34 THE SATURDAY EVENING POST March/April 2008

DO WE REALLY NEEDCUfRSIVE WRITING?

With the rise of elecironic communications, even less time is being devoted to teachinghandwriting in our schools. 77ie written art may be an endangered species.

by Caitlin CarpenterUlustration by Norman Rockwell

Second-grade teacher Diane Ar-ciero waves her hand—draped in

a homemade, white bunny puppet—from side to side in time lo "If You'reHappy and You Know 11" playing onlier classroom's CD player. As thesong reaches its familiar refrain, the24 students in her class at Boston'sHugh R, O'Donnell Elementai-y Schooljoin in singing with her and the bun-ny: "Where do you start your letter?At the topi" they shout, pointing indexlingers in the air in unison.

It's hardly the handwriting instruc-tion most American adults grew upwith, but cursive traditionalists arehappy to see any type of instruc- 'lion. Their revered written art is anendangered species given the rise ofcomputers, the growing proportion ofclass time spent preparing forstandardized tests, and theincreasing perception thatcursive writing is a diffi-cult and pointless exercise.Yet new evidence suggeststhere are benefits to master-ing this skill—including higher SATscores—^that don't appear until longafter traditional Instruction ends infifth grade. It's a controversial claim.

Cursive's proponents point to less-practical benefits as well. The roman-tic allure, for one, "When you look inMartha Stewart Weddings magazine,you don't .see printed invitations."says Janie Cravens, who taught for25 years in Alabama and Georgia."Despite what many people seem tothink these days, there's still demandfor calligraphers and people who eanwrite in cursive beautifully." She isa vice president of the InternationalAssociation of Master Penmen. En-grossers, and Teachers of Handwritingbased in Webster, New York.

"You still need to be able to write asignature and a personal thank-younote as well as read cursive," saysCathy Van Haute, a pédiatrie occupa-

www.saturdaijvuen ingpos t.com

tional consultant. "You can't tell meeveryone has easy access to a com-puter."

Robert Martin, principal ofO'Donnell Elementary, agrees, "It's adangerous path to go down if the onlyway you can communicate or recordinformation is electronically or vtnthprinted letters. Cursive teaches thingslike how letters connect and a dif-ferent type of hand-eye coordinationthat's important."

Cursive enthusiasts also point torecent College Board data on the newwriting section of the SATs, intro-duced in 2006. The data indicate thatthe 15 perceni of students who wrotetheir essay in cursive did slightlybetter than those who used someother type of handwriting. Cursiveproponents say this is because those

ivriting in cursive could write faster,allowing them lo write longer essays.

Steve Graham is skeptical of sucha conclusion. The special educationprofessor at Vanderbilt University inNashville, Tennessee, says. "It's likesaying there's been a rise in peanut

butter sales in New York and arise in mental illness, therefore

peanut butter causes mentalillness," he says.

Professor Graham saysthe issue isn't what kindof handwriting is taught,but thai children learn to

be fluent in some type oftranscription. He pointsÍO studies where twogroups of people weregiven the same essay tograde. One group got anessay writien in poor,

liut legible handwriting;the other, an essay in more

attractive handwriting (notnecessarily cursive). The essay

with the more attractive hand-writing received a hetter grade.

But the most efficient way foranyone, including children, to recordtheir thoughts. Graham says, is ata keyboard. He recommends moreelementary schools buy computerswith keyboards designed for children'shands. Typing should be a key waythat children communicate.

"Your hands aren't fast enough tokeep up with your mind," Grahamsays, "especially for a first graderwho can write between nine and 18letters a minute. Typing uses a differ-ent, slightly easier motor skill. If theyspend less time thinking about theirhandwriting and more time writing,they will have longer compositionsand better grammar and planning."

Others share this sentiment thatteaching cursive should not be sacro-sanct .

"Schools are reflective of our society

THE SJITURDJIY EVENING POST 35

in general," says Barbara Wilier, deputyexecutive director of the National As-sociation for the Education of YoungChildren, an advocacy group in Wash-ington, D.C. "We spend less time doingthings like writing notes to each other,since there are other tools available to

us to communicate,and curriculumsneed to reflectthat."

Kate Gladstoneis a "handwritingrepair experi" inNew York. She isnot surprised tosee cursive goingthe way of the

dinosaur, with only 15 percent of adultsusing cursive after high school. She'snot disappointed. She disagrees with theidea that students should first learn toprint and then to write in cursive.

"You don't teach some English byfirst teaching them Chinese." Ms. Glad-stone says, "We need to decide whatthe best way to handwrite is and justteach that."

That does not sit well with cursivetraditionalists. "Handwriting is anemotionally charged issue." Gladstone

i^lain to the eye andgracefully combined

^o train the muscle andinform the mind. "

adds. "1 get letters from people callingme anti-American because I don't likewhat they think of as 'proper' cursive."

Gladstone promotes italic cursive,which she says is the fastest, mostnatural, and most easily readable formof handwriting. It's also the easiest andquickest to teach children, she says.She also claims it's the fastest-growingway to teach handwriting: 7 percentof students are learning this method,compared with one percent ten yearsago. For homeschoolers. that number isone in three, she says.

She recommends that traditional cur-sive be an elective children could takeañer elementary school if they wanted to.

That idea has no appeal forO'Donnell Eiementary's Dr. Martin.Back when he was a middle-school

see Cursive Writing on page 81

Landmarks in Handwriting History200 B.C. Tliefirst comic sketchabout bad handwriting appears, in tin-play Pseudolus by the Roman comedian TitusMacdus Plautus, Pseudolus attempts to reada letter handed him by his friend Calidoms;"By Hercules. 1 beg you. " the exasperated reader gasps, "do even hens have hands likethese? For indeed a hen wrote these letters."

780 A.D. The illiterate HolyRoman Emperor Charlemagnetries to master handwriting and ^Mexiriccy.hcix^cÇ f^x:

Jails. According to I he emperor's biog-rapher. Einhard. Charlemagne kept tablets and blanks in his bed under his pillow sohe could practice forming letters in his leisure hours. "However, as he did not begin hisefforts in due season, but late In life, they met with ill success." Under Charlemagne,however, a new, easier way to read script called Caroline minuscule spread throughoutEurope and became the basis of modern cursive handwriting.

1300 Black letter, also known as Gothic scrípt. supplants Carolineminuscule. Increased literary calls for speeding upproduction of copied texts such as the Bible, and blackletter, a script derived from earlier Roman forms of writ-ing, is speedier than minuscule.

14G0 Roman typeface is developed forthe newly invented printing press. But it isa misnomer. Early Renaissance humanists believedGothic to be a barbaric hand and took Caroline mi-nuscule manuscripts to be thoroughly classic andtrue Roman. Thus Caroline minuscule became a basisfor "Roman" type, and minuscule survived for another600 years.

] Y44 The twelve-year old George Wash-ington copies out the Rules oJ Civility toimprove his handwriting.

mt iUH>lfqucr iikv ben 3

PETRI BEMBI DE AETNA ADANCELVMCHABRIELEM

LIBER.FAÍlumamtbiípücrKcft,« qitifiem fc-dulo Angcl(.';quocl ineiiimifTc rc ccrtofi:io;ut fni(fliis (hi<iianim aoftronim,.

11 bcres,icinpcT nbd d k b

'^'•••"'•

1848 The Golden Age of AmericanPenmanship begins. Platt Rogers Spencer, an Ohio teacher and civic reformer andthe "Falher of American Penmanship," develops the Spencerian method to improvehandwriting and business communication. GoodhandviTiting evolves into a personal virtue and an ar-duous exercise for schoolchildren.

Handwriting Déjà Vu. Perhaps the hand-writing crisis is not so new. after all. In a September10,1955, Posi article, "Why Our Kids Can't Write. " au-thor Theodore Irwin chronicled an epidemic of illegiblehandwriting that was then gripping America.

WhyOur Kid«

Cant Write

Cursive writing reaches the moon.The signatures of Neil Armstrong, Mit hael Collins.Edwin Aldrin. Jr., and President Richard M. Nixon areaffixed on a plaque on the moon's surface. The mostlegible of the four is President Nixon's.

Cursive Writing

continued from page 35

principal, he realized many studentscouldn't read cursive, let alone write it."I said. "If I ever get to be an elemen-lary-school principal. I'm doing some-thing about this.'" he says. That's whyhe recently introduced HandwritingWithout Tears and the "magic bunny"to his school, which he found to be aneffective and fun method.

'We're used to thinking about nunsrapping Ihe knuckles of kids whocouldn't write the perfectly shaped let-ters," he says. "1 remember when I wasa kid, we had the Palmer Method." Herecalls the rote cursive instruction imdcopying upper- and lower-case letterspinned to a board at the front of theclassroom.

The Palmer and Zaner-Bloser pen-manship met_hods n.iled the day fordecades. Students spent 45 minutesevery day on handwriting. Penmanshipwas a separate grade on report cards.Today, handwriting instniction mightget 10 or 15 minutes a lew times aweek. Keyboarding skills are taughtmuch earlier now.

But in this era of standardizedtesting. Gladstone says, teachersneed to train their charges to expressthemselves with a pen or pencil. Thatmeans italic cursive to her.

"Students need to be able to writeabout 100 letters a minute on thesetests." she says, "but I know a lot ofhigh schoolers can only do 30 perminute."

It may be too late to halt cursive'sdecline. Fewer and fewer teachers todayknow how to write cursive themselves.

"I've actually seen teachers givecursive instruction by saying, "Justfollow the book,'" Gladstone says."And when a child asks the teacherto demonstrate it herself, she'll say.Til try. but Im really not so good atthis." How can we expect kids to learncursive if teachers have trouble withit?" A recent study Graham conductedon handwriting instruction found thatonly 12 percent of teachers had takena course in how to teach handwriting.

Instead of focusing on what type ofhandwriting is best, Graham suggeststhat schools concentrate on impro\angstudents' handwriting, period, what-ever it is.

"Two out of three kids in this coun-try do not write well enough for theirclassroom work," he says. "Handwrit-ing is a small part of the overall writ-ing picture." »

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