Curses to banners of cursive, writing
Oh to be taken back to the days of yellowed paper with green lines on them. We used them to practice our r’s and d’s and p’s and q’s. And we practiced with big, husky pencils and giant pink erasers.
Those were the days, as we were reminded in a recent report by Daily Herald Staff Writer Larissa Chinwah. Now, it seems cursive, and even more importantly, writing itself might be falling out of favor and fashion in our schools.
Chinwah reported the Illinois State Board of Education never included learning cursive writing on its list of core components of elementary curricula. Obviously, it’s been taught and still is being taught in many Illinois schools, thank goodness. But what now is a part of the Common Core standards Illinois has adopted as part of a national model is keyboard efficiency.
Far be it from us in the newspaper business to ever argue that keyboarding isn’t important. It indeed is more important to master than ever, no matter what job may be in your future.
But we also think cursive has value. It just isn’t the same if you have to print your name on the dotted line when you get your first car, college or house loan.
And we, more than most, might appreciate that cursive is much faster and more practical than trying to manage a keyboard or a smartphone touch-screen when you’re standing on the shoulder of a road jotting notes while interviewing a police officer about a crash that just occurred.
So, we hope Illinois elementary school administrators and teachers won’t think of cursive as going the way of the stone tablet.
As fifth-grade teacher Michele Mannella told Chinwah, cursive develops students’ “fine motor skills and there is memory and thinking involved.”
And speaking of memory and thinking, we are even more dismayed to see that for the second time in recent years, writing is being dropped as part of state tests. It’s been dropped this year for 11th graders as part of the Prairie State Achievement Exame and it was cut last year from the Illinois Standards Achievement Test for grades 3, 5, 6 and 8.
We know it takes longer to grade writing and that probably makes it more expensive to teach and to test, but we absolutely believe writing is a fundamental skill we all must learn.
Anyone who does any hiring will tell you the ability to express a complete, coherent thought is critical. We venture to suggest anyone who does any hiring would tell you good writers are getting harder to find.
And if we cannot think rationally and then write our thoughts with clarity in order to communicate them to others, then how can we function well as a society?
We hold these truths to be self evident.
And we hope parents, educators and students everywhere agree: FWIW, shrtcts jst don’t transl8.