When Sara Singh began mulling whether to teach her third-graders cursive writing, a problem arose: She didn't know pure cursive because she doesn't write that way.
There's a big part of the problem. Teachers who evidently aren't educated enough to teach! I'm assuming this teacher is at least in her 20's......which means she was educated during the 80's & 90's (traditional elementary through high school). Where was the teacher that should have taught her how to write in cursive??
Also, why are they waiting until 3rd or 4th grade to teach these kids to write longhand?? I learned in 2nd grade, shortly after learning how to print in Kindergarten and 1st grade. In fact, I had a head start, as my mother was a 2nd grade teacher before she married and started the brood that ended up being my two sisters, my brother and myself. We were on vacation the summer between my 1st & 2nd grade schoolyears, and having long boring driving time every day, my Mom asked me if I wanted to start learning how to write cursive (which might explain why my cursive handwriting is actually readable, unlike my brothers! :laugh: ).
This is a lot like when I was in high school, and if you wanted to take science past the one year they required for graduation (at that time), you had to take a course where calculators weren't allowed. Instead, we learned how to calculate using
sliderules!! :shocked: Why did they do that, especially since the following years when you'd take chemistry and physics you'd get to use a calculator?? Because they wanted us to learn the old methods, which taught us not only some shortcuts in making calculations, but also how to
think. Unfortunately, in the following 30 years since I took that course as a freshman in high school, I've lost the talent to perform mathmatical calculations with a sliderule (let's face it, windows calculator is just a click away). But my pencil & paper calculations, plus my "do it in my head" calculations, are a lot stronger now because of that "back to the basics" learning I did back then.
So if you have nice penmanship now, thank your teachers. If you don't, it's because of the "oh well" attitude that's taken over too much of our educational system in the past quarter century.