Florida Bill Would Require Cursive Instruction in Elementary Schools (nbcmiami.com)
- Reference: 0180107101
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/17/1434243/florida-bill-would-require-cursive-instruction-in-elementary-schools
- Source link: https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/florida-bill-would-require-cursive-instruction-in-elementary-schools/3721824/
> Elementary-school students would have to learn [1]how to write in cursive , under a bill set to be vetted by a House committee next week. Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, filed a similar proposal (SB 444) on Monday. The House Student Academic Success Subcommittee is set to review the measure (HB 127) on Nov. 18.
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> Sponsored by Rep. Toby Overdorf, R-Palm City, the bill would require cursive instruction in second through fifth grades. The proposal, filed for consideration for the legislative session that begins Jan. 13, also would require students to demonstrate proficiency in cursive by the end of fifth grade.
[1] https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/florida-bill-would-require-cursive-instruction-in-elementary-schools/3721824/
It a guidebook... (Score:1, Troll)
How to watch republicans piss away taxpayer money on utterly useless crap, trying to get back to a past that time forgot...
Re: It a guidebook... (Score:4, Insightful)
I used to think cursive writing was pointless, but my son's teacher told us that it helped with developing fine motor control, particularly in children that had below average motor control.
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We have video games for that now... And 99% of communication and writing, is now done on a computer. STEM is where its at. From Google on Cursives original purpose - "The original purpose was to meet the practical needs of a time before modern tools, allowing for rapid transcription by minimizing pen lifts, which helped prevent ink from drying out and reduced the fragility of quills." We haven't used quills in a good bit. Just sayin.
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FWIW, my most useful "STEM" notes are in hand-written cursive .
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I can type 240wpm.... Older PC's system buffers, would still be spitting out text up to a minute after I am done typing. Cursive just can't do that. Shorthand maybe. Cursive, no. Its a dead skill that has been surpassed in purpose ten fold. Decades ago. It hjas zero business still having millions of dollars spent on it. If parents want their kids to know it, teach it to them yourself. Its free, and doesn't cost me a % of my paycheck. ;-)
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And YES, even at 240, you still have the occasional Typo ;-D
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Cool. You got the millions this will cost on deck then I assume? YOU YOU YOU? That's millions of tax dollars, on a skill nobody uses anymore. YOU, can pay it. Right? ;-D
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Useless? I use Cursive daily!
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Wow, you clearly have some personal problem with cursive. Did someone make fun of you for having bad handwriting?
Get over it. It's not teaching people how to write with a quill pen here. Cursive writing is still everywhere. It's still a useful skill.
Re: It a guidebook... (Score:1)
â¦you say as you type on a QWERTY keyboard, which was designed to keep typewriters from jammingâ¦
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You don't need raw speed for notes, you need meaningful notes.
This is a skill that relies on hand writing and no amount of mad 2-finger typing skills replaces it.
But I can see how you don't know it.
World's fastest typist (Score:3)
Unless you are using a stenographers keyboard, I'm calling 100% BS on this comment. 240 wpm would put you in world record territory.
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It's a typo. He probably meant 40 ... or 24 ... either way, he sucks at typing and should just learn cursive.
Re: It a guidebook... (Score:5, Informative)
You are just quoting pop-psychology. Go look at some actual research. My wife is a school psychologist. Kids' performance in fine motor skill tasks have fallen drastically, while video gaming has been going up. The lack of instruction in writing in schools is a significant contributor to this problem.
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It doesn't even make sense. Mashing discrete buttons requires very little precision. It might require reflexes and fast-twitch muscle fiber movement, but those aren't even the muscles used for fine control, I don't think.
Re: It a guidebook... (Score:1)
It's exactly video games and typing that got kids with lesser motor skills. So I'm taking your comment as sarcasm.
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Note-taking for memory/learning is much better handwritten. In fact, I never studied in college but on tests I could remember the layout and some of the contents of my handwritten notes without even seeing them a second time. That muscle movement is a second path to memory formation. So jotting something down you need later can actually help you not to need the written note later.
Today, I still keep track of my to-do lists on handwritten paper so that I can remember them.
For actual communication, I even h
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Hey it's Florida - they don't do STEM!
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There are many other ways to help develop fine motor controls that don't involve learning antiquated writing techniques.
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Such as ... ?
*crickets*
Re: It a guidebook... (Score:2)
My daughterâ(TM)s academic performance improved when she no longer had to hand write her answers. Writing neatly was such an effort for her that she would write as little as possible until she was allowed to type it. Shockingly, different kids have different educational needs
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> How to watch republicans piss away taxpayer money on utterly useless crap, trying to get back to a past that time forgot...
Oh FFS. There are lots of knowledge that isn't "practical" yet is valuable to our culture. You people piss and moan about children not being properly educated, but when someone suggests that things like cursive writing and other finer points of civilization should continue to be taught, you scoff with bullshit like this.
My mother's generation had mandatory classes in Latin during high school in the early 1960's. As a culture, we're the poorer for having dropped those kinds of requirements. There's a reason
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> Ok. YOU pay for it then. Most people don't want to pay millions of tax dollars on a skill that hasn't been in wide use for nearly 50 years. Better things to spend money on.
You've posted this response all over the thread.
Thing is, anyone can apply it to every part of the curriculum.
So to demonstrate your sincerity in the discussion, list for us the specific skills you do want your tax dollars to teach in schools.
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That's not what makes education expensive. And learning languages that influence later languages (Latin) is the type of metalearning that prepares you for higher education. And helps if you're in a STEM field too, since so much language is borrowed from there.
It's about priorities (Score:3)
The same people pushing cursive are also pushing privatization and the elimination of higher education for everyone except a handful of the elite.
So right now if you're finding somebody on the left our main concern is to teach critical thinking skills that will create the next generation of voters that don't fall for the usual bullshit. You know what I'm talking about. The southern strategy, woke dei moral panics whatever the hell. The basic tricks that the ruling elite use to kowtow a population.
I
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Capitalism is awful, until it's compared to every other economic system that has existed. Maybe you would like to live in Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Somalia, or a host of other countries that try their hardest not to be capitalistic. Capitalism is far from perfect, but it's better than everything else out there.
Re: It a guidebook... (Score:3)
> As a culture, we're the poorer for having dropped those kinds of requirements.
I thought we had too many kids taking underwater basket weaving and wanted more of them in the trades where foreign language requirements only makes the cost of education unnecessarily more expensive. Or that was last week. But ... still, foreign language requirements are all over the place in high school and university programs. Or did you mean Latin specifically and not Spanish for some reason.
I can't keep up with right wing "culture" bullshit. It seems so arbitrary, like are we going to do Germanic runes
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> like are we going to do Germanic runes next,
[1]probably [adl.org]
[1] https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbol/runic-writing-racist
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I get it, it may not be my first choice either. But the republicans are in power and they get to pick their priorities. This seems relatively innocuous compared to other batshit crazy things.
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Now see, thats a non-trolling honest response. Thank you.
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This seems relatively innocuous compared to other batshit crazy things.
Such as whining books by black authors [1]contained hate messages or would indoctrinate kids [go.com], or [2]removing books [cbsnews.com] by Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, or Ernest Hemingway.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/US/poet-amanda-gorman-criticizes-book-ban-effort-florida/story?id=99566344
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-school-library-book-bans-list/
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removing books [cbsnews.com] by Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, or Ernest Hemingway.
Not sure the context, but I don't think "cocaine" Stephen King's child sex scene in IT should be taught to younger children. Vonnegut has some good books, but again age appropriate, and Hemingway is mostly overrated, enjoy "the Old man and the Sea" and thank your lucky stars if that's all the Hemingway you'll have to endure. Not quite the moral panic as when people were silenced for asking questions about COVID.
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Better to teach them cursive than to teach them that men can get pregnant and women can have two mommies. We've gotten so far away from basic education in this country it's no wonder we are falling apart at the seams.
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This reeks of "I was put through this crap when I was young, so today's youth should also be put through this crap".
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Pretty much this...
I had to learn cursive in school, and i've never used it since leaving school.
About the only time i ever write anything by hand is official forms, and for those you are expected to write legibly and often in uppercase.
It's also extremely annoying when someone else writes things by hand and you're expected to read them, it's often extremely difficult to read and leads to errors.
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Kind of a contradiction in your statement here, that we donâ(TM)t need to learn handwriting, because itâ(TM)s annoying having to read the writing of people who donâ(TM)t know how to write. What if they did?
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I can no longer write in cursive. I'm 45 years old. I can read it if it's like an old document such as the constitution, but I can't read any modern cursive without a lot of effort. I find it pointless.
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The only time I ever use cursive is on forms. It's called my signature. I can't imagine closing on a house without being able to at least write my name in cursive. For everything else, I hand print non-cursive. I'm slow with either, so it's of no benefit.
It's in the name (Score:1)
By definition, conservatives prefer much of the past
A useful skill to have. (Score:2)
I think pupils should learn to hand-write. It's a useful skill to have. What I think should be done away with is torturing children with dictations and other non-sense that are basically speed-writing contests _without_ teaching them to type and giving them the option to chose typing over hand-writing.
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Hand-writing is fine. Cursive itself is pointless. Print is just as fast in modern times and is FAR more legible.
If you look at cursive writing from like an 1800's census or something, half of it is virtually impossible to read. Cursive was invented for use with QUILLS. Even if you're writing by hand now you're using a pencil or an ink pen, not a quill.
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> Cursive was invented for use with QUILLS.
I thought cursive was invented to write faster, which might still be relevant in some contexts, e.g. handwritten note-taking.
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Cursive IS hand writing. I think you are confusing it with italic.
I think American schools should probably teach something. It seems fairly evident that they are not even doing that at present.
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"Cursive IS hand writing. I think you are confusing it with italic."
NO. I think you are confused.
Cursive is one form of hand writing, where letters are joined together in almost a continuous line per word.
Most people who write by hand nowadays do not use cursive.
Which is the point of TFS.
Re: A useful skill to have. (Score:2)
Ive always used the words cursive vs printing to draw the distinction between the two methods of handwriting. I suppose shorthand could be a third. But that is a totally different thing that almost no one knows. (Including me)
Others may identify other words
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> Cursive IS hand writing. I think you are confusing it with italic.
Cursive is handwriting, but so is e.g. handwriting in block letters. Handwriting in block letters is usually clearer but slower, whereas handwriting in cursive is usually less clear but can be much faster. Basically, different handwriting styles have different pros and cons and depending on the situation one might be better than the other.
My point is that the cursive handwriting style is still relevant, as the need to handwrite fast at the expense of clarity is still pretty useful in some contexts.
> I think American schools should probably teach something. It seems fairly evident that they are not even doing that at present.
Never bee
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> Cursive itself is pointless. Print is just as fast in modern times and is FAR more legible.
Print is faster than cursive? Nope.
Modern print is faster than "old" print? How so? Unless you're implying gothic print, I don;t see how there could be any performance increase in hand written print in the last few hundred years.
Cursive is literally less movement, and less removal and application of the instrument tip. It has to be faster, if you know how to write it.
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I don't mean "modern print" as opposed to "old print" - I mean print with modern writing instruments as opposed to the instruments of the time when cursive was invented. They didn't exactly have ball point pens back in the days of yore.
Cursive is not generally less movement in the 2d plane of the paper - it is just less movement up and down in the 3d space so that you are removing the pen from the paper less. The thing is, we can move in 2 directions at once. The tip of a pen can come off the paper as it
Re: A useful skill to have. (Score:2)
> I don;t see how there could be any performance increase in hand written print in the last few hundred years.
It's called the ballpoint pen. It's a vastly superior writing instrument to the quills in use before that, and overcomes many of the issues cursive writing was designed to solve (mainly splattering of ink, which happens with any dip pen when you lift off the page). Proficient cursive is still faster than print (in theory, at least) but it's also technically more challenging, so in practice cursive will end up being slower unless you hand write a lot. It's also way easier to read bad print than it is bad cur
And do the teachers know how to? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder how many of the teachers even know how to write in cursive.
CursiveGPT (Score:1)
CursiveGPT
Not as important as bringing back flashcards (Score:4, Insightful)
There was an educational movement just after 2000 where for some reason teachers decided that rote learning was bad, so the activists within the ranks of teachers went through and got rid of everything that was strictly memorization and practice-based. This included everything from phonics to flash cards and of course cursive. In fact I think keyboarding was also a victim. My kids didn't take any of these things in school (we're in Ontario, Canada). Their handwriting is awful.
We sat in the evenings teaching them how to read (sounding words out), doing adding, subtracting, and multiplying flashcards with them, and I bought a typing tutor program and repeatedly encouraged them to use it. The Ontario government brought back mandatory cursive teaching to classrooms just after my kids left elementary school. I would say, of all these things, learning your times tables is way more important than cursive. There was a lot of research in recent years showing that both "learning to understand" *and* rote learning are important for a child's education, but it seems like the school boards won't admit their mistakes until the people who made those mistakes retire.
Just as my kids entered high school, the provincial government, worried that certain minority groups weren't doing well on tests and were over-represented in basic classes (vs. academic level) decided to de-stream both grade 9 and grade 10, and remove all exams from grades 9 and 10 as well. You don't have to write an exam in Ontario until you reach grade 11. Let's be clear... the data showed that kids from minority groups weren't doing as well, and their solution was to stop collecting data. It's absurd.
I really do feel like the education system was unethically experimenting on my kids this whole time. The worst part is that they were basing their decision on pop-psychology teacher-memes instead of hard and fast evidence-based research. The cost of these mistakes will be paid by the generation of kids who are only now moving on to university and the workforce. The whole saga sickens me.
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> There was an educational movement just after 2000 where for some reason teachers decided that rote learning was bad, so the activists within the ranks of teachers went through and got rid of everything that was strictly memorization and practice-based. This included everything from phonics to flash cards and of course cursive. In fact I think keyboarding was also a victim. My kids didn't take any of these things in school (we're in Ontario, Canada). Their handwriting is awful.
The best schools always included a mix of techniques in teaching. You had "drill 'till it kills" in math, THEN you had logic and reasoning exercises. You had memorization of names and dates, THEN you had deep discussions of historical events. A good education includes both rote and discussion, and always has.
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They took a nugget of truth and ran with it. Rote learning is bad if it replaces understanding. But I wouldn't survive adulthood if I didn't rote memorize addition and times tables.
More than meets the eye (Score:2)
At first blush, this bill looks like just another Republican attempt to appeal to the base while at the same time distracting people from the real reasons why the US education system doesn't stack up well internationally. This is probably true, but there's something far more important at stake. Teaching children cursive writing at a young age develops fine motor skills, and that's something that can pay big benefits down the road.
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Cursive is shit though and people should stop using it. If we're only keeping it around for signatures we should just learn to accept doing them without. They can learn fine motor skills in an art class.
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In 5th grade my teacher wanted to wring my neck because I was growing quite skillful in drawing and art, yet my cursive writing was worse than a drunk doctor's. I didn't see them as connected, but it was in the teacher's mind. I had a semi-impressionistic art style such that stroke precision mattered less.
How about typing! (Score:2)
When I was in school in the 1980s, typing was a popular subject with high schoolers, especially those who were going into office work. Then, as computers took over the world, schools ironically started to *drop* typing from their curricula. Why on earth? If anything, younger students should be taught how to type. Knowing how to touch-type saves me probably an hour or more every single day.
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I think that the science shows that kids today are born knowing how to type with their thumbs. So, there's no need to teach them how to type on antiquated keyboards.
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Eventually, they have to grow up and work in an office, where people still use "antiquated" keyoards.
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That was for low-paying secretary jobs. Now that kids are expected to pour coffee or empty bedpans for minimum wage they really don't have to teach much, even reading has mostly been silently dropped from the curriculum.
Of all the debates to have... (Score:2)
This one at least doesn't require students to take a class that half the parents will find offensive. So as debates over school curricula go, this one seems pretty tame. Whichever way it goes, it's not going to cause harm.
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Should loops lean forwards or backwards ?
There will be gunfights.
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Definitely an important question to answer!
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Are the loops male, female, or something else? (ducks head in FL)
Writing is kinda useful (Score:3, Interesting)
As I wrote out a medication schedule for my dad after he got out of surgery this weekend, my parents were very happy about how legible my writing was. We were just talking about how one of the most useful, long term skills I picked up in school was my architectural drafting class in high school where they drilled us on perfect print. There is an art to our language that is being lost, and I see it in every meeting where people are incapable of writing legibly on a whiteboard. And no matter how fast you can type, research shows again and again that you retain information differently when you hand write vs type.
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A friend at university studied architecture.
He showed me some of his designs.
What impressed me was the beautiful text he had written on them.
I fear this would apply to most modern architect's awful building designs.
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Yup, I got really good at writing text due to my drafting/architecture/engineering courses through high school and college. Of course, that was before schools had really gone CAD, I was right on the edge of that. Started by hand, ended in AutoCAD. I can still break out the fine print when needed, but my quick note handwriting is chicken scratch that only I can read.
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> research shows again and again that you retain information differently when you hand write vs type.
As someone who has illegible handwriting, it's what saved me in college. I could remember what I wrote but I couldn't go back and study from it.
Make it retroactive ... (Score:1)
... for doctors.
Borugh to you by a state which (Score:2)
still practices school corporal punishment.
Figures.
Russians only learn cursive (Score:2)
They don't spend much time teaching how to write in print form and go straight to cursive. Mostly because Cyrillic is slow to write out compared to the simplified Latin script like the single stroke forms we teach children to use in the West.
Signing your name (Score:1)
But no cursive makes signing your name so much easier. signed, X (not to be confused with all the other Xs)
Already Taught (Score:1)
The end of the article states that cursive is already taught "in schools" (I assume that means most or all public schools) already, so this is a purely symbolic waste of time. Is writing in print "woke" now or something?
Teach penmanship and Spencerian (Score:2)
Every child should take penmanship courses, and be taught to write in Spencerian Script. I would expand the requirement and teach kids to write with proper pens and ink.
While they're at it... (Score:2)
teach them to write using fountain pens, apply sealing wax to the envelopes they'll use to send checks they've written to the phone company, and how to dial rotary phones. Oh, and to read ticker tapes coming off stock machines showing the current prices of PanAm airlines, Westinghouse manufacturing, and Sear-Roebuck department store.
Basic skills can teach competence. (Score:2)
Everyone gets out of joint about specifics of the different practice-based skills we no longer teach. Something also lost is that practice skills can be mastered using ... practice. We have replaced it with a lot of more wooly teaching which I think is intended to teach the ability to properly consider the problem and search for the core concepts. The issue with this is that we have very little evidence that humans can actually learn that level of discrimination en masse, and we also don't really underst
I learned ... (Score:2)
... to write in cursive when I was a kid. Problem is: nobody can read my handwriting*. On the other hand, I learned to print in drafting classes. And my neat printing adorns numerous sets of construction blueprints in my city.
*I probably should have gone to [1]medical school. [blogspot.com]
[1] http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nr42lcgGmxU/Us0ccKkINUI/AAAAAAAACW0/zCOZz3o7wLY/s1600/doctor+handwriting19.jpg
It's not that hard (Score:2)
The kids who are not idiots will pick it up easily. The ones who don't, it's not like learning cursive is the problem.
Great, now make it future-proof. (Score:1)
Let them also learn the most often-used 500 Chinese characters while they are at it.
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The janitor at the retirement home doesn't need to know chinese.
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If the future janitor is young enough now to be in second to fifth grade then he or she might.
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What makes you think so?
Everyone from the trumpistan will need to know Chinese in about 10 years down the road if they want some income, be that a job or a pension.