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Food for Thought on Cursive and More
I read this article a while back and kept thinking about to the point I decided to make a post. Here’s a link to the study it cites, for those who want to go straight to the source (and have the patience to read it).
The short summary is that writing cursive is better for your brain and its development. However, I’m aware of some (and I believe it’s a small number) of schools dropping the teaching of cursive as outdated in favor of teaching “keyboarding” (distance learning because of COVID didn’t help).
Then, I started thinking about how some schools are no longer teaching how to tell time from a clock with hands. Then there is the debate on whether or not rote memorization of the math tables is worthwhile when kids are using calculators — or rote memorization of anything, for that matter. (Aside: One of my happiest memories in College was when I convinced my parents to buy me an HP-35 for Christmas.)
And now English majors at some major universities can get their degree without a single course in Shakespeare.
Is education doomed? Why did it take CRT, wokism, and sexual assaults to wake parents up into getting more involved in their kids’ education?
Published in Education
We are becoming the Eloi. I knew a woman in Michigan who went to the U of Michigan in the 70s and has a degree in English. She had never read a Shakespeare play (we read two of them in 7h and 8th grade, and most of the rest in high school.) This was already going on in the 70s. It started the minute the Woodstock hippies got out of college and began teaching.
Very interesting! I didn’t read the study but in my own experiences, and those of my friends, writing notes by hand (not on computer) seems to have at least a lot of anecdotal evidence backing it up. It definitely connects one to one’s own thoughts more. I get why note taking on computer is important (the sheer volume one can write down quickly can have its own benefits, but probably not outweighed by writing notes down by hand if you don’t go back and study your notes). Our teacher banned laptops in class (except for those with disabilities) and I had to take all my econ notes by hand it was certainly a better experience.
I don’t know the specific pathways that drive “writing effects” (let’s call it) but certainly there are less distractions. Writing makes me read and think about my notes in a way that is more conscious than when I take notes by computer. They are also more specific since I have to economize. When I teach, I notice students are in a rush to copy down my slides and that can’t be the best way to gain or retain knowledge (I try to not make them busy to avoid that but they copy even though I tell them it will be posted and they don’t need write everything down!).
I can’t speak to all of education. I’m a little biased but my experience has generally been moderate to positive. There are a lot of things I’d like the students to do, and there is a lot of self-selection but there are a lot of students who can be whipped into shape.
Unless they are working on something else (we’ve all had to do it) people who go to hear presentations all take their notes by hand or just sit and listen. That’s been my experience. There’s probably something to it. Glad to have a study backing that up!
I think probably not reading Shakespeare would be the far exception rather than the norm but its been ages since I’ve been in an English class. Most Mich students will almost certainly have to do Shakespeare. I didn’t care for him so I’m jealous she got to avoid him (if she truly had never read him at all).
Agreed. As a graduate student years ago I taught a section of Econ 101. I had a student come to the office for extra help. He was a college sophomore. We were working some problems at the blackboard. One step required division of 100 by 15. He didn’t know how to do it. It’s not that he did it quickly and got it wrong…he did not know how to proceed to get an answer without a calculator. Long division was a complete mystery. Even how to make a guesstimate was an unknown to him. He graduated from a NY high school so he must have taken and passed the NY State Regents exam. I was slack-jawed. His peers from Korea and India and Taiwan were facile with calculus and differential equations. He struggled with 4th grade math. As it turned out … he was not alone. Probably 25% of the US students were unprepared for college math.
Exactly. Looking backward (into the 70s) it seems to me that the field of education never met a fad that it didn’t like. My favorite was putting animals (dogs, cats, etc.) into the classrooms because they had a “soothing” effect on the students (along with the Ritalin, I assume).
Any parents who objected to these fads and/or the dumbing down of the curriculum were dismissed as ignorant by the high priests of the teaching establishment. Now, 50 years later, parents are finally banding together. If they are not successful, then I would advocate for the elimination of public schools.
I believe there are real connections between manual skills and intellectual understanding. The person who uses his hands to do stuff tends to develop a sense of the possible and the reality of the physical world. I’m not talking about the Bohemian “artsy” types. I think the person who can build a chicken coop (Looking at you @she ) tends to think things through better than someone who only builds castles in the air.
They are still doing the animal thing. My wife went back to college to retool. One of the students brought in her support lama. Yes, I said that. The university let her bring her pet lama into class on a regular basis.
The differences between the US students and a lot of foreign students in the area of math is generally huge. There are plenty of domestic students who do math exceedingly well but comparing your modal US student to your modal foreign student, especially the countries you mentioned, is very deflating. I’m not a math whiz by any stretch but it is deflating. I don’t know what it is (I haven’t thought deeply about it, to be sure, but I don’t know what it is. Could it be a pure failure of pedagogy? It isn’t impossible. Regardless, something positive has to be done.)
Hope they have a tenured professor clean up the llama crap…
I think it had a diaper. If not there are all those illegals doing the work liberals do not want to do.
The best US students are the equal of the best anywhere. And, to be fair, I likely only saw the best foreign students. Who else would travel to America to study? So it’s a biased sample. But if kids are kids … most will take the path of least resistance. If they are not challenged to excel and disincentivised when expectations are unmet, they will lag behind.
I agree with all of that. I must admit I hadn’t checked the stats in a while. I think self-selection aside, there are a lot of ways of characterizing some of these numbers for our high-school(ish) students. One way to look at it is that on average, we are (historically) consistently below but not very far behind math scores compared to the rest of the OECD (on average). Our 15 year olds have consistently lagged on the math PISA. So the gap is there but not as deflating as I thought. We are below the average. (Anecdotally: It is department specific but my stats class (math department) was basically all Asian students, and it was a reasonably large class.) What you say about the expectations seems right. I think challenging students is important. It was for me.
I checked this since I hadn’t looked at the numbers in a while:
https://thejournal.com/articles/2019/12/05/pisa-u.s.-students-flat-in-math-science.aspx
I’m fascinated by the point of the research referenced…that the act of writing augments learning. I know that for myself that is absolutely true. Doing math is inextricably linked to the scratching of pencil on yellow legal pad. As a student, in the evening after class I’d re-copy my sloppy in-class notes and that process really cemented the class work in my head. I always put it down to me being a visual learner … but maybe it’s something else? Maybe it’s the act of physically engaging with the concepts by writing? Maybe the writing just slows the whole process down so you can actually think about what you are writing?
On a separate but maybe related topic relevant to the adult world of business, there was a fairly recent study indicating that Powerpoint presentations actually make participants dumber. When presented information in purely written format vs purely oral presentation vs a speaker using a Powerpoint visual deck, participants retained less information from the PowerPoint presentations than from the purely written or poorly oral presentation.
I can’t say that the not being able to tell time on an analog clock will be the demise of the world, but people who can read analog clocks can process the information for which they are looking at a clock faster than those who can read only a digital clock. Most of the time the reason we look at a clock is to have an idea of how much more time until some event or deadline, or how much time has passed since something. A person looking at an analog clock can determine that almost immediately because they’re not really “reading” the details of the clock, they’re getting their information from the relative positions of the hands. A person reading a digital clock must first read the specific numbers displayed, and then perform some mental calculations to get the information the person really needs.
In defense of memorizing arithmetic tables, with such information tucked into the brain, a person can make “guesstimates” that are quite helpful in certain circumstances, such as making a preliminary decision on how much a project or event will cost, or whether the bill just received from the restaurant / hotel / car repair facility / etc. is “about right.” Also, do you really want to pull out your phone calculator every time to calculate the tip for the waitress?
Although I never liked memorizing a lot of historical details, memorizing certain historical information is helpful just to keep broader conceptual information in some type of structured order so it can be useful.
Funny coincidence – I just watched a video about London cabbies in which the presenter noted that supposedly studies have verified that certain parts of the brain are more highly developed in London cabbies than in most other people, presumably because of the amount of information cabbies are required to learn (memorize?) as part of the licensing process. Perhaps the very act of memorizing helps brain development that contributes to other capabilities.
Yes, I agree. A digital clock gives you a point in time without regard for it relationship to any other points in time. But an analog clock immediately tells you the time in relation to half the day, or more like, the entire waking day.
Shakespeare himself would probably think it strange to devote time to reading his plays. As plays they were meant to be seen in a theater, with the actors playing the parts.
I enjoyed reading the language he used, but didn’t catch on to a lot of the meaning until a friend was in a local “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and I went to most of the rehearsals and all of the nights it was performed.
I didn’t really enjoy Shakespeare. I can admit that based on some of the notes and having to encounter it in a college course there was more depth than high-school me saw when I had to read it but that’s it. For some reason I ended up having to read Moby Dick several times and ended up realizing that it was a pretty good book, at least after reading it and a commentary in the back of the book.
I like using PowerPoint so that I can show images and maps.
When I taught 4th grade for 24 years, the incoming students always were eager to learn cursive. Many of them were able to improve their handwriting tremendously because it was more controlled and not as herky-jerky as “printing” is. Those new 4th graders considered writing in cursive to be a sign of not being a little kid anymore. My last few years I realized that keyboarding is essential, but I still taught cursive because they loved it!
Thanks, @joelb! I agree, and am grateful to have been raised to think there’s something both useful and salvific in working with, and through, one’s hands.
“Keyboarding” is a great leveler in that it removes the stigma of illegibility from one’s handwriting. This, in turn, removes any whiff of inequality among students whose handwriting may be deemed “better,” or “worse,” and which could be improved by application and effort, something an awful lot of people in many different age groups seem allergic to these days. Most spelling howlers can be auto-corrected, and although this sometimes leads to interesting grammatical and syntactical mistakes of its own, fewer and fewer people seem to care. (This is the point at which I usually get an unsettling frisson of “good grief, despite all my best efforts, I have turned into my mother!” vibe.)
I find the lack of intellectual (not implying an elite intellectualism, just the exercising of one’s brain) curiosity, at a time when there are so many resources available to satisfy it, very disheartening. As I do the lack of imagination when it comes to teaching and learning.
As both @fullsizetabby and @flicker have pointed out, a person gets much more information from an analog clock in terms of proportions, fractions, and ratios, parts and wholes. Even if one doesn’t have a single analog clock in the house (I have several) there’s utility and understanding that comes with learning how to tell time by one.
When she was very young, my granddaughter and I would bake cakes together. I’d get out the smallest measuring cups and spoons that could be used in the recipe, and we’d learn fractions–if a recipe said “1 1/3 cup of something-or-other” and all you had was a 1/3 cup measure, then how many times would you have to fill it to get to where you needed to be? The same with spoonsful. That, and the chemistry lessons (yeast, baking powder, etc) and the changes of state (from liquid to solid through cooking, etc) made the whole process of such “women’s work” an interesting scientific experiment.
On a strictly personal level, I recall as a child being in awe of my mother’s cursive handwriting and could hardly wait to “unlock” its hieroglyphics. In my mind, learning cursive was a gateway toward becoming a grown-up. Once it was introduced (in third grade, if I recall correctly), I devoted myself to perfecting my handwriting. Little did I know that as a southpaw this would be no mean feat. But my diligence paid off. I developed what was considered a very mature script for someone so young. My biggest obstacle–both then and now–is the lefty smudge. I never learned to write with a hooked arm to avoid it.
So, yeah, I lament the loss of this skill for generations of young people, whose handwriting seems to reflect a certain immaturity and a deficit in confidence.
This is my 31st (and final) year teaching in public schools (chemistry and physics). This has been a hot topic for several years, especially with the integration of personal devices such as chromebooks and IPads for each student in the classroom. It is rare, in education, to see a study confirm what we see experientially. I would have a high degree of confidence in this study’s findings.
My relationship with handwriting is odd. I am old enough that there was a “penmanship” element in my second and third grade. I was terrible at it. My cursive is illegible. Finally I ended up writing in all caps, which I have done ever since, even my signature. That wasn’t from a hatred of cursive or manual writing. In fact, I was given a printing press at age 12, got very interested in typography, and made a study of calligraphy even though I couldn’t do it without templates. By the time I was in high school I was running a printing business out of my basement, setting business cards and wedding invitations in lead type and running a treadle-operated press. I can still load a composing stick out of a California job case. And my handwriting is still all caps if I expect to be able to read it later.
In my Awana class, I encourage the kids who struggle with memorization to write the verses. Even if they don’t understand, the writing down of it lodges it into the brain better. It sticks with them.
I am a hand note person. I use technology out of necessity, but I prefer the control of organization I have when writing things out by hand. Most of the time, when I’m stuck on a code solution for a program, I’ll settle down with pencil and paper to really think through the problem, draw it out, make diagrams, flow charts, etc. I’ve tried doing the same in PowerPoint, but that is better for documenting what I’ve already figured out and not brainstorming.
Not possible to eliminate government education but here is the better alternative: eliminate the requirement to enroll in the school chosen for you. Open enrollment across the district plus charter schools would go a long way to cleaning up the mess because introducing competition would mean existing schools would have to improve or die. Hard to do but not impossible.
Not to worry. Cursive will be back in the form of Mandarin pictographs.
Exactly. Put in broader terms, the hippies eventually became The Establishment they railed against in the 60s and 70s, so now it’s “We’re the experts, we’re in charge, what we say goes, and that’s final.”
College used to be the place where ridiculous theories could be taught, and the professors were protected by tenure an academic freedom. Now, professors who try to teach normal things are hounded and threatened to the point they get their tenure revoked.
Two unique things about humans are our faces and our hands. Okay, three if you throw in our brains, but our faces and hands help us develop our brains.