FROMONLINE | 2013-02-15

  • By Tami Lange
  • February 15, 2013
  • 308
                        
I can’t tell you how many hours I spent in my childhood looping, looping, looping. I made high loops for the top of an “f” and low loops for the bottom of the “p.” Then came the endless looping of the “o” … oooooooo. … from the left margin to the right. To make matters worse, by the time I was in second grade, no one was going to deny I was left handed. So every time Mrs. Chidsey started looping on the chalkboard, it all seemed backward to me. But that was a rite of passage in elementary school, the sometimes painful, always monotonous process of learning cursive. Somewhere in her archive, my mom still has my essay, “My Dog, Frisky.” I believe it totaled six sentences, all painstakingly mapped out in big rolling, number-two-pencil cursive. I can still see the pencil marks that stained the outer skin of my left hand. Mrs. C. wrote “Very good” in her perfect script and placed the standard gold star sticker next to it. It stayed on the refrigerator for quite a while once it got home. So, imagine my dismay when a friend told me last week that her 10-year-old son reported that his class will be the last to have learn cursive. I imagine, though I have no direct knowledge of this, that this demise of cursive is coming in order to free up more time for keyboarding. Heck, by the time Nipper passes on to adulthood, he probably won’t have to actually hold a writing instrument (which is too bad, because he really has struggled to just make his writing legible). I am no denier of progress, no stranger to the technology revolution. Still, there’s something to be said for nice handwriting and for learning how to make it happen. Learning cursive requires a certain amount of concentration and discipline that children don’t get enough of. And, looking back, it really sort of helped a pre-adolescent start to realize they could have a personal style all their own. Go dig out an old yearbook and look at how your classmates quite literally left an indelible mark. I had one friend who dotted every “I” with a heart and another who purposely looped the bottom of her “j” backwards. In college, a sorority sister earned the name “The Human Typewriter” for her near-flawless, ridiculously-evenly-spaced English Lit notes. Cursive was kind of a way to make yourself an individual during a period when everyone wanted to fit in. Even now, experts will tell you your handwriting says a lot about you. If we all resort to keyboarding and texting, how will anyone be able to delve into our psyches? In the years that following learning cursive, I ended up in classes where I learned facts and figures I knew I’d never have any use for. I still don’t know the value of “x” and I still can’t recall the year of the Second Battle of Bull Run. A lot of the countries we had to locate in geography no long even exist. And typing? Nipper thinks a daisy wheel is a flower arrangement. But there was the seemingly inane (at the time) skills I learned that might be no longer trendy in the world of modern education, but which I rely on today. I still like diagramming sentences when I try for a better flow in my writing. I still do long division to keep what few math skills I have current. I still get a huge kick out of helping Nipper memorize poems, Bible verses and multiplication tables. And I still occasionally like to sit down and write something in longhand. Call me old fashioned, but there’s no looping key on a laptop.


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