Link to: Queen Anne Lace: Getting Rid of Cursive Writing?
This was the first time it dawned on me that many students no longer can read cursive writing. (Other than their names!)
Many teachers have stated to me that they no longer teach it because it is not tested on Virginia Standards of Learning. Their claim is further justified in the fact that the SOLs only have cursive handwriting stated one time – third grade. The few teachers that are teaching it, are only having students learn how to write their names in cursive.
This is unsettling to me, and in a different way than the sadness I felt when I no longer needed a slide rule to work with square roots.
Just on a whim, I did my Friday lesson, entirely in cursive. Only a fourth of my students could read my science notes. The kids wanted to know how to write and read in cursive because their parents know it and they can’t read their parents’ notes. This really blew some my colleagues away who did their own gathering of data and got similar findings as I did.
