Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Penmanship

Something in this country is slowly fading into oblivion.

Cursive.

Now if hearing that makes your head spin and you suddenly feel very old, you're not alone. I suddenly felt like I was living in another era entirely, when people still rode bicycles with gigantic front wheels and waxed their moustaches.

Here's an excerpt from the story:
Today, written communication is increasingly being replaced by computer messages. And, while adding computer proficiency requirements, school districts across Texas and the nation are de-emphasizing cursive writing in elementary school training. In higher grades, teachers are seeing less work done in cursive and more in block lettering or on computer printouts...

Traditional penmanship, like calligraphy before it, is fast becoming a lost art.

Irma Webber, a fifth-grade teacher at Kiker Elementary School in Southwest Austin, said only two of her 29 students write in cursive, and few have traditional penmanship skills.

I'm not bemoaning the end of cursive, since I can hardly read my own cursive handwriting anyway, but it's the utter separation from the world that surprises me.

Here's a link to the full article:
http://tinyurl.com/dovdq.

By the way, since I hear shrieking kids out in the living room right now, it reminds me of a conversation I had with Gloria yesterday. She said that Eli 4.5 was going to have a play date.

"Where is this play date going to take place?"

"Here," she said.

"Didn't we just have a tractor pull or something here on Monday?" I asked.

"I think what you need is a satellite office," she said.

Site Meter