Well this is interesting: our 15 y/o daughter was never taught cursive writing. But today we got a notice from our 10 y/o son’s teacher they will learn cursive this year. I welcome the change. Same school district. 🏫 🖊

@ronguest That feels kind of late (thought my memory certainly fails here), but definitely better late than never IMO. Though the number of practical applications may be on the decline, I still think it’s a valuable skill to have.

@ronguest It was a bit ironic when the school had forms the kids were supposed to sign - but they hadn’t taught the kids how to write cursive...

I recently found my high school chemistry lab notebook. I was surprised to see it was all written in cursive and highly legible. My current handwriting is awful. My kids didn’t believe it was my handwriting 😃

@ronguest My third-grader is learning cursive this year, but it is a curriculum decision that our district leaves to the individual teacher. My guess is that a lot of teachers would be happy to have it as part of their classes, but have to balance that against stated-mandated testing and the pressures (explicit or otherwise) to teach to the tests.

@ronguest That's coz the State Board of Education added it to the TEKS standards for elementary schools in 2017

@vasta I think you could still learn it. I can still remember practicing loops. This website makes it look pretty easy. The original book is also available in the Internet Archive.

@vasta I'm of the opinion that cursive is actually an objectivly bad way to write. The loops at the top of letters make them difficult for humans to quickly read without extra effort, and the way peoples handwriting tends to degrade when writing quickly amplifies the problem. slate.com/human-int...

I found learning cursive somewhat torturous in school and never got very good at it, and have never found it to be particularly important. (We were told for several years that "next year" we would be required to write everything in cursive, but that never actually happened. Print, or Italics are much more readable by everyone, and given how bad my handwriting is anyway cursive would make it unreadable even to me!

@vasta - I should clarify: the loops at the top are not in and of themselves hard to read, it's just that it makes the top half (and often the bottom too!) of lots of letters all look the same, which makes it much more difficult to distinguish them quickly. With most people's handwriting you end up with a bunch of slightly different loops that you have to look at carefully to distinguish. (Also I think something got messed up in that URL when I posted it. lets try it again: slate.com/human-int...) I don't think there's anything wrong with working on penmanship, but I don't think cursive itself is important or even really a good use of students time. I've been really interestd in learning the Italics based writing system mentioned in that article for a while now though. That sounds like a method of writing that is both easy on the writer and legible for the reader.

@vasta I (still) haven’t had time to listen to the podcast yet, but I had seen a few stories on the local news late last year or early this year mentioning various mental/developmental benefits of cursive (which sounds like where the podcast is going) and how some parents were signing their children up for private cursive classes, given the absence of them in the school curriculum.

My handwriting is terrible all-around (I come from a long line of men with poor handwriting, and no amount of women with amazing handwriting marrying in has done anything to improve it!) and has continued to degrade from disuse, but I have noticed that when trying to write at the same speed as my brain is outputting thoughts, my hand hurts far less with cursive than when printing…. // @ronguest