this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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It's great that you had good experiences but I think if you dig through a few threads on the topic, you will see a LOT of people reporting very bad memories and even trauma around how cursive is taught. Not everyone can learn cursive and even if we had the resources to identify the large number of students who will never be able to write cursive, it is still alienating and degrading to de-stream them. And in the end, there is no significant benefit to merit the tens or hundreds of hours spent drilling letter forms. That extremely valuable time could have been spent doing something useful.
Bad experiences around bad teachers will exist regardless of whether cursive is taught, though. Teachers aren't perfect.
I didn't say anything about bad teachers. My criticisms are still valid even if assuming teachers are perfect.
Was this something specific to cursive?
I'm not surprised that kids would've had awful experiences, especially because this is a skill that takes time to develop, and time is often the thing in the shortest supply when it comes to teaching kids.
But you wrote your post like there was something particularly unique to the awful experiences had with learning cursive writing. I wasn't expecting that. Does it have to do with how you can 'get away' with messing handwriting in math or even in English, but when you're being graded on the appearance of cursive letters, any fine motor skills a child is struggling with gets piled on?
No, it has to do with the fact that ability to acquire fine motor skills vary a great deal between individuals and many students simply cannot learn to write at what educators consider an acceptable level of quality, no matter how many hours you force them to do lines, no matter how many times you tell them they are sloppy, or lazy, or stupid. They simply cannot do it, any more than a one-legged student can do the triple jump. But unfortunately these students and their unique needs are hard to detect and mostly they are just stigmatized as slow or difficult.
I don't know if you understand how harmful and undermining it is to be set up to fail like that. It's cruel. Once upon a time, it might have been worthwhile overall that some students had to suffer that, but it no longer is.
We just do not have the facilities to address the unique needs and very common disabilities of children, we've gutted all of that. If you want to teach cursive, how about we first start supporting students with disabilities. That's something parents SHOULD be upset about. This is just bullshit distraction, because it's designed to be a bullshit distraction.
Sorry I took so long to reply! I'm still not used to Lemmy. :P
That was an excellent answer. I imagine it's further compounded by how kids are sorted into grades, with someone being born very late to the grade's cut-off having a disadvantage to someone born many months earlier/at the start of the cut-off.
From what you wrote, I'm almost persuaded to think that it's something kids should be taught in school, but far later. I'm back on the boat of having calligraphy classes offered in high school as electives. The trouble is, once I suggest that, I feel like it's setting myself up to be argued into having it at a much younger age and as a mandatory part of education, which puts us right back into the problems you listed out. :(