Cursive

Cursive.

There's a meme going around the internet declaring that cursive writing is the secret code of old people. As funny as it may sound,  unfortunately it's true. Fewer and fewer young people know how to write in cursive, let alone read cursive. 

As a child I was completely intrigued by the squiggly letters that my mother and father used. I can remember pretending to write in cursive making loops and squiggles on my paper. I was mesmerized by Babar the Elephant which was impossible for me to read as it was written in cursive. It all seemed so mysterious and grown-up, and I couldn't wait until I was old enough to learn. 

When I was in second grade in Kansas I was thrilled to find out that I would be learning cursive. Many minutes a day were spent practicing, and I took great pride in my penmanship. At the end of the school year my family moved to New York, and enrolled me in school for the month of June. I gloated over the fact that I had already learned all the cursive letters since school in Kansas ended almost a month before New York. 

As a second grade teacher I thoroughly enjoyed teaching my students not only the proper formation of each letter, but more importantly how they were connected. We worked our way through the alphabet learning how to write each other's name. Each child's anticipation of learning their capital letter just added to the excitement. 

By the end of the year my students had the choice to do their work in cursive, which most did, and did beautifully. My insistence on teaching them the proper formation paid off, as they had not had the chance to develope any bad habits prior to my instruction. I learned a few years later when working with older students that although cursive may still be taught, it generally is not required to actually be used, and most of my students chose print over cursive. 

As cursive has been deemed less and less important in our modern-day keyboard world, we are finding through research that there is an actual advantage to cursive. Writing in cursive allows the brain to retain information more readily than when typed or printed. Comprehension is aided as well in better understanding of what is being learned. I'm just stubborn enough to say that I think we do our children a disservice in not insisting that they actually use cursive.

In education trends seem to come and go. I'll be curious to see if cursive makes a resurgence  or if it goes completely by the wayside as some lost ancient art.  Either way my Baby Boomer friends and I will enjoy sending secret notes to each other at our retirement homes completely  unlegible to our caretakers.