apparently, as my son is learning non-cursive first.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >as my son is learning non-cursive first.
|
| Is non-cursive different than print? Didn't everyone
| learn to print before learning cursive?
| psychphysic wrote:
| I think people massively overestimate what kids are
| willing to do or capable of.
|
| Kids are stupid. Like really dumb, not even just not well
| informed (they are entirely uninformed) but also wildly
| illogical and without strategy. They do by brute force.
| Unable to appraise tasks and split them into smaller
| pieces.
|
| I don't think many get to use an abacus these days but if
| you do you'll see an abacus makes visual the way numbers
| can be split into digits for addition and subtraction.
|
| Believe it or not at one point in your life that wasn't
| so deeply rooted into your soul that it seems alien and a
| colossal insight.
|
| To kids the sums of numbers might as well have been
| plucked from thin air.
|
| Every time there is an attempt to teach kids "useful"
| maths there's a backlash that it's too hard. That parents
| can't manage it. New Maths, Common Core.
|
| Add to that 50% have IQ below the mean ( of course).
| dylan604 wrote:
| I wholeheartedly disagree with the "kids are stupid"
| comment. They just have no experience. I've coached 4-5yo
| kid soccer. With guidance and instruction and lots of
| practice, they went from wanting to kick the ball as hard
| as they could to dribbling the ball in total control in
| one season. Some of them had better skills/ball control
| than some of their older siblings that were not taught
| the same way. All they needed was to be shown how,
| encouragement to keep at it, and someone willing with the
| time to do it with them.
|
| It wasn't until this team (I had coached older kids
| prior) that I immediately understood why people became
| coaches/teachers. The look on their faces when they
| realized they could do something. It was the pride of a
| parent multiplied by each player.
| samatman wrote:
| The (of course) is true of the median, not the mean.
| psychphysic wrote:
| Of course. Glad to be corrected.
|
| Clearly I need to hit the abacas harder to bone up on my
| averages!
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Devil's advocate: it's teaching you how to memorize something
| you don't want yet need to.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I don't want to need it ever
| dsego wrote:
| In my secondary school we had teachers who dictated their
| lectures out of their notebooks and we had to write it all
| down & learn it line by line basically. And then during oral
| exam recite it back at them. I remember some kids would ask
| to go from the beginning when they lost track.
| [deleted]
| thefz wrote:
| Nah. Roman numerals are fun and a different way to think about
| how you write a number. It is something I think a lot about and
| I am glad I have been taught. Same thing for Latin. That thing
| ruled. That thin rules still
| aaronwalker wrote:
| What do you think is some of the more "modern and efficient
| material" we should be learning in school now? Things that come
| to mind: - Keyboard typing - Converting between binary and base
| 10
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > Converting between binary and base 10
|
| Just because something is relevant to the HN readership
| doesn't mean that it is to everyone.
| adfm wrote:
| I suspect we'll start to see things we wouldn't expect. Kids
| are growing up with phones and tablets, so keyboards are
| debatable, even though they're commonplace. Consider asking a
| kid to tell time with an analog clock sometime.
| Zak wrote:
| I doubt many are writing papers longer than a page using a
| touch keyboard even if they're doing it on tablets.
| Physical keyboards are among the more popular tablet
| accessories.
| irrational wrote:
| Voice to text is pretty good these days.
| ip26 wrote:
| The ability to put down written word is a basic element of
| literacy. They need to learn _some_ way. Perhaps you are
| saying they type in on-screen keyboards?
| irrational wrote:
| I wonder if voice to text will replace keyboards.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| People generally think and type much faster than they
| speak so probably not. Plus, no matter how robust speech
| to text becomes it still struggles with names and slang.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| A quick google search tells me the average typing WPM is
| 40 and the average speaking WPM is 150
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The average typing WPM isn't comparable to the average
| typing WPM someone has while working on say, an essay.
| Just like how the average speaking WPM isn't comparable
| to the same. Even more when what's being written has to
| be more proper than spoken language, where grammatical
| errors, broken sentences or stuttering etc is completely
| normal and easy to ignore.
|
| We've had fairly robust speech to text for a few years
| now and the only places its seen real penetration in is
| basic personal assistant stuff involving short and simple
| queries, so I find it hard to imagine that anyone thinks
| that speech can replace keyboards as an input method.
|
| Even with people I know who've tried to switch to using
| speech to text due to injuries, it's been a nightmare
| because there are no easy ways to use it for anything
| that isn't plain format-less dictionary language. For
| casual communication it sucks because people use a lot of
| slang, often even slang exclusive to their friend group,
| and for serious communication it doesn't work because
| "delete last word" or "cut sentence X and paste here" is
| objectively not as convenient/fast for say, the average
| western highschool student as doing the same via
| keyboard.
|
| Not even considering how unrealistic it is to edit/format
| text via speech.
|
| As a way to reason about this, look at some code
| (assuming you're a programmer) and try to think of how
| you would input it without a keyboard.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > Such as dry weights, including 2 pints to a quart, 2 quarts
| to a...pottle? 2 pottles to a gallon, 2 gallons to a peck, 4
| pecks to a bushel, 2 bushels to a strike, 2 strikes to a coom,
| 2 cooms to a quarter, 5 quarters to a wey, and 2 weys to a last
|
| Good thing the rest of the world uses this amazing system where
| a kilothing is a thousand of a thing eh.
| mlyle wrote:
| > We're never going back to a world where cursive is in
| widespread use.
|
| The tricky thing here is while we're transitioning away from
| some of these things, they still often serve as signals of
| class and overall quality of education.
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I respect that individual parents would want their schools to
| teach those things, so that their children will seem high-
| status. But as a school _system_ , it makes no sense to teach
| things that only serve as status markers, because if you
| teach everyone the status marker, it won't carry any
| information and people will switch to something else.
| mlyle wrote:
| > I respect that individual parents would want their
| schools to teach those things, so that their children will
| seem high-status.
|
| Yup. So the main places that are still teaching cursive:
|
| * Wealthier public schools (to keep upper class parents
| happy, even if it doesn't tie to a state requirement).
|
| * Private schools (I teach at one of these).
|
| * Various "traditionalist" / "conservative" states.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| > Yup. So the main places that are still teaching
| cursive:
|
| While cursive is still teached at schools where I
| live,print letters are the ones used the most
|
| I guess there is be a difference between the way public
| schools and private schools teach handwriting.
|
| I can usually figure at by looking at someone's
| handwriting whether they went to private or public
| school.
| dpierce9 wrote:
| My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes
| it.
|
| Here is a counterpoint. The US foundational documents
| (Declaration, Constitution) are written in cursive/script.
| Public education certainly has something to do with creating
| citizens capable of participating in US democracy and reading
| these docs is one significant part of that. Obviously they can
| be transcribed so I don't think this is super compelling but
| perhaps it is not anachronistic as it seems.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Can be and has been. So, not compelling at all, I'd say. Even
| if you extend the general idea to a need to read grandma's
| recipes, you could post a pic online and someone who can read
| cursive could transcribe it for you.
| fuzzzerd wrote:
| What a horrible way to live. Dependent on others for even
| basic needs.
|
| I'm not arguing you have to be 100% self sufficient, but
| learning to read what amounts to a specific font shouldn't
| be too much to ask.
| ben_w wrote:
| When I was a pup, my mum had several occult books,
| including on divination with runes.
|
| Because of this, I learned to read them.
|
| Because of this, I got slightly more out of the maps (and
| cover) of The Hobbit than most normal people -- Tolkien
| used runes as merely a font for Dwarfish, which was
| really just English.
|
| I wouldn't say that this is any more useful than cursive.
| lovich wrote:
| I'd disagree that it's a basic need or that it's not too
| much to ask. I think most people on this board have had
| to deal with not automating a one off task because the
| time to automate it is longer than the time saved.
|
| Spending time learning how to read a font optimized for
| hand writing that you might need to read a handful of
| times in your life seems like it would fall into the same
| category of work that's not worth the time
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| No one is reading that in its original or at all
| coffee_beqn wrote:
| I do wonder is cursive really that hard to read without any
| lessons? It's still English just with a awkward font. Writing
| cursive has a lot of rules but I would think most GenZers
| could read the constitution albeit slowly
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| A lot depends on penmanship. My grandmother was taught old
| school, and her cursive was so precise it looked like a
| font. Like she didn't use a ruler but everything she wrote
| till the day she died looked like she did.
|
| Myself I've lost the ability to write cursive. Obviously I
| could get it back with a little practice but I see zero
| point in doing so. I barely even write anything vs type
| these days.
| cronix wrote:
| > I barely even write anything vs type these days.
|
| Me as well, to the point that when I do write, it's a lot
| slower and less legible than it used to be. Most of that
| muscle memory has left in the last 30 years since I've
| been heavily using keyboards and writing less and less
| each year.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| My issue is that my entire method of long-form writing
| isn't linear. I'm too used to highlighting a
| paragraph/sentence and pasting it somewhere else.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| As a lefty, I was never going to have good penmanship
| without the ability to do it blind (your hand covers up
| what you are writing). I am so glad that penmanship
| became pointless to my career after sitting my university
| exams, and I had already learned that printing was the
| way to got anyways.
| DanBC wrote:
| It's hard work though.
|
| https://www.oldfonts.com/antiquepenman/wp-
| content/uploads/20...
|
| I can read this, but mostly I'm doing it through context
| and word recognition, not letter recognition. It's a
| struggle. This means there are some words that take a while
| to get.
| Izkata wrote:
| > and word recognition, not letter recognition
|
| That's how most people read printed text as well. You're
| not sounding out every word, are you?
| halpagg wrote:
| ncallaway wrote:
| > The US foundational documents (Declaration, Constitution)
| are written in cursive/script. Public education certainly has
| something to do with creating citizens capable of
| participating in US democracy and reading these docs is one
| significant part of that
|
| I've read most of the constitution on each 4th of July for a
| decade now. I've never read the cursive version.
|
| You don't need to learn to read cursive in order to learn the
| history, importance, or context of our founding documents. I
| promise that the script is NOT the most important thing about
| those documents, and someone who was unable to read cursive
| is still fully able to participate fully in our democracy.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Also, in the same way that old English is now strictly the
| domain of its academia, do we need to teach cursive to all?
| ghaff wrote:
| The reality is that even those of us who were taught cursive
| --Palmer script in my case--and can vaguely sort of still
| write some poor imitation of most of the letters, would
| generally struggle to read a lot of old documents. The
| lettering tends to be small (paper/vellum was expensive),
| many spellings are archaic--as is some of the language.
|
| The fact is that you can't teach everything and, as I recall
| my grade school, learning Palmer script actually occupied
| quite a bit of time at one point in school. (And it was
| always my lowest grade.) You can just as easily argue for
| required music classes, typing classes, cooking classes, or
| any number of classes appropriate for early elementary
| school.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _The reality is that even those of us who were taught
| cursive--Palmer script in my case--and can vaguely sort of
| still write some poor imitation of most of the letters,
| would generally struggle to read a lot of old documents._
|
| Yes, I can attest to that. But it rapidly becomes easier if
| I stick with it for more than a few minutes. If you can
| read it at all, with effort, it's something you can
| acclimatize to.
| jjeaff wrote:
| There will always be room and need for experts in every
| little topic. But of course, there is no need to teach every
| little topic in grade school.
| Isamu wrote:
| I just looked at them in the National Archives Museum and
| frankly they are hard to read because the ink is surprisingly
| faint, at least for the Declaration. That one I think looks
| like it was handled a lot in the olden days before they took
| pains to protect it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Cursive isn't sufficient to read it; you also have to be
| aware of the long S to know why we don't call the body
| "Congrefs," and we haven't taught long-s for over a century.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Nobody taught me long S, I figured it out for myself after
| seeing it repeated numerous times in a text.
| codeflo wrote:
| From the outside perspective of a younger democracy, the fact
| that the US political system treats this ancient legal
| document with the same reverence that one might pay to the
| biblical stone tablets, where it would be sacrilegious to
| even change the _font_ , let alone bring it up to speed with
| almost 250 years of progress in ethics, political practice
| and technology, seems like it might explain some problems.
| yonaguska wrote:
| It's slow to change by design. I don't know that ethics and
| political practice really has "progressed" all that much
| just 250 years.
| teolandon wrote:
| Yeah I can't think of any Civil Rights issues that have
| changed at all since 1787.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _can 't think of any Civil Rights issues that have
| changed at all since 1787_
|
| OP was discussing constitutions, structure of government.
| We haven't made that much fundamental progress on design
| of government compared with the eighteenth century.
|
| Are there housekeeping fixes the Constitutions needs?
| Yes. Do they reveal glaring, fundamental errors in the
| system's design? No.
| cnelsenmilt wrote:
| I truly can't think of a more fundamental element of a
| democratic system than who is enfranchised, and there
| have been two or three enormous changes in the answer to
| that since the founding.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| You are right. /s/ Here is a good example:
| <<Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned
| among the several States which may be included within
| this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which
| shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free
| Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of
| Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of
| all other Persons>>. If you choose to reply to this post,
| please carefully consider how Black and Brown Americans
| would feel knowing this was deeply embedded in this
| history of their country's founding document. (It is
| horrible!)
|
| This segment is widely called the "Three-fifths
| Compromise" in American English. It refers to the fact
| that enslaved people would be counted as 3/5 of a person
| for the purpose of determining gov't representation.
|
| From a modern perspective, this section is wholly
| demented and supports the institution of slavery. This
| support for the institution of slavery in the founding
| document of the United States is a terrible stain upon
| its reputation.
|
| The biggest issue I have with the US Constitution in a
| modern society: It is too hard to change. (When is the
| last time the US had a serious effort to pass a new
| amendment? 1970s / 1980s-ish: Women's equality, but still
| it failed!) Many successful, younger democracies have
| found ways to allow non-extremist changes to their
| constitution, to support "futurism" (my own term) -- the
| progression of society. Personally, I am a big supporter
| of regular (frequent), small changes to a country's
| constitution to support, and facilitate, social change.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Personally, I am a big supporter of regular
| (frequent), small changes to a country 's constitution to
| support, and facilitate, social change_
|
| Sure. But that's a preference, nothing more. We don't
| have strong evidence one way or another, nor over-arching
| theories supporting or rejecting seldom-messed-with
| versus frequently-adapted constitutions.
|
| That's my point: we haven't made progress beyond
| preferences. As such, denigrating the Constitution on
| account of its age falls flat. Modern concepts of
| governance were largely already in place at its drafting.
| thechao wrote:
| There are four major _structural_ issues I can think up
| off the top of my head (this is unfair -- we 're
| discussing my wife's job):
|
| 1. Modern gerrymandering is probably the Achilles heel
| that'll bring the US to its knees.
|
| 2. Judicial capture is the standard playbook for
| autocratic take-overs of democracies -- there needs to be
| a reaffirmation process & it needs to be a "yes - no >
| 1/2*senators".
|
| 3. The electoral college is particularly vulnerable to
| bad actors at the state level, and the opportunity cost
| to capture the college is higher than the capture cost.
|
| 4. The Senate, itself, was a known-to-be-bad compromise
| to build a confederation, rather than a formal union into
| a single, sovereign State.
|
| I'm not entirely convinced of the last one: I kinda like
| the idea if 50 separate competing democracies all trying
| to come up with great ways to be a state, with a fairly
| low barrier-to-migrate.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| You're still describing the same fundamental system, with
| tweaks. Fundamental changes would be things like a
| unicameral legislature, Supreme Court without judicial
| review or President who isn't commander in chief.
| revscat wrote:
| I would argue too successfully. There are fundamental
| changes that could and should be made to the
| Constitution, especially in regards to climate change and
| information warfare.
| ben_w wrote:
| Climate change is too big for one nation, even a big
| nation, I'd say the de jure solution there is more a job
| for international treaties (while the de facto solution
| is making tech such that the right action is
| automatically desirable).
| revscat wrote:
| I think the idea of codifying the repair of the
| environment as a foundational legal concept to be an
| interesting one, and one arguably necessary to
| successfully combat the problem. Treaties tend to codify
| shared values between states; since almost all modern
| nations are capitalist, treaties tend to focus on trade
| and capital. Climate thus gets second tier status, which
| is the opposite of the ideal.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Well, amendments used to be more common. We just haven't
| passed a non-academic one since 1971.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| I am confused by this post.
|
| From here: http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/all_amendme
| nts_usconst.ht...
|
| I see the final amendment: << AMENDMENT XXVII -
| Originally proposed Sept. 25, 1789. Ratified May 7, 1992.
|
| No law, varying the compensation for the services of the
| Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an
| election of representatives shall have intervened. >>
|
| First: Holy Sh-t: This is a long time between propsal and
| passage / acceptance!
|
| Second: Do I misunderstand? Do you consider this
| amendment academic? It _sounds_ like reps cannot increase
| compenstation during their term.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| The reason I call it academic is this:
|
| > The proposed congressional pay amendment was largely
| forgotten until 1982, when Gregory Watson, a 19-year-old
| sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a
| paper for a government class in which he claimed that the
| amendment could still be ratified. He later launched a
| nationwide campaign to complete its ratification.[2][3]
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-
| seventh_Amendment_to_...
| Izkata wrote:
| > where it would be sacrilegious to even change the _font_
|
| This is a misunderstanding of the actual concern there. The
| way I've heard it explained is, once it's all online in
| printed form and people can't read the original physical
| document, the online versions can be tweaked by the
| platforms and no one would be able to read the original to
| prove it's been changed.
|
| This is an extremely common trope in sci-fi, where only a
| small group of people understand the language of the
| "sacred texts" and have been claiming it says something
| different than it actually does and no one is able to
| challenge it.
|
| I think both versions stem from real-world religions where
| the translations have to make adjustments because the
| source language has concepts that don't quite fit in the
| new language.
| samatman wrote:
| Most Americans would greet "we must teach cursive so
| children can read the manuscript form of our founding
| documents" with the same bafflement you do. Even in the
| civic religion surrounding all that paper, this is not a
| normal expression of reverence.
| qsort wrote:
| As another non-American, I'm curious as to why you would
| say that.
|
| The US constitution was objectively very far ahead of its
| time, and it still is a far better attempt at a
| constitutional order than most.
|
| Very rarely can a country's problems be blamed on its
| constitution. The UK doesn't even have one and it's still
| one of the world's most advanced democracies.
| FerociousTimes wrote:
| The USC so far proved to be resilient, adaptable and
| durable but timeless?
|
| It remains to be seen but I have my doubts esp. in a
| future socio-political context where post-modernism and
| cyberpunk ideals reign supreme.
| azinman2 wrote:
| You have the Magna Carta
| pmyteh wrote:
| Kinda. Bits of it are still in force[0], despite us not
| having a definitive text, but much of it was written to
| deal with contemporary political problems and was
| repudiated fairly quickly. It's more important as the
| start of a (semi-mythical) tradition of political liberty
| then as an ongoing source of constitutional law.
|
| Even more excitingly, some of the documents we consider
| constitutional aren't even statutes. My favourite is a
| pseudonymous letter to _The Times_ sent in 1950, which
| authoritatively established a constitutional convention
| for when the monarch can refuse his Prime Minister a
| dissolution of Parliament[1]. (The writer, 'Senex', was
| the King's private secretary Sir Alan Lascelles).
|
| [0]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1cc1929/25/9
|
| [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascelles_Principles
| ben_w wrote:
| As a totemic icon sure, but it has mostly been repealed,
| and it was more of a peace treaty between the king and
| his barons.
|
| Also:
|
| > Neither side stood behind their commitments, and the
| charter was annulled by Pope Innocent III, leading to the
| First Barons' War.
| lovich wrote:
| Well if you go by the sentiments of some of the authors
| of the document, they'd likely be appalled we're still
| using it. Jefferson wanted it to expire every 19? 20?
| years so that the country wasn't governed by the
| sentiments of long dead men
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The "founding fathers" had a diverse set of beliefs, you
| can pick and choose to support a variety of diametrically
| opposed points of view.
|
| Consider for instance John Jay, who thought that
| Christian rulers guided by Christian principles were
| necessary to maintain order and freedom, and thought the
| Republic would be doomed if it ever forgot this. A far
| cry from Jefferson's deism.
| lovich wrote:
| They did have varied beliefs especially between New
| England and the southern colonies, but I am referencing
| Jefferson here as he was one of the main authors of the
| constitution and not just a signatory
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Very rarely can a country's problems be blamed on its
| constitution.
|
| Actually, the usually trace back to the constitution, one
| way or another.
|
| > The UK doesn't even have one
|
| Yes, it does. [0]
|
| It's not an explicitly separate written document, but
| that's not required of a constitution. The idea of a
| constitution predates the spread of the practice of
| having them as distinct documents.
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_U
| nited_K...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _that 's not required of a constitution_
|
| It's not, but it helps.
| deep_merge wrote:
| Right, sure, that's all true. Now consider that many people
| can't read the document.
|
| I guess your analogy still checks out. Neither Old nor New
| Testament are written in English. And thus English-speakers
| rely on translations.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| To be fair, it has been amended 27 times.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| The world is full of younger democracies and very few
| contiguous older ones. Depending on how you want to measure
| it, the United States is the worlds oldest democracy based
| on an original constitution or set of rules. The longevity
| of the US constitutional democracy is in most part because
| of what an incredible job the original writers of the
| constitution did in drafting it as well as the massive
| effort and agreement required to change it. The same large
| scale leadership problems that exist today existed then.
| The key to a long term democracy is slow change, not fast.
|
| Many of the world's young democracies exist because of
| America; notably those formed out of the collapse of USSR.
| All of Europe's democracies exist because of the US role in
| WW2. Same as the current governments in Japan and Taiwan.
| Don't get me wrong I am not arguing America is perfect,
| there have been plenty of egregiously harmful moves,
| including what's currently happening in Iran, Afghanistan
| and Iraq. Although Iraq is technically a young democracy
| now because of the United States.
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| > All of Europe's democracies exist because of the US
| role in WW2.
|
| Can you explain what you mean by this? Continental
| Europe's relationship with republicanism and democracy
| dates back to the same roots as what spawned the ideas
| that led to the US's formation, and that is the European
| Enlightenment.
| thechao wrote:
| This is the "if you were occupied by a foreign aggressor,
| it breaks the contiguity of government"-argument.
| Obviously, there is some truth to this argument; but,
| honestly, we'd need to address each constituent state in
| Europe to determine its factuality.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Yes, you are right, my point is more straight forward in
| that without the usa stepping in to win ww2, all of
| Europe would be part of the Reich.
| jleyank wrote:
| Stepping in? Blame Japan for us entry and all of the
| downstream effects. Hitler was being careful to not give
| fdr an opening.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Doesn't really matter why it happened only that it did
| and because of that Europe and Japan are democracies.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > From the outside perspective of a younger democracy, the
| fact that the US political system treats this ancient legal
| document with the same reverence that one might pay to the
| biblical stone tablets
|
| As a whole, it doesn't, both the major parties have
| _elements_ of it that they are strongly attached to, but
| each have also made amendments to it, and hacks around
| parts of it, key parts of their agenda.
|
| > where it would be sacrilegious to even change the font,
| let alone bring it up to speed with almost 250 years of
| progress in ethics, political practice and technology,
|
| Um, it's been updated quite a lot since initially adopted
| (and I'm not talking about the font or other presentational
| issues.)
| chrisco255 wrote:
| There's a reason why the U.S. is the oldest democracy.
| Strong culture. It's also the legal foundation for the
| establishment of the country and all laws passed hence are
| a derivative of it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > There's a reason why the U.S. is the oldest democracy.
|
| Under most viable definitions of democracy, the US isn't
| the oldest. If you restrict to non-aristocratic (i.e.,
| not limiting franchise by ancestry) representative
| democracy, Finland and New Zealand, among others,
| achieved that first; if you accept participatory
| democracies, the Iroquois Confederacy has it beat by even
| more; you need to tightly define "democracy" around
| exactly the US model at a particular time to make it
| first.
|
| > It's also the legal foundation for the establishment of
| the country
|
| No, it's not, the country was established before the
| Constitution.
| _dain_ wrote:
| >Finland
|
| didn't exist until 1918
|
| >New Zealand
|
| didn't exist until a century after the US was founded
|
| >Iroquois Confederacy
|
| extinguished utterly, nowadays an object of idle
| revisionism
| patrick451 wrote:
| What are you talking about? Do you think we still own
| slaves and prohibit women from voting in the United States?
| Updates to the constitution are exactly why neither of
| those things is true. These updates are called amendments,
| and the constitution itself outlines that process. In 250
| years, we've passed 27 amendments. The most recent
| amendment passed in 1992. Pretending even the most strict
| constructionist treats the constitution as an immutable
| document is just ignorant.
| Jaruzel wrote:
| At which point is it better to just write a new
| constitution? 100 amendments? 500? Or never?
| kemayo wrote:
| My favorite part of that example is that, of course, you'd need
| _five_ quarters to get to the next unit.
| renewiltord wrote:
| What is with all these things about "never learned to do X". When
| the time comes to learn it you can do it in days, maybe hours if
| necessary. In minutes you can read in "interpreted mode" and in
| days in "compiled high-performance mode".
|
| Half the things people say aren't taught to kids are trivial to
| learn as an adult so who cares.
|
| "They don't teach you how to do taxes", "they don't teach you to
| read cursive". It takes maybe an hour max to learn the skills.
| amelius wrote:
| I am more concerned about gen z never being taught to type with
| 10 fingers.
| green-salt wrote:
| The ones that care do.
| gsich wrote:
| Using all 10 fingers is a pain.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I was doing something in my college class this week and I
| wanted my students to follow along typing what I typed. I was
| amazed at how slowly they typed.
|
| I also show them ctrl+F and they think I'm a magician...
| Ekaros wrote:
| Don't worry. They will just use touch screens soon enough.
| arvinsim wrote:
| Or will just rely on speech to text tools
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Or just use voice input. Writing as a whole may decline as
| technology advances.
| esmon wrote:
| There's just one problem: privacy. I don't have that when
| using voice input. Writing won't decline in favor of voice
| input until we find a way to make it private. Tangential to
| this, smart glasses won't replace smartphones either for
| the same reason.
| wilsonnb3 wrote:
| I think in the later books in the Enders Game series
| (Speaker for the Dead, in particular), Ender speaks to
| his AI companion via subvocalization.
|
| So perhaps a little sensor on or in our neck will allow
| us to speak to computers silently.
| viraptor wrote:
| Make that privacy and accents. There are too many regions
| where choice recognition just won't work without
| essentially building new voice models. And that's before
| we get to people using their second/third/... language.
| smitop wrote:
| Viable on-device speech recognition is becoming reality.
| Apple is apparently processing some speech recognition
| on-device now: https://www.engadget.com/ios-15-siri-on-
| device-app-privacy-1...
|
| So far there aren't any particularly good open source
| voice recognition models though, in large part due to a
| lack of training data. You can (and should!) contribute
| to Common Voice to help change that:
| https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en
| autoexec wrote:
| may not work so well if you want to write something in an
| area where other people are talking or with a TV/podcast in
| the background.
| thiht wrote:
| My girlfriend has always typed with 2 fingers and still types
| faster than me.
|
| Touch typing is not necessary to type fast.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It is for most people though. I certainly have seen some self
| taught people type quickly but it's not the norm. I learned
| typing and do 80-100 words per minute. I have seen very few
| hunt and peck typists that can reach that rate. It's also not
| nearly as efficient. I think it should be taught in high
| school at least for a semester. It's only getting more useful
| rather than less.
| temple_os wrote:
| If that's the case you can't be typing very fast in the first
| place. Two finger typing caps out at around 60-70wpm
| bluGill wrote:
| That is as fast as most people think though so it is good
| enough. I'm still glad I learned to use all 10 fingers, but
| that is to spread the strain out. Typing speed is not the
| limit for most people
| jonathanyc wrote:
| The average speaking rate is >100 WPM. I really doubt
| most people think at only 60 WPM. Try transcribing a
| normal person having a normal conversation and you'll
| quickly see how difficult it is even as a fast typer.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| How many of those spoken words are words that are
| (rightfully) excised when transcribed into a written
| document? There's a lot of filler in speech.
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _Try transcribing a normal person having a normal
| conversation and you 'll quickly see how difficult it is
| even as a fast typer._
|
| I type at around 120 wpm and I can't keep up with my
| speaking speed. When I transcribe my own recording I have
| to constantly pause the recording to catch up. Speaking
| is "bursty", where you say a lot of things very quickly
| and then slow down again.
| dekken_ wrote:
| No one taught me to type, and I can touch type.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| There is also a fair number of people who can't read an analog
| clock...
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| talk about a useless skill these days. That said I have 4
| analog clocks on the wall as decorations for Austin, NYC,
| London, and Tokyo like the old newsrooms. Yes they are all
| set to the atomic standard via RF
| samgranieri wrote:
| I'm the father to a boy turning two in December, and I'm going to
| teach him how to read and write cursive myself in a few years. I
| think it's a big mistake that reading and writing cursive was
| removed from common core standards.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They should replace the practice with memorization of typing.
| Input rate on a mobile device is far worse than a keyboard, and I
| feel bad when I see that the next generation coming from homes
| with only mobile devices have such a slow typing/entry rate.
| lofatdairy wrote:
| Myself and a lot of my friends grew up with typing classes in
| middle school (in addition to growing up with cursive classes
| but in different years). It does seem the make a pretty big
| difference - even my mediocre 80 wpm is much faster than a lot
| of people of I meet.
| maxboone wrote:
| I like that I can write cursive, but I sure as hell didn't learn
| it through elementary school cursive.
|
| Glad that is phasing out, even though I'd hate cursive writing to
| die.
| stakkur wrote:
| This is not true, of course. In the US, millions of students
| still learn and write cursive. Yes, even in public schools. Is it
| uniformly taught/practiced? No, but it's far from 'dying out'. My
| wife is a 20+ year public school teacher, and daughter attends a
| Waldorf school.
|
| And all criticisms I read of cursive seem to utterly ignore the
| proven cognitive and other benefits of handwriting, instead
| focusing on 'efficiency' and 'speed' or--even sillier--comparing
| it to 'keyboarding' as if handwriting's only value is its
| utility.
| avnigo wrote:
| > We will become reliant on a small group of trained translators
| and experts to report what history--including the documents and
| papers of our own families--was about.
|
| I think we know this won't be true based on AI getting better and
| better at handwriting recognition, despite the downsides of
| offloading this work to machines (e.g. if trained in closed
| system, could result in censorship and potentially limited
| validation at the endpoint).
|
| However, I do see a lot of upsides to using computation for such
| efforts: increases the scale of processed documents by orders of
| magnitude and enables indexing, search, categorization, and
| further analyses which would otherwise take many man-months for
| trained translator and experts to complete.
| tommica wrote:
| Personally I enjoy writing in cursive, and am happy I was taught
| it as a kid
| dfranke wrote:
| I retrained myself on Barchowski last year. Barchowski and its
| close cousin Getty-Dubay are italic rather than looped, and a lot
| easier to read for someone who only ever learned print.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| And just as many boomers never learned to touch type. Different
| skills for different times.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Cursive is a practical (this seems to be the point most heavily
| debated) art form. At a point in every day use. I'm awful at it,
| but glad I learned it. My block letter writing is also far less
| legible than my cursive. I've just stopped using it because I'm a
| keyboard cowboy and have been for 20 years. Like all art forms,
| we'll be lesser for its demise.
| As_You_Wish wrote:
| I've typed almost all of my life. And, of course, you start out
| with block letters in 1st grade.
|
| I thought it was so cool to learn cursive. It was like the first
| step towards belonging to the adult world.
|
| And like most people, I do most of my communications on the
| computer.
|
| But, for me, there's nothing like the tactile feelings of writing
| in cursive on a piece of paper. The soothing flow of the pen, the
| feel of the roughness or smoothness of the paper on the side of
| my hand, the smell of the ink and of the paper, the impression or
| indentation on the paper.
|
| I just adore writing in the cursive script on paper.
| UkiahSmith wrote:
| You should try writing with a fountain pen, if you already
| haven't. It's a different experience than popular ball pens.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Not any old fountain pen, though. A cheap one snags on the
| paper, and isn't at all pleasant. A good pen (on good paper -
| like, a nice laid) is certainly a pleasure. But who writes
| personal letters with a pen, these days?
|
| I've never tried to write with a quill. That must have been a
| real pain in the wazoo - constantly whipping out a penknife
| to trim the nib.
| As_You_Wish wrote:
| Oh, I have. I love fountain pens and writing with them a lot.
| But those things get ink everywhere, I've never had it when
| they didn't, so I haven't had one in a while. But I love
| fountain pens, I've had many of them.
| snvzz wrote:
| Absolutely. This is how I survived handwriting.
|
| Pens would just physically hurt to type with. Fountain pens,
| no force required, they just glide on the paper.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Isn't this sort of evolution kinda normal? Even though I learned
| modern German "Schreibschift" in school at the beginning of the
| 80's, I hardly ever used it outside of school.
|
| And this 'modern' script is completey different from what my
| grandparent learned in the 1920's and 30's, which I cannot read
| either without a lot of effort and looking up character shapes.
|
| (googling around a bit, apparently the evolution of script was
| mostly dictated by the writing tool - bird vs steel quill etc...,
| so it makes sense that the transition to typing causes another
| evolutionary step).
| asddubs wrote:
| What your grandparents learned would probably have been
| sutterlin
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
| jeltz wrote:
| Yes, it is very normal. Scripts have changed many times
| throughout history.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| Depends on countries I guess. In France, the vast majority of
| the handwritten letters I have received or seen were written in
| cursive.
|
| At some point a handwritten "letter of motivation" was also a
| _de facto_ requirement for job applications, and not writing it
| in cursive would not even come to the mind of anyone -
| precisely because it variability gave it a more "personal"
| vibe, a feeling that was exploited by the bogus graphology
| pseudo-science [1] at that time.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Depends on countries I guess. In France, the vast majority
| of the handwritten letters I have received or seen were
| written in cursive.
|
| Up to this day kids at school in France are still taught
| cursive. Source: my daughter was for five years straight in a
| British College and didn't learn cursive, but she just moved
| to a french school and now has to write cursive (and AFAICT
| the school, although private, is following the official
| french cursus).
|
| No biggie though: she adapted in a few days. As to me I don't
| write in cursive anymore (although I did learn to write using
| cursive) but I've got zero problem reading cursive.
| bradmcgo wrote:
| Zoomer here. I attended a Catholic school and can assure you that
| in second grade, I did indeed learn how to read and write in
| cursive.
|
| Not sure if this is limited to the school that I attended.
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| That's the same for me. I had to use it for every (non-math)
| assignment from 3rd through 6th grades.
|
| I found it much slower and more cumbersome, and I have not used
| it since.
| fedeb95 wrote:
| Everyone in the comments seem to hate cursive but I actually like
| it. Not reading other people cursive, but nothing matches the
| fastness of cursive for writing down rapid thoughts. Sometimes I
| need to write something very fast and scribbled, even if it won't
| be readable by anyone one else.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > _" Handwriting instruction had already been declining as
| laptops and tablets and lessons in "keyboarding" assumed an ever
| more prominent place in the classroom"_
|
| While I think you can debate the particular merits of cursive the
| underlying fine motor skills that are developed are important in
| many situations. Wholesale replacing handwriting with keyboards
| or even voice is in my opinion a bad idea.
|
| I've been teaching people how to solder at a local makerspace and
| there's a big increase of "two left hands" young people from my
| experience. Younger generations just don't do a lot of mechanical
| work any more. Same with the decline in swimming. Tech should
| augment, not replace or even degrade physical abilities.
| dageshi wrote:
| Unless you keep regularly using them those fine motor skills
| will atrophy from lack of use.
|
| And barely anybody will use it outside of the real world. All
| this does is make kids exasperated with their education because
| they're being taught something they know is outdated and has no
| real utility in the real world.
| [deleted]
| XorNot wrote:
| So how's your blacksmithing these days? After all, if you can't
| repair a plow then what will you do?
| jeltz wrote:
| Or your flint knapping?
|
| Edit: I think there are better and more relevant ways to
| teach kids fine motor skills than teaching them an outdated
| and useless script. What about just teaching them block
| letters, calligraphy or drawing?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I'm not entirely sure how the sarcasm is warranted given 1. I
| made clear that rather than the particular task, what is
| important is the development of skills, secondly the ability
| to perform basic repairs is also a rapidly declining but
| important skill, and thirdly blacksmithing is actually still
| a career.
| andrew_ wrote:
| it wasn't warranted IMO. Topics on HN which incite feelings
| of insecurity, or which drag up strong negative emotions,
| tend to result in a lot of brash negative replies and a lot
| of sarcasm anymore.
|
| This topic seems to be striking a nerve with a lot of folks
| who struggled with the teaching/skill at an early age.
| [deleted]
| random_upvoter wrote:
| IMO children should be taught cursive writing both as a
| meditative exercise and as a teaching of motor skills and the
| lack to do so is a near criminal impediment of their development.
| I'm in my fifties and worked in a optics research lab and it was
| shocking to me how PhD students in their twenties, brilliant
| young men and women, lack the most basic tactile skills to handle
| precision instruments. Many of them would be better off working
| as elephant handlers.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Was early into computers and we used printed copy back then -
| your 'listing'. I'd letter changes on the code then use an editor
| then run then get another listing.
|
| So I was going to write a letter to my brother who'd moved out to
| Silicon Valley, and I found I could no longer write in cursive.
| Several years of just lettering had beat it out of me. Anyway I
| could hand-letter faster than cursive anyway.
|
| I let cursive go 40 years ago, and never looked back.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| I was born at the end of the 80s and there was a funny thing
| called "simplified cursive" in Germany. I struggled for the rest
| of my life with that and already half gave up on cursive while
| still attending the German equivalent of high school.
|
| Maybe that was partly caused by me prematurely being put into
| school (1-2 years early), but some letters still feel like a
| motoric and decisional exercise because I couldn't quite decide
| how to write e.g. lower-case "l", where the "simplified" and the
| non-simplified version differed.
|
| My solution at high school was already to discard cursive
| completely.
|
| At the time, this ceased to be a problem as grades progressed.
| EGreg wrote:
| I made this site for Free Talk Live, who discussed this topic in
| much more depth several days ago:
| https://ftl.fm/clip/FTL/Qsvrgnovt
| ajmurmann wrote:
| This has happened time and time again, but maybe it hasn't
| happened to speakers of the English language in a longer time and
| this is remarkable. My German grandma wrote in a style called
| Sutterlin that neither I nor my parents could read but she
| learned in school. I'm able to read blackletter/gothic script
| which must gen x people cannot read just because my parents had a
| lot of old books and I wanted to read an old print of Thus Spoke
| Zarathustra. There already was little practical value in being
| able to read that back then and I'd rather see young people put
| that every towards a foreign language, literature, philosophy or
| math or computer skills. The only time I notes read blackletter
| is to translate ancestry documents for my wife.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| shmde wrote:
| I love cursive, I have written in cursive all my life. Cursive
| gives a special sort of personality to a person. Its unique to
| everyone. It just feels personal. Have you ever received a letter
| in your life ? Lets say its a personal letter maybe a love
| letter. What would you prefer. A mechanically block printed piece
| of paper which was "typed" by someone or a love letter written
| with ink and a pen and some cursive ?
| VintageCool wrote:
| Cursive and block letters are not your only options. There is a
| wide range of legible handwriting between the two.
|
| For example, "Italic" handwriting has (imho) the advantages of
| cursive without the excessive strictures.
|
| https://www.italic-handwriting.org/exemplars/display/welling...
| mort96 wrote:
| What makes non-cursive handwriting less personal than cursive
| handwriting?
| NavinF wrote:
| If those were my only options, I'd prefer the printed letter,
| but realistically a text, voice call, or better yet an IRL
| conversion is far more common.
| Balgair wrote:
| I love cursive.
|
| For me, it's faster to write and faster to read.
|
| The idea of drawing the words instead of printing them, putting a
| smidge of creativity into my writing, makes the whole exercise of
| writing and taking notes easier and more enjoyable. I put my
| emotions into the drawings/words and can tell my emotional state
| years later. The larger curves, the more joyous I was. The
| sharper the lines, the more i hated that particular meeting. The
| 'faster' the drawings the more hurried the meeting. ETC. It adds
| an extra layer or two of information to my writing that I just
| don't seem to be able to manifest in print, and at no cost to me
| in terms of time.
| obblekk wrote:
| This is a good use case for deep learning. The entire human
| knowledge of converting cursive to normal could be learned into a
| (probably) compact model and then the utility/culture of older
| writings would be accessible forever.
|
| Like a modern Rosetta Stone.
| janmarsal wrote:
| I don't think anyone can read cursive comfortably. Especially if
| it's written by others.
| Normille wrote:
| Previous discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32873924
| sirsinsalot wrote:
| All these "Gen Z don't do X" type articles are unuseful,
| redunctionist and usually wrong.
|
| I know quite a few Gen Z and younger people, and in my small
| sample, they're amazing groups of people filled with empathy,
| critical thinking, patience, emotional intelligence and more.
|
| That's my small sample, and these articles have equally skewed
| views and samples. Their views on the matter are as useless as my
| own.
|
| Generalising a generation is a bad idea.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Good riddance. I was born in 1991 and I learned (and hated)
| cursive in elementary school with my teachers nagging us that
| "every paper you write going forward will be in cursive". Even
| back then I thought that was bullshit but I was big into/bullish
| on computers, even in elementary school. Sure enough I don't
| think we used it in middle school at all other than to sign our
| names.
|
| I still distinctly remember taking the ACT, opening the booklet
| and it saying "Please write the following paragraph below in
| cursive" (it was a bit about how you hadn't cheated or received
| outside help, 2-3 sentences) and my blood running cold as I
| hadn't written cursive in almost 8 years. I meekly raised my hand
| after a minute or two and said "Um, I don't think I remember all
| the letters to write this in cursive" which was followed by a LOT
| of people exhaling/sighing, thankful that someone else spoke up.
| The teacher/proctor was a little confused for a minute and asked
| the room who else wasn't sure they could and pretty much every
| hand went up. After a minute she just said "just print it, it
| will be fine".
|
| To this day (some ~14 years later) the only thing I write in
| cursive is my name and even that's a stretch, I get the first
| letter, a distinct letter in the middle/end and call it a day.
| stetrain wrote:
| Elementary school: You need to learn cursive, every paper in
| college will need to be in cursive with good handwriting!
|
| Middle school: Hey computers are cool let's learn how to use
| them
|
| High school: Assignments should all be typed and printed at
| home before class.
|
| College Freshman: Times New Roman. 12pt. Double Spaced. Any
| papers not following these rules will be marked as 0. Printing
| costs 25c/page in the library.
|
| College Senior: Times New Roman. 12pt. Double Spaced. Microsoft
| word file format. All papers must be submitted to the online
| portal and plagiarism checker by 11:59pm on the due date.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Does that include math and physics assignments? Writing math
| excercises on a computer is the epitome of frustration, one
| of the most tedious tasks I ever had to (occasionally) do.
| Writing them out by hand is so much easier, I would have
| probably not done half the assigned work in college if I had
| had to type it.
| stetrain wrote:
| I was thinking specifically of written papers. Math
| homework and exams were usually hand written and I usually
| printed so people could actually read it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Out of curiosity, when you say "print it" here, does that mean
| "write it by hand but using print-like letters", or literally
| "print it using a computerized printer/type-writer"?
| joshstrange wrote:
| Write it by hand. In this case the test was on paper so we
| just wrote the paragraph using normal letters on the lines
| provided.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| I had a somewhat "unique" perspective on learning cursive (and
| English in general) through my education in the 2000s as I went
| through a few different school systems.
|
| Starting out in the American system I hadn't been taught
| cursive at all, writing in print was normal. Right before I
| left we had just started typing lessons. They had convinced my
| parents that trying to force me to write with my right hand
| despite being a lefty was wrong.
|
| Then I spent two years in an Indian private school, where they
| were rather nasty about how not knowing cursive reflected
| poorly on me (a similar nastiness came in solving some math
| problems in a different way, imagine humiliating an 8-9 year
| old in front of the class on their first day about how stupid
| they are for solving a set of math problems differently despite
| the solutions still being correct). I had to just sort of pick
| up cursive on my own, so while it was mostly okay there were
| some letters I wrote differently from "proper" cursive. On top
| of that they required gel pens rather than ball point, leading
| to my writing being extra prone to smears (not to mention
| always having ink stained backs of fingers). Typing assignments
| wasn't really a thing and computer classes were generally
| meaningless things about how to make wordart.
|
| Then I moved to another country, where an Indian public school
| was the only option available. At this point I was old enough
| that they didn't push too hard on writing in cursive in general
| schoolwork, although there were still things like handwriting
| contests where they claimed that I would've won if I hadn't
| written my capital H's differently. Not too big of a deal but
| that still seemed to emphasize cursive writing as some measure
| of success. Notably even at this point I still got treated
| poorly by some teachers for things like my American accent
| (which included complaints to my parents, although they ignored
| the complaints because I was always expected to go back to
| America for university).
|
| Finally I moved again and this time ended up in a school based
| on the Ontario education system (although not located in
| Canada). At this point no one really cared how I wrote or
| spoke. Despite my accent making me sound like a native speaker
| I turned out to need some catch-up English classes but on the
| other hand I had managed to skip grades for math, physics and
| biology.
|
| Nowadays I rarely ever write by hand and when I do it's usually
| still digital like on a tablet. I have a couple of ink pens
| still around but I use them so rarely that I almost always have
| to search for them when needed.
| tdeck wrote:
| I was born in the same year and had the same experience on the
| SAT. When we got to that part, everyone was audibly confused.
|
| In my elementary school we were taught non-slanted cursive,
| which was billed as more readable but also slower to write.
| Learning it involved copying text and having it judged, there
| was hardly any practice in reading cursive writing, maybe 5
| birthday cards worth.
|
| Occasionally there would be an old-fashioned teacher who would
| write on the board in cursive, and I'd just listen to them and
| mostly go by what they said out loud.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I'm old enough I learned cursive in school. Some years back I
| made a deliberate decision to abandon it, it had atrophied
| enough from a lack of use that I had a hard time reading my own
| writing. Realistically, all I write these days are forms (which
| shouldn't be in cursive anyway) and the occasional short note.
| Anything else, I'm a lot faster with a keyboard than with a pen
| and I can pretty much do the keyboard without thought. (It's
| strange that as I've aged it's become not quite so utterly
| automatic as it used to be.) It's very convenient to be able to
| think about what I'm writing rather than the mechanics of
| actually doing so.
| snarkerson wrote:
| But writing is learning. Brains use sensory feedback to
| remember and recall. Cursive is just a method of faster
| writing. The physical act of forming the letters leads to
| better recall of what is being written. Reorganizing and
| rewriting does even better.
|
| Learning to write is as important as learning to read and
| learning to do math. There are good ways and bad ways to learn.
|
| It's too bad this skill is being neglected and people turn to
| measurably worse methods of learning.
| ip26 wrote:
| Learning cursive isn't learning to write. As a kid I spent
| copious amounts of time learning to fit the sweep of my
| cursive to a rigid meter, and form them just so... it was
| closer to learning to draw than to write (which I could
| already do)
| ris58h wrote:
| Do you have any proof of that?
| irrational wrote:
| I'm 50 years old. I haven't used cursive since third grade or
| so. I've had no problems learning while sticking to print
| letters.
| irrational wrote:
| I attended school in the 70s and 80s. We spent a ton of time on
| cursive. At one point I could write in cursive, but I preferred
| print letters. At this point, I haven't written cursive in 35
| or so years. I could probably relearn it fairly quickly, but
| why would I do that?
|
| As for signatures, my kids use print letters for their
| signatures since they have no clue how to even write their
| names in cursive.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >To this day (some ~14 years later) the only thing I write in
| cursive is my name and even that's a stretch, I get the first
| letter, a distinct letter in the middle/end and call it a day.
|
| It used to be that banks would compare signatures to
| approve/decline checks. What are checks you ask? Exactly!
|
| It used to be that tellers would compare signatures from the
| back of your card to the signature you just scribbled on the
| receipt to ensure it was really your card. (when's the last
| time if ever someone asked to see the signature on your card or
| compared the card info to your gov't issued ID?) Now, the PoS
| units have digital pads for signatures. Has anyone anywhere
| ever had their digital signature look anything like their
| written signature? I've never signed a digital pad the same way
| twice.
| delecti wrote:
| Washington state compares signatures on ballots, and they
| contact you to verify the ballot if it isn't close enough to
| what they've got.
|
| NB: WA has universal mail-in voting, so they can easily
| compare your on-file signature with your signed ballot
| envelope
| irrational wrote:
| Same with Oregon. I've wondered about this since my
| signature is the first letter of my name followed by a
| random assortment of peaks and valleys.
| Izkata wrote:
| Illinois too, on the envelope.
| Zak wrote:
| > _when 's the last time if ever someone asked to see the
| signature on your card_
|
| Recently. One grocery store in Germany usually does that. It
| may be in part that signing receipts is not common there (vs.
| entering a PIN) and they're confused by my American debit
| card.
|
| I'm not sure my scribble on the receipt closely matches the
| one on my card, but I've never had them object.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Yeah, I can't remember ever seeing a teller compare my
| signature but I think I only have written like <10 checks in
| my life. And I haven't signed the back of any card in at
| least a decade if not two.
|
| When depositing checks I receive (rare) I just assume the
| signature they extract from my cell phone picture is saved
| but not used/compared. If they did compare my checks would
| get rejected, my signature is inconsistent.
|
| As for POS systems, I just draw a line. In fact I find it
| hard to believe it's worth much given how most people just
| scribble. I know in credit card disputes they will ask for it
| but the few disputes I've had (and been ruled against even
| though I'm positive the person paid for and used the
| services/product) didn't feel like "if only I had a signature
| I'd be golden", I didn't even build in signature capturing to
| the in-person payment software, it wasn't worth it. For 0.01%
| being lost to fraudulent chargebacks, it would be a huge
| waste to spent the time/effort/storage to implement
| signatures.
| dylan604 wrote:
| We've almost come full circle to "place your mark here"
| smolder wrote:
| Personally I usually draw a smiley face or boobs or something
| on the digital signature inputs. The cashiers look on and
| laugh because they know the signature is a meaningless
| anachronism, too.
| Lev1a wrote:
| > It used to be that tellers would compare signatures from
| the back of your card to the signature you just scribbled on
| the receipt to ensure it was really your card.
|
| I'm in my mid-20s.
|
| From the time I signed my first debit card and ID card at
| around 16 to my driver's license at around 18 my signature
| already significantly changed, not to mention that I rarely
| if ever have to physically sign something on paper forms and
| the like so it's not uncommon for there to be months or even
| more than a year between signatures. How am I expected to
| replicate my "signature" almost exactly?
| novaRom wrote:
| I personally cannot make the same signature twice, it seems
| it is always different, not just different slopes, but
| directions and even number of spirals and crosses.
| thatfrenchguy wrote:
| > It used to be that banks would compare signatures to
| approve/decline checks. What are checks you ask? Exactly!
|
| I don't know, in the US checks are so common. Wanna pay a
| contractor? Checks. Have a HOA account? Checks. Pay the
| landlord? Checks.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| If I write my signature twice in a row it's barely similar.
|
| The last place that actually cared was a bank in India
| (surprise surprise) but the clerk helpfully turned her
| monitor around to show me how I had written it previously.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yep, exact same situation here. Was visiting once and
| unsurprisingly my signature at 17 didn't match my signature
| at 10. After trying twice they just showed me what my
| signature had been and told me to copy it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's a good thing that at 10 or 17 you're not able to
| enter a legally binding contract where signatures would
| be a thing.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| For sure, although the same happened with my Dad. In his
| case it was more surprising because his job was such that
| he had to sign paperwork several times every day and so
| he was very insistent on maintaining a fixed signature,
| yet his signature too had drifted over the years.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| That's weird considering that I'm over a decade older than you
| and was allowed to turn in typed papers (this rule predated
| microcomputers; it was for typewriters).
|
| [Edit]
|
| Just remembered that it was the other way around for my dad.
| Only cursive was taught in primary school, but in college, he
| had a drafting course where he learned print, so his print is
| incredibly legible.
|
| Also, I _love_ cursive. I had terrible fine motor skills when I
| learned print, but had developed by 3rd grade, so my print is
| illegible, but cursive is fine.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > That's weird considering that I'm over a decade older than
| you and was allowed to turn in typed papers
|
| I had the same experience as the GP commenter. Early
| elementary teachers were insistent that cursive would be the
| future of your handwriting. As soon as I hit 5th grade,
| teachers either didn't care or explicitly asked for typed.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| I'm a decade older than the original commenter, and
| teachers started asking for homework papers to be typed
| even earlier for me. I did the first year or two of those
| on my dad's old mechanical typewriter lol. When I was in
| middle school it was really common for students to have a
| word processor that was hardware, not an application on
| their PC. These were basically a printer with a keyboard
| and like a 3 line LED display.
|
| Anyhow, the last time I can recall using cursive as a
| requirement was in my IB exams, and it felt like a
| pointless anachronism there.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| The very first paper I turned in was typed on my mom's
| electric typewriter.
|
| Later on, some teachers refused any papers printed by dot-
| matrix printers because of how bad they looked.
| peatmoss wrote:
| I hated learning cursive in elementary school, was terrible at
| it unless writing very slowly, and purged it from my skillset
| as soon as I was allowed to type assignments. And it wasn't
| hard to convince teachers to let me type assignments, because
| my cursive was a combination of plausible motor control issues
| and malign intent.
|
| Fast forward to college where I took a number of Russian
| language courses. I had to learn cursive... with Cyrillic
| script. Reversing my elementary school position, I decided I
| wanted to be good at cursive in Russian. I never had great
| motor control, but damned if my cursive writing in Russian
| wasn't head and shoulders better than anything I've ever
| written in English!
|
| I have lately thought that maybe I should relearn cursive in
| English. I like being away from screens and my printed
| handwriting is pretty slow and ugly. Now cursive seems like a
| way to do work away from the shackles of my laptop.
| irrational wrote:
| Reminds me of the story of Dieter Uchtdorf who lived in post
| WWII Germany. They were required to learn English, but it
| didn't click for him. He loved watching airplanes and decided
| he wanted to become a pilot. Then he learned that pilots have
| to speak English. Overnight he learned English. I went on to
| be the chief pilot of Deutsche Lufthansa.
| noneeeed wrote:
| As a Brit with two small kids, I was on the lookout for some
| practise books to help them practice what we call "joined up"
| writing and kept finding US based ones. I finally understood why
| so many Americans hate cursive, it seems a lot more florid and
| loopy than what we teach, almost like it's trying to replicate
| Victorian copper plate.
|
| I can really sympathise with how frustrating it must be to learn
| and to write well and quickly for a lot of people.
| Angostura wrote:
| Yup. Our joined up writing seems a pragmatic and useful tool -
| it's certainly been taught that way since the 1960s. Though I
| was always rather jealous of my mum's fully elegant
| handwriting.
| iso1631 wrote:
| I haven't written any 'joined up' writing since school 20
| years ago, the only writing I make is short notes for myself
| which is far more legible than the nonsense they force on
| kids in primary school.
| udp wrote:
| Yes, UK educated here and I've literally never heard of
| "cursive" (other than from Americans). Just "joined up
| handwriting" that we learnt in primary school in those books
| with ascent/descent lines, which certainly seems to be a lot
| simpler than American cursive.
| johnzim wrote:
| When I was reading for the bar in 2011 (analogous to 'taking' the
| bar in the US), one test, that of writing 'opinions' was,
| incredibly, still a handwriting-only assessment. It was expected
| that you would have to turn in something like a dozen full pages
| to cover all the pertinent topics in the exam question.
|
| Having primarily touch typed from a young age and being in
| possession of some truly horrible handwriting, the only way I
| could get through it was to spend half an hour practicing -every
| day- in order to reach the requisite speed.
|
| I looked then at the experience of handwriting that exam as
| massively anachronistic, and a decade later, my feelings are the
| same. However I can now handwrite at a decent pace, and I still
| find going to pen and paper a great aid when tackling complex
| problems.
|
| Is it a vital skill? I don't think so, but I'm quite certain it's
| a helpful one. Gen Z won't miss it, but then, playing a musical
| instrument isn't vital to one's education either, but few people
| who do would say they regret spending the time to learn it
| outside of school.
| XorNot wrote:
| I was dreadful at every instrument I tried and never had a
| shred of passion for them. I would've been better off doing
| anything else with the time and money invested.
| rtpg wrote:
| This does remind me of engineering school entrance exams in
| France, where I would be happy to get to 4 pages in the
| philosophy stuff, but then look around and see that in the same
| amount of time so many people wrote 12 or 16 pages.
|
| I do think that a part of it was more of an upstream bottleneck
| in my mind, but part of me wonders if training that sort of
| writing skill helps with mental agility as well.
| jeltz wrote:
| Or maybe you were better at structuring your thoughts and
| getting to the point. More is not necessarily better.
| prox wrote:
| Interesting. Handwriting does require fine-motor skills, do you
| feel that was an improvement? Or : do we lack fine-motor skills
| if we don't learn handwriting?
| denton-scratch wrote:
| My handwriting at school was so spidery that I was signed-up for
| handwriting lessons. Insanely, they gave me an italic pen, and
| had me practising italic letter-forms.
|
| Unsurprisingly, my handwriting turned into a mess of italic
| letter-forms and spidery crap. I'm told that my handwriting is
| not just readable, but even clear; but hell, if I can't read my
| own writing, I don't see how anyone can describe it as "clear".
| It's an ugly mess.
|
| It's good for signatures, though; I have a signature that seems
| pretty hard to copy. In fact I can't copy it myself; every time I
| sign my name it looks different.
|
| [Edit] There was another guy at school who was taught italic; he
| favoured green ink, and wrote in the most beautiful italic script
| you can imagine - very regular. It must have taken him hours to
| write his school essays.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Same here, unless I am concentrating super hard my block
| letters don't even look like another of the same letter. My
| handwriting is just not consistent. I've long theorized that
| nice handwriting is like 90% "do you make letter consistently
| the same" verses anything else, I can't do it (or have no
| patience to spend seconds on each letter, which still look
| wiggly). Typing is just better in every imaginable way IMHO.
| delecti wrote:
| What is an italic pen? I'm aware of italic fonts (slanted
| letters) and italic script (the same but handwritten), but I
| can't find anything about a specific type of pen used for it.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| The kind of pen I'm referring to is a pen with a nib that is
| a flat blade of metal, cut across, making a straight edge,
| then slit to make an ink channel. If you drag it
| horizontally, e.g. left-to-right, it makes a very fine line;
| if you drag it vertically, it makes a line as broad as the
| width of the nib. Sometimes they are cut on a slant;
| sometimes you hold them on a slant. So take "horizontal" and
| "vertical" with a bushel of salt.
|
| Basically, these things are metal replicas of quill pens,
| which are made as flat blades cut across to make an edge and
| then slit.
|
| That wide-stroke/thin-stroke business isn't anything to do
| with italicness, as far as I know; nor is the business of
| everyone _leaning to the right_. It 's about serifs, and
| related orthographic flourishes, isn't it? [Edit: the kind of
| script I mean is angular, straight lines, with vertical
| strokes meeting diagonal strokes; rather gothic.] Well, those
| flourishes are facilitated by that kind of nib. Whether
| that's italic or not, I don't know; but the pen-and-nib sets
| used to be sold as "Italic pen with set of nibs", or
| something like that.
| Kuinox wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I do not have a learning disability! I think my spidery
| scrawl was more legible _before_ I had remedial instruction.
| My handwriting was damaged by my teachers. Sure, it was ugly
| to start with; but the remedial instruction just made it
| worse (and I ended up writing slower). Lose, lose, lose.
| Terretta wrote:
| > _I 'm told that my handwriting is not just readable, but
| even clear; but hell, if I can't read my own writing, I
| don't see how anyone can describe it as "clear". It's an
| ugly mess._
|
| ... suggests _something_ is up.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Well, sure. I'm 66, I was badly concussed a few years
| ago, I drink a lot, my hand is unsteady, and my eyesight
| is fading. Occam's Razor hacks away any diagnosis of
| learning disability.
| [deleted]
| RunSet wrote:
| If you don't learn to write cursive, don't be surprised when your
| vote gets discarded because your signature didn't match exactly
| with the scan on record.
|
| https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/signature-match-laws...
| FateOfNations wrote:
| A neat, unadvertised trick we have in California: if you use
| the online voter registration, it uses the signature you have
| on file with the DMV. That signature is printed as an image on
| your driver licence, allowing you to have an exact exemplar of
| what they will be comparing to.
| mrg2k8 wrote:
| Last week, during a meeting, I found myself scribbling some notes
| in cursive some 20 years later since having last used it, the
| only way we have been thought to write in school in an Eastern
| European country. I didn't know it was possible for anyone to not
| understand cursive or to forget it, even if one wanted it. This
| is definitely a thing just in the US.
|
| I have been writing in block letters because my writing is tidier
| this way and have self-taught myself to do it.
|
| Maybe this way less entitled peoples will have a better chance at
| making it, a sort of culling of the weak and unwilling.
| Terretta wrote:
| To the untrained eye, Cyrillic script feels like an endless
| line of Ms --impressive people can read it!
|
| https://i.imgur.com/KEmhkXx.jpg
| supersrdjan wrote:
| It's the lower case i, m, sh, t and p that all look similar
| in cursive. Here in print: i, m, sh, t, p (though t and p and
| t have little lines above them to differentiate them, and
| some people are taught to put a line under sh to distinguish
| it. At least it's like that in Serbian.
| tr1ll10nb1ll wrote:
| Well, I'm 19 and I was taught as a kid how to write cursive
| extensively in India. Not saying it's good or bad, however.
| snickerer wrote:
| I am a 42 year old European and I'm so glad that cursive is dying
| out as a compulsory school subject. Even as an elementary school
| student, I didn't understand why two scripts were taught.
|
| That future generations are cut off from old writings is
| nonsense. You can learn to read cursive quickly. In fact you have
| to learn to decipher it again for every decade, region, and
| person, because it differs so much.
|
| I always wished for an OCR tool that translates handwriting into
| UTF-8 when I had to read it. Soon every phone will be able to
| translate it. I am happy about it.
| mradek wrote:
| I could be wrong as I am ESL and moved to USA at a young age.
|
| I believe we were taught cursive to build motor skills. My
| teachers always gave me good remarks for my neat handwriting,
| and I remember spending hours practicing both regular and
| cursive characters. Fill out the sheet, then my mom would erase
| it and I would do it again and again.
| _Microft wrote:
| It might not only train fine motor skills but since learning
| cursive isn't easy, it might also require practicing focus,
| self-discipline and tenacity.
| mradek wrote:
| True. I'm definitely not complaining that I got to learn to
| read and write cursive. I think it's a beautiful way to
| express characters on paper.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Digging dirt would probably increase your motor skills better
| and would be a more useful additional skill.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Even as an elementary school student, I didn't understand why
| two scripts were taught.
|
| In my university you had to write so fast to follow the
| teachers that if you were not writing using cursive you were
| probably missing half of the content.
| _dain_ wrote:
| or the university could just .. make recordings of the
| lectures? why should students be burdened with realtime
| handwritten audio transcription? if you miss even a single
| sentence it can fuck up your understanding of the entire rest
| of the lecture. but with video you can just pause and rewind,
| speed up and slow down however you want.
|
| it's even worse in math / physics / anything that uses a
| blackboard -- you have to copy down what the prof draws on
| the board as well as what he says aloud. two simultaneous
| information channels, bottlenecked by handwriting speed and
| muscle cramps. students frantically copying down things by
| hand as professors talk is a ridiculous outdated ritual that
| ought to be binned.
| Spivak wrote:
| Did something change between generations? Because HS teachers
| would mythologize this but it doesn't match at all with my
| experience. Even ignoring that professors have slide decks
| and lectures are recorded professors seem to encourage
| students to only take light notes so you can actually focus
| and participate in the class.
| retrac wrote:
| I've been learning Chinese. Learning to write the characters
| (not even memorizing -- just copying by sight correctly) has
| been a very effective way of learning to read Chinese
| handwriting, especially the semi-cursive script. With almost
| any writing instrument, the order and direction of strokes is
| important to reading Chinese, and the best way to learn to
| decode that is to learn to encode it yourself, probably.
|
| I would suspect the same is true of cursive Latin script, in
| the same way.
| k__ wrote:
| Especially, since every country has its own variation.
| Qem wrote:
| > Even as an elementary school student, I didn't understand why
| two scripts were taught.
|
| If you need to write by hand a lot, cursive is vastly more
| efficient and fast, as you don't need to lift the pen/pencil
| from the paper as often. You mostly glide over the paper.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| If you're right-handed, yes. Those claims never proved true
| for southpaws like me.
| overgard wrote:
| Shorthand is better for this
| derekp7 wrote:
| This sounds good in theory, but in practice doesn't work out
| so well. In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow
| down. Think of how most people's signatures aren't readable
| at all, that is because they evolved to be written fast.
|
| Whereas you can learn to do fast printing. My writing speed
| improved later in life once I convinced myself to switch back
| over to print characters -- I can speed up the process
| without losing legibility. Also some people do a mixture of
| the two, which really is writing out ligatures for common
| character pairings. I don't really do that, and it seams
| everyone sort of figures out their own stile, but it would be
| nice if written ligatures were taught as an in-between style.
|
| Edit: To see examples, do a search for "fast printing", I
| know there were several good posts on one of the fountain pen
| forums. The style I liked referenced "bookhand", and to get
| good/legible at it you start by practicing writing small
| circles (both clockwise and counter-clockwise) and small
| straight lines (horizontal, vertical, diagonal with various
| starting positions). This also helps with general technical
| drawing, things like writing circles and making them larger
| and smaller. And learning to draw a straight line across a
| page freehand will help with character alignment.
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| My experience is exactly the opposite. I used to do printed
| characters. My writing speed and legibility (especially for
| quick notes) improved significantly after switching to
| cursive. Once you realise that cursive is basically just a
| way to write printed characters in one flowing motion, it's
| weird to go back to printed.
|
| But maybe we're talking differnt cursive systems, and that
| might explain our difference in experience.
| jakzurr wrote:
| My guess is the biggest difference is how much you use
| cursive.
|
| However, just like most skills, some people may be
| naturally better, so I suppose I could be wrong.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Think of how most people's signatures aren't readable at
| al
|
| Signatures are not cursive.
| jakzurr wrote:
| Yes, I think that's pretty much all true, now.
|
| 100 years ago, when accounting and bookkeeping were all
| done by hand, writing cursive was probably quite a bit
| faster, and with all the practice you got, just as legible.
|
| In high school, I wrote almost everything in cursive, but
| over the next 10 years, computers replaced so much writing
| that I fell out of practice. I'm not sorry it's gone.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Still waiting for a really good stylus driven computer
| ecosystem. :(
| koheripbal wrote:
| Even 35 years ago when I wrote exclusively in cursive, it
| was significantly faster than printing. Everyone wrote in
| cursive.
|
| It's odd to even see people make the argument that
| cursive isn't faster. Literally no one wrote in print
| except young children.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| No, you can write cursive faster than printing--that's why
| it was invented. It's just that it takes enough practice
| doing it that it becomes muscle memory--it's not something
| that can be done well as a conscious act because the
| reaction cycle is too short.
|
| It's like driving stick, you can't consciously operate the
| clutch and gearshift smoothly. When you're trying to start
| the system is very sensitive to the amount of pressure,
| balancing it for maximum power transfer without slowing the
| engine too much requires a feedback loop shorter than you
| can consciously do. Shifting gears is a lot more forgiving
| but if you're going to simply take your foot off the clutch
| you must have a reasonable match between the RPM of each
| side--and even if you have both a speedometer and
| tachometer you can't actively be looking at them while
| you're trying to drive.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Cursive is definitely faster while maintaining legibility.
| It's just that no schools in my country has taught us how
| to actually write it efficiently. For example when I'm
| writing cursive I'm holding pen incorrectly (yes, there are
| more efficient and less efficient ways to hold it), I'm
| moving my fingers incorrectly, I'm moving my hand
| incorrectly, and in the end certain muscles required for
| the efficient writing weren't properly developed.
|
| I've learned all this well after graduating from the
| university, so there is zero reason to train that skill
| today. But I do know that my shitty cursive is 100% caused
| by my own lack of proper training to write. I've switched
| to the writing print characters nowadays, but only out of
| necessity, not due to efficiency.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I don't know what your country is but in a few US public
| schools we had fairly strict teachers trying to get us to
| correctly hold our pencils. They'd wander around class
| correcting people holding their pencil wrong, give out
| special grips that were supposed to force correct
| holding, and we were penalized on tests for holding our
| pencil wrong.
|
| Not saying it worked that well, as it was only a handful
| of teachers who cared so maybe you'd have one year where
| it mattered. However they did try.
| Yizahi wrote:
| Ukraine. We were taught extensively how to write cursive,
| for whole elementary school, we were writing in special
| workbooks which reinforced the correct shape of the
| cursive letters, teachers were looking at us and helping
| us write correctly. Only it appears they didn't teach us
| the writing movement itself.
|
| Quick question - do you hold your pen in the hand
| parallel to the middle and outer phalanxes or your pen
| lies between thumb and index finger? Apparently the
| former position is optimal, while I hold it between
| fingers. Also my palm is always touching the table with a
| wrist so I move the pen mostly with my fingers (which a)
| strains them when writing a lot and b) produces wavy
| cursive, less legible that it should be), and the correct
| way is to move pen mostly with whole arm movement, don't
| touch wrist on a table and don't move fingers too much,
| only correct movements with fingers, not do all the work
| with them.
| Izkata wrote:
| > do you hold your pen in the hand parallel to the middle
| and outer phalanxes
|
| I remember trying to do this as a kid and wasn't able to
| actually hold the pencil like that. It would flip up out
| of my hand every other word or so (grip was tight enough
| towards the tip, but towards the knuckle I couldn't hold
| it, so the pencil would swivel around the tighter grip).
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| I think I still write incorrectly, it certainly isn't
| legible, and I haven't researched the concept recently so
| all I have to go on is decades old memories. I do recall
| I was regularly scolded for having my hand on the desk.
| sseagull wrote:
| This is the difference between theory and practice.
|
| In theory, with proper training, it is better. In
| practice, it's a mess.
|
| I've said before: If you want to start hating cursive,
| start doing genealogy. It's takes so long for me to
| decipher what people were writing (they often were
| writing very quickly), and I learned cursive when I was
| younger!
|
| (I sometimes run across census pages where the census
| taker printed. It is vastly, vastly easier to read).
| autocorr wrote:
| I don't think cursive is necessarily faster. But I do
| recall studies that showing what you're talking about: that
| a person's developed hybrid printing (printing with
| personal ligatures) are just as fast if not faster than
| full cursive.
|
| What cursive does appear to be useful for historically is
| writing for long periods without tiring. Cursive written in
| the older Spencerian script fashion is written with big
| movements of the wrist and arm along the main diagonal path
| with little finger movement. The wrist and arms tire less
| quickly than fingers. Some professions in the 1800s like
| had to write all day, so it was quite useful and worth the
| significant training costs of learning such penmanship
| skills. They also had to write with pens that didn't write
| equally well in all directions.
|
| And of course other fancy scripts likely just signalled
| class status similar to being able to recite Homer (in
| Greek) on command.
| halpagg wrote:
| croes wrote:
| >This sounds good in theory, but in practice doesn't work
| out so well. In order to write cursive legibly, you need to
| slow down.
|
| I know many people who can write cursive both fast and
| beautiful, most of them women.
|
| The problem seems to be rather a lack of training due to a
| lack of interest.
|
| Writing on the keyboard with ten fingers slows me down, but
| not because the ten-finger system is slow, but because I
| haven't trained it.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Signatures have almost nothing to do with normal written
| script, they are a special mark that
|
| 1) is ideally hard to replicate and unique
|
| 2) may be performed by somebody who doesn't write much
|
| Fast printing doesn't return anything useful to me (google
| searches are personalized so I guess we're just seeing
| different things). I get printshops nearby.
|
| I think cursive it taught very formally in elementary
| school, possibly to the detriment of adoption, just for the
| same reason everything is -- grammar is given hard-and-fast
| rules, math is route memorization or totally algorithmic --
| because it is easier to grade that way, and also because
| people will find their shortcuts as they age. Switching
| between cursive and print seems fine to me (it can also be
| used for emphasis).
|
| Cursive (interspersed with print as convenient) is sort of
| nice because it is a fairly "normal" way of writing that
| still goes quickly enough. I can write cursive anywhere on
| the spectrum of nice and formal to quick and sloppy, in one
| system. Quick and sloppy basically keeps up with by brain,
| maybe if I was taking lots of meeting notes I'd want to
| switch, but it is good enough for my current applications.
| stakkur wrote:
| * In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow down*
|
| And right there is one of the crucial cognitive and
| proprioceptive benefits of handwriting over 'keyboarding'.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| In practice it works out great, this is yet another example
| of the whole "contrarian-means-im-smart" thing that's
| entirely too prevalent here on HN.
|
| Cursive is there for exactly what the other person said,
| it's much faster to write than print. There are generations
| of people who have successfully written and read large
| swathes of cursive, yet somehow this person thinks they
| know better, and their explanation for it is akin to a new
| way of writing (which is what cursive is) and
| recommendations on practicing it.
|
| queue xkcd reference about standards.
| usrusr wrote:
| It might be much faster to write when you spend many
| hours per week writing on paper. I don't even spend spend
| many hours writing on paper per year! Abandoning cursive
| should habe been put up for debate already back when
| phones displaced letters in personal communication.
| layer8 wrote:
| It doesn't need to be on paper, taking notes with a
| tablet and stylus is a use-case as well.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Also If you want to write fast and don't care about
| legibility, learn shorthand writing :)
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I considered doing that in college--decided against it
| because overall I decided it wouldn't be worthwhile. Yes,
| I could have taken notes faster but it's not a skill I
| expected to have much use for later in life. I could
| already see that the computer was going to pretty much
| kill handwriting.
| supersrdjan wrote:
| Word. I learned Orthic recently. It's easy to pick up,
| unlike the other system (at least that's my impression
| after a day of investigating)
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| > you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as
| often.
|
| But you are contact with the paper far longer, which incurs
| friction and uses more ink/graphite. Moving the writing tip
| through the air is far easier and faster than dragging it
| along the paper.
|
| With cursive, not only do many letters require twice as much
| drawing, such as letter "l" (ell) -- with cursive you have to
| draw twice as long a line (up and down again) compared with
| printing (a single stroke). But they also require drawing
| across the gap between letters, again slowing you down and
| not contributing to actually forming any letters.
|
| I am old enough that cursive was taught and used throughout
| my entire educational period, but around age 11 or 12 I
| decided to start printing instead, and I was easily able to
| write as fast as my peers on in-class exams, etc. And far
| more legibly.
| alfnor wrote:
| I learned my own version of cursive through trial and
| error, and I found that the most efficient method is to
| just barely lift the tip off the paper between characters,
| in a manner that provides little resistance from the paper.
| Usually, you'll see a light trace of the tip between the
| characters, but not as strong as some examples of cursive
| you might've seen.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Agreed. Looks better, polished. All caps in drawings and
| technical documentation is appropriate though.
|
| It's just profesional.. writing legible cursive is also part
| of the skill.
| josefx wrote:
| Are you also still using an ink pen that will smear all
| over the place unless you are pointlessly neat? As a left
| handed child learning cursive in school was an exercise in
| frustration since the school system mandated that it had to
| be done using the most outdated and counterproductive tools
| they could find. So instead of "properly" mastering it I
| noped the fuck out the moment it was an option.
|
| > It just profesional
|
| Most professional texts I am dealing with are digital and
| cursive is not the default anywhere as far as I can tell.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Being left handed is a disadvantage, but it really isn't
| something that changes whether you can write well.
|
| I've seen the nicest script written by a left handed
| person, dramatic because the stroke curvature is
| inverted.
|
| Yeah, technical drawings, systems architecture, as I
| mentioned elsewhere, block letters are best.
|
| Mostly the cursive is for notes, requests, thanks - there
| are a lot of 'professional' arenas
| Terretta wrote:
| "pointlessly" neat?
| [deleted]
| CasualSuperman wrote:
| If this is the goal, wouldn't it be better to teach a form of
| shorthand rather than cursive?
| Terretta wrote:
| Indeed, and in the USA, stenographer's notebooks only
| disappeared from craft aisle of supermarket and drug stores
| during my adult lifetime.
|
| // They're the pads with spiral at top, stiff cardboard
| back, Gregg Ruled with horizontal lines and one differently
| colored vertical line down the middle of the page.
| rootlocus wrote:
| > as you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as
| often Except for crossing your Ts and dotting your Is and
| depending on your language's alphabet, other diacritics which
| breaks the flow since you're switching from gliding over the
| paper to pattern matching letters and words from the start of
| the sentence.
| feet wrote:
| >need to write by hand a lot
|
| There are less and less needs for this, so I think this is a
| good development
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You still have to take notes and do homework all throughout
| >12 years of your early education, so learning how to do it
| efficiently is fairly useful.
| feet wrote:
| Which is all increasingly done on computers
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I doubt that many people are taking notes in any mathy
| class at least on computers (without stylus input). Even
| in non-math classes, notes often include diagrams and
| other drawings that are much harder to do real-time in
| computers than on paper.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Except this isn't the 12th century and we aren't all working
| as scribes in a monastery or whatever. I'm not paid by the
| volume of what I write, nor is anyone nowadays. If we need
| volume, we have this 19th century invention called a printer.
| beebeepka wrote:
| No. I stopped using cursive years before I had to. Other
| students mocked me for a while but it was worth it. To this
| day, I simply refuse to read cursive.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Why learn to read at all, when your phone can do it for
| you.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| I think it's true in principle. It may be true for most. It
| was not true for me - one day I finally acknowledged that all
| my fast paced noted ended up as a squiqqly unreadable line,
| and went back to block printing my notes.
|
| I think of cursive as an art or craft - not to say it's not a
| valid thing to learn, but also not a particularly practical
| or needed thing for most people today. I'm 44 and last time I
| did cursive was about 23 years ago.
|
| I certainly don't think it's a necessary gate for my kids to
| go through. Things change. Life changes. Other than inertia,
| I feel cursive should go the way of logarithmic tables etc.
| rjsw wrote:
| I did the same as you, switched to block printing notes,
| but then found I was out of practice at writing quickly for
| exams.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| For me, the need for professor to actually be able to
| read what the heck I wrote continued out weighing the
| speed factor :). Legibly, I was faster block printing.
| ajot wrote:
| I think most people here are only looking at cursive as a
| writing method only. When you're a kid, you're not only
| learning how to write (or history, or multiplication tables,
| or playing a recorder, etc.), you're always meta-learning.
| Cursive also helps you develop fine motion; history helps you
| train your learning of boring topics, retain them and link
| them; and so on.
|
| I must concur, I dreaded cursive as a kid. My writing was
| never "tidy" though it was always very readable, and my
| teacher bugged to the point I asked my mother for a laptop to
| do my homework (this was in early 00s, in Argentina, so this
| was never a real option). I kept using cursive through
| university, as it was the fastest way to handwrite for me,
| and I keep using it nowadays, although not handwriting every
| day. I believe (although this is a counterfactual) I would be
| even more clumsy today if I hadn't learnt cursive.
| Broken_Hippo wrote:
| Are you sure about that? I am under the impression that this
| was only true before modern ballpoint pens.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| That's a surprising point of view. In the schools of the
| 80/90ies, note-taking had to be done with pen and paper, and
| you were doing it for hours. Printed documents were rare (in
| the eighties Xerox machines were a luxury, so they used some
| sort of waterless printing [1] that left a strong smell of
| alcohol on the paper).
|
| Cursive was extremely practical or fast note-taking, so why
| cursive was a thing was pretty obvious. It was also normal to
| write in cursive for homework, tests, exams. I am still using
| it at work today. And if I were to go back to school, I would
| definitely use it again, although my touch-typing is decent
| enough that I could keep pace.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterless_printing
| adrian_b wrote:
| If the purpose had been to be better at taking notes with pen
| and paper, than being taught to write in shorthand would have
| been a much more useful skill than being taught to write in
| cursive.
| tdeck wrote:
| Shorthand tends to be somewhat difficult to read quickly,
| difficult to scan, and somewhat personal to the individual
| stenographer. To make the notes useful most people would
| need to transcribe them first.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| It's not taught, but it is a skill one also develops.
| Probably this is not taught because french kids already
| have a hard time with spelling.
|
| Fun fact: french physicians are well known for
| undecipherable cursive hand writing. Part of what makes it
| difficult to write is that they use Greek letters for short
| hand. For instance, they replace "-tion" suffixes with a
| theta, or the "ph" combo with a phi.
| beej71 wrote:
| American doctors, as well. I guess as long as the
| pharmacy can read it, it's fine...
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Also, writing by hand has been shown to increase
| comprehension and retention.
|
| Developing your own short-hand helps a lot or just going with
| a standard
| squarefoot wrote:
| +1.
|
| I'm 56 and essentially can't write decent cursive anymore since
| like decades as I stopped as soon as I could. No problems
| reading when it's correctly written, but as a leftie I found
| cursive handwriting hard since day one, so I resorted to
| capitals only, save for my signature, which however is
| different every time: I have 5 filed at the bank as I can't
| produce two seemingly identical; I often joke with the clerk
| that for me would be a lot easier if they asked for a blood
| sample for DNA recognition:)
| irrational wrote:
| That ocr exists, at least in some form. There are efforts to
| digitize old census records, which are written in cursive.
| Humans are just used to double check the work of the ocr
| program.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| As a nearly 42-year-old American, I fully agree with you. In
| particular:
|
| > That future generations are cut off from old writings is
| nonsense.
|
| Some of us are cut off anyway, until the writing is either
| OCR'd or manually transcribed. I'm legally blind (though with
| some usable vision), and some of my friends are totally blind.
| I can read handwriting if it's magnified enough, or large
| enough to begin with, but my skill for deciphering handwriting
| has faded due to disuse. It's very rarely a problem anymore.
|
| Some of my least happy memories from elementary school are of
| learning to handwrite. My teachers quite reasonably thought
| that I would be better off if I learned to make maximal use of
| the vision I have. It made sense at the time (the 80s and early
| 90s); if I had only been proficient at writing in Braille or on
| a computer, I would have had no way to write something in-class
| that could then be immediately read by my sighted teachers and
| peers (unless I used the one classroom computer, as I sometimes
| did). But now I wish I had started learning Braille in first
| grade, and that they had made me keep using it even when I
| thought I didn't need it. And these days, any low-vision kid
| shouldn't have to waste any time at all learning to handwrite.
| Honestly, I wish they'd quit teaching sighted kids to handwrite
| too, so future generations wouldn't produce any more text
| that's inaccessible to us. But I suppose that's too extreme.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| In peer-reviewed studies, writing cursive has been linked to
| deeper processing of the language than printing, just as
| printing has been over typing.
|
| Early L1 development concerns aside, learning cursive was a
| pretty good ROI for me given how little time it took as a seven
| year-old, and how much time cursive has saved me over the years
| since.
|
| Related research:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7399101/
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274624/
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5422512/
| Macha wrote:
| So despite containing cursive in the title, the first study
| appears to be comparing handwriting as a whole vs typing, not
| print vs cursive handwriting.
|
| The second study compares handwriting vs tracing vs typing,
| again no cursive vs print.
|
| The third study compares drawing vs typing, it doesn't
| address handwriting.
|
| Also all of them are using proxy measures like brain activity
| and not recall of the studied material.
|
| I could actually accept the more laborious and slower process
| of handwriting may slow kids down and therefore spend more
| time thinking about a subject as a hypothesis, but that's not
| what was tested here. Such a hypothesis would however favour
| print handwriting more than the theoretically faster cursive.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Here's one more narrowly focused on what you're looking
| for. It compares students taught cursive writing, printing
| and a mix of both.
|
| The students who only printed lagged on every metric: https
| ://journals.library.ualberta.ca/langandlit/index.php/la...
| robocat wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_impl
| y_c...
|
| Does the paper have any relevance to whether teaching
| cursive helps (causes) learning more generally?
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| Deeper processing isn't necessarily better. I would bet it
| also takes "deeper processing" to learn all the characters in
| written Chinese. There's been movements to simplify Chinese,
| but never movements to complicate English.
|
| Language is best when it uses as little processing as
| possible. Its meant to be a medium, not a mental task in its
| own right.
|
| So taking your research claims at face value, that's not
| actually evidence that cursive is good. In fact, its the
| opposite.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I have severe carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand. I'm
| relatively certain that it was brought about by being forced as
| a child to write cursive for hours on end. We were even forced
| to hold our writing instruments in a specific manner. I would
| have horrible hand cramps each day, severe pain and I even have
| an abnormal growth on one finger from it.
|
| I was forced to waste hundreds of hours of my life getting
| instruction in an arcane, obsolete format.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| "You can learn to read cursive quickly."
|
| The same is true about Fraktur (the old German script), and yet
| few people are capable of reading pre-1940 books typeset in
| Fraktur.
|
| There is no way around it, the vast majority of people won't
| learn old scripts and they won't be able to read their
| grandparents' correspondence etc.
|
| This might be worth the progress, but let's not pretend that
| the continuity rupture is smaller than it is.
| barnabee wrote:
| s/cursive/COBOL/
|
| Being able to understand old stuff is not a skill everyone
| needs to attain at school.
|
| If you need it for your chosen academic or career path,
| you'll learn it.
| tdeck wrote:
| This makes me wonder (as a 30 year old who can't read cursive
| well). Can folks easily read English script writing from the
| 18th/19th century? The script writing from earlier eras looks
| fairly different from 20th century cursive.
| nier wrote:
| This is what I found when trying to understand the history of
| Fraktur. It's complicated to say the least:
|
| "Fraktur is often associated with being the official Nazi
| font and is still being used by Neo-Nazi groups in Germany
| today. The fact that it was, ironically, banned by the Nazi
| Party is just a part of its long and strange history"
|
| Source: https://www.typeroom.eu/a-nazi-font-banned-by-nazis-
| fraktur-...
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Yes, the Nazis ironically considered Fraktur (whose
| existence _massively_ predates Nazism, by hundreds of
| years) a Jewish influence and got rid of it. After the ban,
| the only place where it survived were tombstones.
| kleiba wrote:
| Also here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiqua%E2%80%93Fr
| aktur_disput...
| Koshkin wrote:
| Curiously, the same goes for the _stahlhelm_ which is
| widely seen as the signature item of the Nazi military. In
| truth, it was simply the traditional helmet of the German
| military which the Nazi wanted to replace with a more
| modern design, but it was already too late for them, and it
| was the GDR military that ended up using it.
| tgv wrote:
| > You can learn to read cursive quickly. ... Soon every phone
| will be able to translate it.
|
| Not only does that require substantial backup, it also
| sidesteps the problem of writing. There will come a point when
| you need it. Heck, if the war in Ukraine gets out of control,
| it may become a necessity. Your phone might just stop working.
|
| And there's nothing wrong with being taught two ways of
| achieving the same. Or do you only know one way to add? One way
| to program? One way to throw a ball? It might even make the
| process more flexible and adaptable.
| killingtime74 wrote:
| If we wanted backup would learning another language not be
| much more beneficial?
| garblegarble wrote:
| >Heck, if the war in Ukraine gets out of control, it may
| become a necessity
|
| I agree with your incredulity at phones being able to
| translate cursive, but on your second point, if you're
| alluding to another World War starting and our technological
| world being destroyed, then frankly being able to immediately
| and quickly read old letters between grandparents & older
| generations will not be of a high priority...
| tgv wrote:
| Not the letters of my grand-parents, just writing and
| reading current notes.
| garblegarble wrote:
| I'm sure if there's a survival benefit then they'll learn
| fast enough...
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| .-- .... -.-- / .. / -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. -. - / .- --. .-.
| . . / -- --- .-. . .-.-.- / - .... . / .-- .- -.-- / - .... .
| / -.-- --- ..- - .... / - --- -.. .- -.-- / -.-. .- -. - / .
| ...- . -. / - .- .--. / --- ..- - / .- / -... .- ... .. -.-.
| / -- . ... .- --. . / .. -. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -..
| . / --- .-. / -. --- / -... .- ... .. -.-. / ... .. --. -. .-
| .-.. / ..-. .-.. .- --. --. .. -. --. / .. ... / ..-. .-. .-
| -. -.- .-.. -.- / .- .-.. .- .-. -- .. -. --. .-.-.- / ....
| --- .-- / -.-. .- -. / - .... . / ... --- -. ... / .- -. -..
| / -. .- ..- --. .... .- ..- - . .-. ... / . ...- . .-. / -...
| . / .-. . .- -.. -.-- / ..-. --- .-. / - .... . / .-- .- .-.
| / -. --- .-- / -... .-. . .-- .. -. --. / --- -. / --- ..-
| .-. / . .- ... - . .-. -. / ..-. .-. --- -. - / .. ..-. / -
| .... . -.-- / -.. --- -. - / . ...- . -. / -.- -. --- .-- /
| .-- .... .- - / .- / -. .- ...- .- .-.. / -.-. --- -.. . /
| ..-. .-.. .- --. / .-.. --- --- -.- ... / .-.. .. -.- .
| ..--.. / - .... . / -.- .. -.. ... / - --- -.. .- -.-- / -.-.
| --- .-- .-.. -.. -. - / - . .-.. .-.. / - .... . / -.. ..
| ..-. ..-. . .-. . -. -.-. . / -... . - .-- .-- . . -. / .- /
| .-.. --- .-.. / .- -. -.. / .- / ...---... / .-.-.-
| lordgrenville wrote:
| TIL Emacs has "M-x unmorse-region" for this type of
| situation
| tgv wrote:
| Then you'll also know only a small percentage of drafted
| recruits is actually deemed fit to send and receive Morse.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I'm thinking of the Morse code challenge in The Amazing
| Race. Noisy "battlefield" and a loop playing a message in
| dots and dashes. They had a key to decode it but utterly
| failed and ended up Philiminated. They test things but
| what was doable for the tester apparently wasn't for
| them. (Everyone else took the other side of the detour,
| they had no choice.)
| blooalien wrote:
| Upvoted despite the "snark" and "typos" for being an actual
| valid message in morse code... I actually did get a giggle
| out of this. :)
| thro388 wrote:
| About 10% of Americans are functionaly iliterate, like they
| have troubles to understand and form long sentences in
| writting. Learning second method seems wasteful in that case.
|
| And yes, I know only one way to add, multiply and so on. Also
| I can only program in one way (in very specific language and
| heavy IDE support).
| lizknope wrote:
| I'm 47 and I haven't written anything in cursive (other than my
| signature) since age 16. In 11-12th grade we had to type all
| reports and I always did homework and tests in print not cursive
| because I hated writing in cursive and the teachers hated reading
| it. They would explicitly tell us "PRINT NO CURSIVE!"
|
| The author answers their own question.
|
| "How will they interpret the past?"
|
| "In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the
| way Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today."
|
| Fine, I don't see any problem with that. The author is concerned
| with people being able to read historical documents. If you
| really need to do that then be prepared to take a short course on
| that. It's not like learning a foreign language. People should be
| able to learn to read it in a week or two at most.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Gen Z also never learned use a typewriter, the Ink Well, the
| Slide Rule, or how to write Copperplate... but somehow I think
| they'll be fine.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Well, when I was in high school they also taught drafting with
| fine construction lines drawn with 2H pencils, fancy parallel
| motion rulers and so on. But that doesn't mean they will always
| have to. Stuff goes obsolete.
|
| In my parents' and earlier generation, writing letters by hand
| was an important communications technique, and cursive writing
| was the most efficient way to do it. My high school assignments
| were still mostly turned in in cursive writing, until my final
| year or so by which time computers and printers were available
| (at the school, perfectly OK for printing off your assignments)
| and my touch-typing skills had advanced far beyond my cursive
| writing speed. End of cursive, for me, I can hardly write that
| way any more.
|
| My mom, at around age 60 discovered computers and email too.
| Having learned typewriting in her youth, she took to it
| enthusiastically and 90% of her writing isn't cursive any more
| either. So it goes. Subjects can go from a mandatory skill to a
| niche subject, studied only by those who want to, in their spare
| time.
| pibechorro wrote:
| Writing by hand is a basic and essential skill. Cursive is may
| times better than printing letters. This is an American thing
| as far as I can tell. My 7th grade teachers in the 90s already
| where averse to my cursive (moved from latin america) and
| honestly had a hard time reading it.
|
| Ignore cursive at your peril. Its like not learning to do math
| on paper because we have smartphones.
| _dain_ wrote:
| 99.999% of the time the stuff you read and write is done by
| keyboard or touchscreen, not pen. The remaining 0.001% of the
| time, chickenscratch is fine. "Cursive" is totally obsolete,
| get over it. When was the last time you actually sent or
| received a handwritten letter? Birthday / Christmas cards
| don't count, I mean a real bona fide handwritten _letter_. I
| bet it 's been years.
|
| The comparison to mathematics is wrong. Writing math by hand
| is more convenient than futzing around with LaTeX
| incantations, at least when solving a problem (as opposed to
| writing up a solution). Some people use a stylus on a tablet;
| but that's just the same kind of thing by digital means. The
| process of writing out an equation is part of the way you
| solve it; you cross out terms as you cancel them, you draw ad
| hoc arrows, little graphs, circle like terms, and so on. In
| that context, handwriting is not just a means of expression,
| it's an effective tool of thought. The day digital input
| matches that convenience is the day I'll abandon handwritten
| math; but that day has already come and gone for ordinary
| prose.
| orangecat wrote:
| _My 7th grade teachers in the 90s already where averse to my
| cursive (moved from latin america) and honestly had a hard
| time reading it._
|
| Which is an indication that cursive is not in fact clearly
| better.
| runjake wrote:
| My US-based, tween kids were taught to read and write cursive in
| school.
|
| I keep hearing this myth but haven't ran into anyone that I know
| of that actually didn't learn cursive.
| DanAtC wrote:
| Zaner-Bloser is disproportionate and ugly and should have never
| been taught to anyone.
|
| Had recent generations been taught something practical like
| D'Nealian or something beautiful like Spencerian then maybe
| cursive wouldn't have gotten such a bad wrap.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| I can't agree, I quite like it more than the other two you
| mentioned
| anjbe wrote:
| I was taught D'Nealian in elementary school. I took to it fine,
| but within a few years decided it looked dumb, and dropped the
| tails and loops that looked out of place compared to the letter
| forms I saw in print. I learned cursive easily in third grade,
| and have used it in most handwriting ever since. Looking back,
| I have wondered whether D'Nealian had a positive effect there
| or not.
|
| It's pretty weird reading all these other comments about how
| useless cursive is. Certainly I think it's more important to
| type well than to write in cursive. But while the vast majority
| of my life's text output has been via computer, I still use
| handwriting in plenty of places--postcards, birthday cards,
| thank-you notes, and so on. Am I just anachronistic
| bluGill wrote:
| Good riddance. Kids have too many more important things to learn
| and too little time to learn. Unless you are going into some
| weird specialist field you won't use it so why spend the time
| learning it.
|
| Get the kids out to more recess. End the school day sooner. Find
| something that will be useful and teach that. Don't waste kids
| time on a useless skill. (Or at least move cursive to art claas)
| UncleEntity wrote:
| > Don't waste kids time on a useless skill.
|
| I would say teach them the founding principles of the country
| but unfortunately those are all written in cursive. Probably
| better that they can't read the original so it can be
| "interpreted" and they learn the double plus good version.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are plenty of electronic copies these days.
| Bakary wrote:
| I don't understand the idea of cursive being useless or
| difficult. Are Americans learning some sort of old-fashioned
| lettering that I'm unable to picture? To me cursive is just the
| natural, fast, and smooth way to write by hand, whereas separated
| block letters are goddamn slow and jarring
| Aerroon wrote:
| > _Are Americans learning some sort of old-fashioned lettering
| that I 'm unable to picture?_
|
| I had to Google what cursive is to make sure I understood the
| article. Cursive just feels like a slightly different font to
| me. I have a hard time wrapping my head around people being
| unable to read it.
| kalleboo wrote:
| I love shitting on Americans as much as anyone else but I went
| to school in Sweden and I also never managed to get proficient
| at cursive writing - it was always slower, more painful to the
| hand and far less legible than block letters to me. And my
| teachers really tried, one even gave me some special triangular
| pencil that was supposed to help your grip. Once I was out of
| grade school I never used it ever again. And now in 2022 I
| struggle to remember the last time I wrote anything by hand at
| all.
| astura wrote:
| My schooling (in the US) went "all-in" on cursive - It was
| taught very early and all turned in assignments for all
| grades after learning cursive were required to be in cursive
| or you got a zero on the assignment.
|
| Yet, I have the exact same experience as you - "slower, more
| painful to the hand and far less legible than block letters"
|
| I suspect this is the most common outcome - which is why so
| few people write in cursive by choice. If it was strictly
| better we'd all keep using it when we didn't have to.
| RA_Fisher wrote:
| We mostly type these days and block writing's good enough, so
| it's a waste of time for the masses in my view.
| Bakary wrote:
| It's a waste of time in the sense that it's too late to
| change, but in itself it is the mechanically superior way to
| write and block letters ought never to have been adopted.
|
| I just feel aesthetically depressed when I think of millions
| of Americans having their pen nibs jump everyday across the
| page like an alarmed bug, when they could be forming those
| delightful, uninterrupted, smooth-ass lines. Csikszentmihalyi
| (RIP) is turning in his grave at all that missed flow.
| Trasmatta wrote:
| Who are these millions of Americans who are writing a bunch
| of stuff by pen every day, instead of on a computer or
| phone?
| [deleted]
| addicted wrote:
| I learned to write cursive, but a decade without writing at all
| meant I can no longer do so, and so rely entirely on non-cursive
| writing.
|
| Cursive is vastly superior. It's not even close. It's way more
| efficient. It's easier to read. It helps you think in larger
| units reducing mental burdens (you think of writing in terms of
| words, as opposed to single characters, because if you've written
| them frequently enough, a word becomes a memorized unit in
| itself).
|
| If we believe writing is important we need people to write and
| read cursive. The only reason I would not think this is important
| is if as a society we agree that with the rise of typing writing
| itself is not important.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| One night of practice would bring it all back. It's packed in
| your neurons somewhere if you care to exercise it. I do that
| about once a year. Just pick up a book and write out several
| pages. It comes back rather quickly.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > Cursive is vastly superior. It's not even close. It's way
| more efficient. It's easier to read. It helps you think in
| larger units reducing mental burdens (you think of writing in
| terms of words, as opposed to single characters, because if
| you've written them frequently enough, a word becomes a
| memorized unit in itself).
|
| I've never experienced this, it has always been harder to read
| for me and humans already skip over parts of words when reading
| in print, it's not a cursive phenomenon. That's why you can
| read through a paragraph of text that has letter jumbled in the
| middle of words and almost not notice.
|
| > The only reason I would not think this is important is if as
| a society we agree that with the rise of typing writing itself
| is not important.
|
| I think that ship sailed over 2 decades ago. In the late 90's I
| was 8 or 9 years old and it was clear that cursive was a waste
| of time as I was learning it (and then turning around and
| teaching my own teachers how to use the computers in the
| classroom).
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I spoke to a right leaning friend the other day about this exact
| topic. She pitched it as a conspiracy to make people unable to
| read the past so that alternative facts could be taught. I very
| much doubt she invented this concept so there is likely an entire
| segment of people out there pushing this thought.
| quest88 wrote:
| Please get rid of dioramas next. What a waste of everyone's time.
| 19h wrote:
| I'm really tired by all of these click-bait articles essentially
| saying my entire generation is retarded. I can read cursive,
| where's your god now?
|
| Seriously though, if at all this might be an American thing. Here
| in Germany we definitely had lessons on cursive writing. I write
| cursive. Hell even most lined school notebooks for children start
| with a page that has cursive writing in it, so that children can
| train on it.
| bambataa wrote:
| The focus on cursive seems to be very American.
|
| I really don't understand why people think that joined up
| writing isn't useful any more. Don't people note things down
| and want to do it faster that writing out each letter
| separately?
| IshKebab wrote:
| I might be wrong about this but I think cursive is a very
| specific style in America, whereas in the UK "joined up
| writing" is less restrictive. Maybe that's why they make such
| a big deal about it. Probably why it has such a clumsy
| childish name here too - nobody talks about it as an adult
| because it's just "handwriting".
| okdood64 wrote:
| > saying my entire generation is retarded.
|
| As a middle stage millennial, we too were once considered
| retarded. But now we control the media, so it's time to pay it
| forward.
|
| Seriously though, the article's point about the loss of this
| skill will result in a knowledge access issue is ridiculous.
| Anyone who's reading these source materials in cursive should
| be able to pick it up without too much effort.
| silisili wrote:
| My kid, 11, is learning cursive now in public school. I agree
| it's outdated, but I'm glad, still.
|
| What sucks is that sometimes she asks for help, and me, not
| having written it in 20 years, don't remember all the
| letters(Capital F, J, etc).
|
| She also asked why n has 2 hills and m 3. I told her I didn't
| know, and always wrote them 'incorrectly', and that gave her
| confidence to do the same.
|
| At the end of the day, while I'm all for preserving traditions
| and such, agree cursive is a useless skill. Even before computers
| dominated everything, it felt like a weird thing that didn't save
| much time, and made everything harder to read.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > She also asked why n has 2 hills and m 3. I told her I didn't
| know, and always wrote them 'incorrectly', and that gave her
| confidence to do the same.
|
| It's because cursive n has two downstrokes, and cursive m has
| three downstrokes.
|
| Counting by hills has issues when the letter before it has a
| high exit. You can end up with barely a hill or no hill at all.
| Consider oe vs. one (vs. ae), if you're cutting out the 'extra'
| hill. You can make it work but it gets pretty subtle.
| latexr wrote:
| If you agree the skill is outdated and useless, why are you
| glad they're making your kid learn it?
| silisili wrote:
| Useless, by definition, was a poor choice of word, apologies.
|
| I meant something more akin to something you'd likely never
| need to use as a life skill or for employment in today's
| world.
|
| One of my favorite trips as a kid was to some museum that
| displayed civil war letters. They were all beautifully
| written in cursive. For reasons like that, I'm glad tp have
| learned it, and hope she finds such things as interesting as
| I do one day.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Not everything is life that is old and not immediately
| effective is "useless". For example, snowboarding is
| "useless" and "inefficient" and contributes almost nothing
| practical to one's life in a pragmatic sense, however it's
| still fun and millions of people enjoy it. Some people may
| enjoy reading and writing traditional cursive and that's okay
| as well.
| latexr wrote:
| > Not everything is life that is old and not immediately
| effective is "useless".
|
| Agreed. But I'm not the one who described cursive as
| "outdated" and "useless", the parent poster did. I used
| their exact words. That's what made me curious: they used
| negative words to refer to the skill, yet reacted
| positively to their kid learning it.
|
| If their answer is "I'm glad my kid is learning it because
| they're having a blast", more power to them! But is that
| the reason? My comment isn't a _gotcha_ , it's a genuine
| question to understand the reasoning behind an (at first
| glance) cognitively dissonant1 situation.
|
| 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
| ogogmad wrote:
| The UK "joined up" handwriting has the same letter forms as the
| keyboard I'm typing on.
|
| I guess it's functional but less beautiful. Maybe not very
| traditional.
| frodetb wrote:
| I love cursive, even as a programmer who touch types on a
| keyboard most of the day. Cursive is just so comfy and looks so
| nice. But I'm also incredibly thankful that I'm as proficient
| with a keyboard as I am.
|
| I'm never more than an Alt-Tab away from a terminal, and have
| some nice and simple aliases for creating new plaintext notes, or
| accessing old ones. Yet I also need to keep a notebook or piece
| of paper closeby for handwritten sketches, notes, diagrams, etc.
| I studied maths and physics, where solving problems with pen and
| paper is simply how you do things. Come to think of it, I'm quite
| thankful for that part, because it is a powerful skill to have
| developed for managing ideas.
|
| I have friends who are bad at handwriting, and who hate it and
| avoid it for that reason. Some of them claim that handwriting is
| a useless skill. I also have parents who are bad at typing, and
| who prefer handwriting for that reason. They do see the utility
| of touch typing, however.
|
| I know both well, and value both very highly. I maybe won't be so
| strict on my kids as to force them to learn a writing style
| designed for pens we no longer use, but will encourage them to
| try it, and to at least get comfortable with writing by hand.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| About all I end up sketching is geometry/trigonometry and
| that's exceedingly rare these days. Programming classes was
| math-heavy, but in more than 30 years of doing it for a living
| I've never used more than pretty simple math. Programming is
| far more logic than math. There have been a couple of occasions
| where calculus would have been useful--but googling the answer
| or brute-forcing the answer was far faster than scraping the
| rust off my calculus.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| I can read it with out issue but I use the computer so much that
| my handwriting has devolved to a mix of cursive and print, often
| in the same word
| Garlef wrote:
| To me, handwriting is in analogy to martial arts: You begin
| learning one style, but by the time you reached the higher ranks,
| you've basically created your own system.
| tibbetts wrote:
| Can confirm, my kids get letters at camp from their grandmother
| written in cursive and they basically cannot read them. They can
| puzzle out cursive when it is very neatly written, but casual
| cursive handwriting is frequently impenetrable.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| There are even Perl programmers who like to write out their code
| in cursive because typewritten Perl isn't hard enough for other
| people read.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Perl is a write-only language. I believe in making code
| readable. (And in the very rare situation where readable and
| efficient conflict and it matters I write the readable version
| as a comment to the efficient version.)
| johnnymorgan wrote:
| I could believe this is real..also Perl rules!
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Gen X here. Good riddance to what was obsolete fifty years ago.
| Quillbert182 wrote:
| I was taught how to read and write in cursive at school, and it
| was mandated that all non-math assignments were written in
| cursive from 3rd through 6th grades. I hate writing in cursive
| and have always found it slower and more cumbersome that block
| letters, and as a result, I haven't done it since other than for
| a select few things such as my signature.
| Foobar8568 wrote:
| Writing in cursive should be faster than block letters, the
| gesture is like a flow going forward, unless crossing t or dots
| on i/j once the word has been written.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| If you're right-handed.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It is definitely faster if you're well practiced in it. Not
| so much if you 99% of what you do is typing or "regular"
| written characters.
| jakzurr wrote:
| And they're not missing a darn thing. I mostly quit writing
| cursive over 40 years ago. I can still read by mom's letters, but
| it was tricky even way back then.
|
| I don't think it's that hard to learn to read it, if you're
| motivated. Sometimes I enjoy trying to read Old German script
| (think WWII period). And English cursive from 1700's and 1800's
| is interesting (but then so is the vocabulary and idioms), but I
| don't see the utility now, unless it's something you enjoy.
| theflyingelvis wrote:
| It's like a superpower. I can, with little effort, write notes
| that the 'kids' nowadays cannot read.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| evidently 1/3 still can, so don't be too overconfident.
| octokatt wrote:
| This. I take notes in neat block writing, but also slurred
| cursive when I need to make a personal note (such as "this
| sprint is going to fail miserably, no reqs gathered"), which is
| nice so I have a little private space for notes.
| ajuc wrote:
| Go one step further - develop your own script. It's
| surprisingly useful.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| ciphers are easily broken with frequency analysis. English
| always has a ton of E's
|
| encoding can be much faster than decoding, going more
| complicated to beat frequency analysis is just going to slow
| your own decoding/reading down
|
| Yes it does thwart people that should have already been
| bounced by the cultural expectation of not reading your
| journal, but it doesn't take a state actor to break it, just
| someone slightly above curious
| ajuc wrote:
| I'm aware (even if the one I'm using isn't a simple letter
| substitution, it's inspired by quenya and sanskrit).
|
| I created it for a tabletop rpg I'm running, my friends (a
| few programmers and a math major) couldn't decode it after
| a few weeks of trying without several hints and a few-
| pages-long sample, which is good enough for me. I've
| prepared a lot of puzzles for them, and this was
| significantly harder than a simple cipher with letter
| substitution, because even separating it into letters to
| feed it into frequency analysis isn't obvious.
|
| Of course if I used it for journals or sth like that it
| would be easy to crack, but I'm mostly using it to write
| very short notes.
|
| Have a crack if you want :) https://live.staticflickr.com/6
| 5535/52366236038_9b3a642015_b...
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Unless you're Christian Bok or reading Gadsby.
| agentultra wrote:
| I keep journals. Lots of them. Diaries, subject matter that I am
| learning, books I have read, letters I've never sent... but
| they're all written in cursive. I thought that my children might
| like to have them some day as a way for me to live on but if they
| can't read them, what use are they?
|
| Still I continue to write this way. Out of habit and training. I
| hope some people manage to keep it alive.
| JulianMorrison wrote:
| If they're studying history, they'll need to learn to read a
| whole bunch of weird, ancient, dead scripts - everything from
| cuneiform, to gothic black letters, to cursive. If they need it,
| they can go learn it.
|
| Most won't.
| ncpa-cpl wrote:
| > If they're studying history, they'll need to learn to read a
| whole bunch of weird, ancient, dead script
|
| I like when languages have lots of "backward compatibility"
|
| For example Spanish handwriting system hasn't changed much.
| Except perhaps it used to use more abbreviations.
|
| A couple of months I went to a museum and was able to read 400
| year old Spanish texts, and I can also grab a 200 year old book
| in Spanish and read it easily. As there have not been major
| Spelling or writing changes. With French I can even go further
| back.
|
| This is more difficult in German where older books used to be
| printed in Fraktur and handwriting starts getting very
| different in the early 1900s.
|
| I guess this gets more difficult in other languages like
| Mongolian, Turkish or Romanian which have undergone two or
| three different alphabet changes.
| pier25 wrote:
| I'm in my 40s and in the past 10 years I've only handwritten my
| name in a couple of forms.
|
| That said, learning to write by hand is very important for
| cognition because it develops fine motor control.
| coding123 wrote:
| "reading" cursive. It's the same letters except for a few
| differences and they are connected and slanted. I learned cursive
| in school (age 42) but anyone can look at it and with at least 4
| minutes of spare time can learn to read it. I swear our country
| spends more time trying to shock people than just getting
| through.
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