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Comment by throw0101c | Hacker News Reader

Is cursive (hand) writing still taught?

The province of Ontario brought it back in the curriculum for example:

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontar...

It is a political thing as much as anything. Some old people feel they learned it so it must be good and therefore kids today must learn it. Same with "new math" - I didn't learn this way it must be wrong, go back to the way I was taught since I know math. At no point is anyone asking if the new way is better or not. Nor are we asking if maybe the skill is obsolete and not worth learning. Or maybe it is a niche skill that most won't need and we are better off spending time with something else (like going to the playground). There are probably other good points to debate as well, but generally it comes down to old people teaching what they learned.

I do come down against teaching it. But then I never could read my own writing and am mad about all the trouble I got into in school for it (I have to credit the one teacher who did realize I wasn't lazy and tried to get experts to help me - but dysgraphia wouldn't exist for several more years so nothing came of his attempt). However I'm not clear if manual writing is obsolete for everyone or just me. Right note typing is a useful skill, but text to speech is making progress so maybe in a few years nobody will type and so teaching that skill was wasted.

My school spent a lot of effort teaching me WordPerfect because that is what industry used. A complete waste of time that I never used again. Anyone care to guess what will be useful or not?

> It is a political thing as much as anything. Some old people feel they learned it so it must be good and therefore kids today must learn it.

Some evidence to indicate it is useful:

* https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-athletes-way/202...

Maybe, or is that another thing that belongs to the replication crisis? Is it just cursive or is regular printing good enough? Is it hand writing or would learning to hunt with a sling also work? That article should bring a lot of questions of validity to mind and thus reasons to question if it is real or not. (of course the article is not the preponderance for scientific studies which I don't have access to)

Oh. My. God.

I had no idea that there was a term for my awful handwriting; I think I have dysgraphia, at least based on the Wikipedia-level reading I just did after reading your post. My handwriting isn't quite as inconsistent as the example on Wikipedia, but it's pretty close.

In fourth grade, my teacher called me aside and told me that I need to improve my handwriting or it would really hurt my career prospects. She wasn't being mean, her heart was in the right place, but no matter how hard I tried I was never able to significantly improve my handwriting.

Fortunately my fourth grade teacher was wrong, and I learned how to touch-type when I was fourteen, and I type pretty fast now, to a point where, outside of signing forms, I am not sure the last time I actually wrote something with a pen and paper...2021 I think?

> My school spent a lot of effort teaching me WordPerfect because that is what industry used.

I'm not sure which version of WordPerfect you used, but at least from the mid-90's and onward, a lot of those skills would transfer relatively well to Microsoft Word wouldn't they? I remembered WordPerfect being pretty similar to Office 2003.

> Same with "new math" - I didn't learn this way it must be wrong, go back to the way I was taught since I know math. At no point is anyone asking if the new way is better or not.

I mean, i think feneyman did have something to say about if it was better or not, and why.

Lots of people weighed in. The vast majority knew nothing about how kids learn or what is valuable. (this is on both sides of the debate, and there of course has been a lot of advancement in education in the 50-60 years since)

What is new math

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

My 2 cents, valid criticisms of new math are _vastly_ outnumbered by ones more in the form of "I wasn't taught that way and so my kids shouldn't be either" / any change is bad change type thinking. There is a lot of overlap in these criticisms with common core ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core ) which isn't particularly related.

Interestingly enough, at least some computer pioneers credited a part of their success to the New Math.

Apparently, learning to do arithmetic in other bases helps with computer programming. Who knew.

My parents did New Math, and I always thought it sounded pretty cool.

My elementary school math pretty much completely boiled down to doing arithmetic. A useful thing to know, obviously, but I always felt too much emphasis was placed on arithmetic when calculators are cheap and readily available.

It always seemed like planting the seeds of some more advanced math concepts would make math a lot more approachable.

> too much emphasis was placed on arithmetic when calculators are cheap and readily available.

I felt the same for a while. Until I realized my college math problems were all selected to make the arithmetic easy. Thus by doing all the arithmetic in my head I had a quick cheat on if I was right or not - wrong answers made for hard math and so I'd start over and thus fix the mistake.

The trick only worked for math though. Physics and chemistry often required harder math and so a calculator was needed to finish on time even when you did the problem right (which wasn't always a given)

I'm not saying that we stop teaching arithmetic, and I'm not even saying that we stop spending a majority of our time on teaching arithmetic, but I think that introducing more advanced concepts early could be a good use of time. It looks like New Math was basically that?

My kids learned it this way, and it was somewhat useful to show that we could arrive at the same solution using different methods.

It was a curriculum reform in the united states in the 60s that emphasized introducing abstract math concepts very early.

I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math

I dont think i have ever used cursive outside of the class teaching me cursive.

I think the problem is that modern ball point pens dont glide well, making it not a useful way to write.

Aside from very occasional drops into printing, I exclusively write in cursive. Once you get proficient you can write very fast with cursive -- regardless of the pen/pencil. Can other people read my writing? Yes, if I slow down. But if it's notes for me, then I can go easily double the speed I have with printing and it feels as "seamless" as touch typing.

It's mostly an issue with English cursive. A lot of styles are just not great.

In Eastern Slavic countries, you are expected to learn to write in cursive and use it in typical writing. Writing in block letters (outside of official forms) is considered to be a sign of illiteracy.

And it really is faster, once you get some practice.

I write cursive all the time and I've never had a problem with any pen, new or old.

Some people like handwriting notes. I know some that do that on tablets rather than paper though.

I have terrible handwriting so type whenever possible.

The only thing my kids have needed handwriting for (i.e. they did not have the option of typing) has been exams.

You do not have to use cursive for handwriting notes. What happens with young people (based on what teachers in my kids school said) is that they abandon cursive for handwriting the moment they can - and everyone basically invents own way of writing letters.

End result is worst then if they were taught handwriting that is not cursive, looks more like printed text and is easier to read and write.

I feel like most of my peers took handwritten notes, but most of them didn't write them in cursive (some did)

It did not even occur to me that people would take handwritten notes not in cursive.

I re-taught myself joined-up writing in my early-mid 20s, mainly because it looks nice. Get yourself a pack of Uni Jetstreams - they are not too expensive and glide about as well as any pen I've ever used.

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