Cursive needed?

activities, education, Languages

Is cursive necessary?  My husband and I go back and forth on it.  I actually even use the script font sometimes on my computer.  Part of that though is the fact that my handwriting is really bad.  I suspect we all want to eliminate the things that we aren’t personally good at, and add more of our favorites.

Seeing a graphic on facebook of a teachers note saying stop writing in cursive – you have had several warnings originally made me wonder if the teacher herself doesn’t know how to read cursive, but it’s probably more that she doesn’t want to encourage cursive that isn’t part of the school’s learning plan.  In my opinion some schools today try to keep students together in their learning. Almost a teach to the middle, but there are mandated programs for students lagging behind.  Students that are ahead are given busy work to keep them occupied while teachers work with their peers.

Cursive though! Do we need cursive in the schools.  Cursive is something that in most cases I’m sure could be eliminated and the students wouldn’t notice.  The top students would pick it up on their own and the slower students would never miss it.  That being said, I’m convinced that cursive like learning another language or working on art can help develop new pathways in the brain.  It has been shown that learning more languages helps develop pathways for math which also ties to music. (I would almost bet someone could do a study showing that adding cursive directly correlates also in the same way as a new language….)

I’ve seen schools add everything from sign language to Chinese.  In grade school I personally learned the sign language alphabet, just because I wanted to – and I haven’t used it, other than one time to figure out what the drawings on my son’s school playground equipment say.  On the other hand, I’ve been working on transcribing notes from a journal and have been using cursive daily…. not to mention I use it in my own day calendar everyday.  Yes I could print, but for me I don’t….

Another language is also great! I personally have taken Spanish and French in high school, my oldest took Latin, Chinese, and Japanese, and my middle took spanish… (hubby took German).  Having a language is a good thing, but I don’t think these should be mutually exclusive.  One of the documents I want to translate was in Italian but Italian cursive.

There are several apps available to help with learning cursive writing. Several of these look good, but you can also search cursive and find more.  We haven’t started working on cursive at our house with my youngest yet, but this debate has brought it back to my attention and I plan to add it to the list of things to work on here at home.