For those of us who write Italic ... have we ensured that our children will learn Italic too? How do you ensure that a teacher won't forbid — or destroy — what you strive to build in and for your children?

Ha! It was easy. When my daughters were in grade school and middle school, I was an active, practicing calligrapher. The girls used to imitate everything I did, including writing. They both had a passable italic before they started first grade. On top of that, they went to a parochial school where nuns still taught, and where the principal herself was a calligrapher. No problem. (None of the other nuns would have dared mark the girls' penmanship down for not using the standard Z-B! Sister Principal would have seen to that.)

Good job, Bill! What advice would you have for Italic-using parents in less scribally blessed environs?

;-)

I have no idea. Talk to the kids' teacher(s), maybe to the principal. So much depends on how many control freaks work for the school district. I am not a patient man when it comes to bureaucrats, and I suspect any efforts I made with the more closed-minded variety would be disasters (I yell when I get angry or frustrated).

Children who attend parochial schools and Montessori-influenced private schools would probably not run into problems if they used italic cursive vs. whatever dogma might be standard. Just a guess. Also, it's been my observation that, because private school teachers rely on keeping things copacetic with the parents who pay their salaries, it is actually possible to have a dialog instead of a shoving match.

More constructively for those whose children are stuck in the public schools, teach the kids italic early and encourage them to use it on "special projects" only, at least until they get to fifth grade. By the time most children get to fifth grade, their handwriting is already so bad that no teacher is going to complain about a good, legible running italic. (Assuming that anyone still submits hand-written work by the fifth grade -- most probably crank stuff out on their computer.) Also I believe the schools stop grading the handwriting separately by the fifth grade, thanks to our government's insistence on standardized testing (meaning the teachers have no time to do much except teach to the tests, which don't include a penmanship component). This is a slightly subversive approach, but I think it would work better than my native "frontal assault" method.

THANKS to Bill for his useful "war plan"! It exactly matches what I've so far recommended to parents who've come to me with that question.

With kids, I do a fair amount of my handwriting-tutoring over summer vacation (between school-years), the longest vacation on the USA school calendar — typically, I pick some summer after which the child will no longer have handwriting at school (e.g., when the handwriting program ends after third grade, teach during the summer between third and fourth grade), so that nobody will expect more than legibility when the child returns (with handwiritng that has gone up, up, up over the summer while everyone else's has gone down, down, down through lack of practice).
Also — and particularly when the school has recorded the child as having trouble with handwriting — I strongly encourage the parents to keep dated, day-by-day folders of the whole summer's handwriting work, and to bring these folders to a meeting with the student's new teacher (I recommend scheduling such a meeting to take place about 1 week before the beginning of the new school-year). The parents can then say (particularly if they know or suspect that the teacher will give them a hard time) — "When school ended for the summer, our child's previous teacher recommended that we 'try to do something about his handwriting' if we could. We'd like you to look, page by page, at what he has done about this over the summer: then please tell us whether we can have your support in continuing what has brought these results." Since progress made with Italic (in speed and legibility) over one summer typically amounts to about three years' worth of progress in the same areas made in non-Italic handwriting in the average school, you'd think this ALWAYS got a "yes" — however, it doesn't always: about 1/2 the time, the teachers either won't even look or they will say: "Well, now that he's improved he should be able to go back to REAL handwriting ... " — so parents/kids using the "subversive approach" get success, but I still hope someone can find persuasive methods that will work when even the "subversive approach" fails to persuade.

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But, Kurt (not to argue, just making a point) -- the school forces things on your children all the time. Handwriting is possibly the least disturbing of these canonical decisions. A kid can write perfectly legibly, and yet suffer academic exile.

To take the tuba analogy, if you were a tuba player and one of your kids decided to follow in the old man's footsteps, you'd probably teach the young 'un to play. The lessons take and the child turns out to be a tuba virtuoso. Then the kid gets to school and is told that playing that way is utterly incorrect and hopelessly backwards and that remedial music will be required or the kid will be set back a grade. How happy would Papa Tuba be about that? This makes no sense to me.

I think Kate is talking mainly about the inflexibility of school administrations. You want to see a war break out, try teaching your kid arithmetic calculation methods that don't conform to whatever the local district has decreed to be "correct." Yow. And that's "just" math -- nothing remotely religious or political. I won't go any further than that (I can already hear the flames roaring).

And, yes, sometimes it is a war. If you haven't experienced it, you've been very very lucky.

Added: I started a reply to your reply to this, tried to quote your post and discovered it had disappeared. I understand why you pulled it. Fuel for flames. But if I may say, I agree with you that there are worse things. The only chance kids have these days are in private schools, if you can afford one. I have given up on the public schools. They can't even teach English without getting tangled up in somebody's agenda or marketing plan, apparently. (Note to casual readers -- that comment does not refer to ESL/English-only controversies. I mean that the schools aren't even able to turn out kids who can spell or who can write a simple declarative sentence without mangling the grammar.)

Re:

> Well I for one will not force anything on my children.
>
>If I was a tuba player would I have to create a 'war plan' to insure that all of my >children were also tuba players ...

No ... unless:

/1/ ... our culture required that all students learn to play *some* musical instrument (probably not a bad idea!),

AND

/2/ ... the school regarded only two instruments as acceptable to learn/use: bass drum until age 8, then an immediate switch to sitar: defining all other instruments as "not music"

AND

/3/ a substantial number of students could not do at all well with (could not even LIKE) the only two instruments the school regarded as "music," but liked very much — and did very well with — tuba which the school absolutely forbade ...

I think that, in such circumstances, the tuba-players *would* have to think in terms of war!
Read "ball-and-stick print" for "bass drum," read "conventional cursive" for "sitar," and read "handwriting" for "music" ... and you have the customary situation for handwriting in USA schools.

Re:

> If you care too much about something it can only hurt you in the end.

What makes some degree of caring "too much"? "Too much" for/by what criterion?

As BillTheEditor says ...

> ... the school forces things on your children all the time. ... A kid can write
> perfectly legibly,

... and can write just-plain-*perfectly* (legibly, and fast, and attractively, too — like that ex-British boy I mentioned, before they wrecked his writing) ...

> and yet suffer academic exile.

Case in point (with an American, not a Britisher, who'd learned Italic "the first time around") —

one of the Amazon reviews of WRITE NOW (for the previous edition, not for the current one) comes from someone who learned Italic in first grade 30 years ago and got slammed for it a few years later when the family moved to another state where people had never heard of it ...

Amazon-comments by that survivor of school-based handwriting abuse:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/...=R3W4YS1H83WT2L

My response to his comments:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/...=R2KM09GVOGUFKI

Re:

> I think Kate is talking mainly about the inflexibility of school administrations.

Yes — and, in particular, about how this affects handwriting. I have, in fact, survived a "school war" on handwriting which broke out during — and in large part because of — my presence at a school whose principal and academic director had arranged for me to re-vamp the handwriting-curriculum ... while almost 1/3 of the parents and teachers strongly preferred "real" handwriting instruction (as they called print-then-cursive), and the other 2/3 of the parents and teachers campaigned very actively to have absolutely no handwriting-instruction at all!
Though this story has a happy ending, getting to that ending took about a year of unbelievable efforts (by many people) against equally incredible obstacles. Let me know if you want to hear about *this* one ...

Re:

>You want to see a war break out, try teaching your kid arithmetic calculation >methods that don't conform to whatever the local district has decreed to be >"correct."

I've seen an example of that. Some years back, I learned that a school had gotten kids in trouble for doing multiplication long-division problems *exactly* *the* *way* *their* *textbook* *told* *them* *too*. It turned out that, between one edition of the textbook and the next, the textbook-authors had slightly changed the presentation to make it easier to learn (putting the partial-results steps in different places on the page — that sort of thing) but the teachers (like 95+% of elementary-school teachers in most subjects) hadn't opened the new textbooks when they got them: after all, they taught school, so obviously they already knew how to multiply and divide, and math doesn't change, right?

Going back to the subject at hand, teachers-not-checking-the-books can affect handwriting too. Within walking distance of my house, a public school has at least one teacher who actually punishes kids for following the handwriting textbooks she gives them — because the current editions of the books don't match the handwriting wall-charts from the same publisher that she has had on her wall for 25 years. (The school won't buy new ones because "handwriting is handwriting, charts are charts — you have a chart, you don't need another one" — since "only" nine or ten years ago did the school start to get the new editions of the textbooks, with very definite differences in most cursive capitals and some other letters, the school still hasn't spent the money to provide the new wall-charts to go with the new books.)
Since this teacher literally won't open her teacher's edition manual (or look at the students' books — she figures "handwriting is handwriting, and I KNOW handwriting because I am the teacher"), when kids follow the writing in the books right in front of them (instead of the writing on a faded wall-chart eight or nine feet above their eye-level), she deducts points from their grade in "language arts" (= English+reading+spelling+writing: this school makes handwriting 1/2 of a student's marks in that subject). She *also* deducts points if they ask: "Which way should I do this letter: the way it looks in the book, or the way it looks on the wall, or the way it looks when you write it on the blackboard?" because she doesn't believe any difference exists between the three (and she refuses to look in her book — let alone to look closely at her OWN handwriting — to find out).

Here I have to report one of my failures. Some years ago, that school — knowing that "something's gone wrong with handwriting hereabouts" — found me (just after an article on me had run in our largest local paper) and directed the teacher to have me in her classroom "to help you teach handwriting." They directed the teacher "to just please do whatever Ms. Gladstone says" ... which she did: for about two weeks ... then, she went to the principal and complained: "I can't get along with Ms. Gladstone because she is asking the same rotten questions that the kids ask. I consider it very disrespectful that she does things like convincing the kids that a 'Q' looks one way in my handwriting, another way in my wall-chart, and a third way in the book, when obviously this cannot be physically possible because a 'Q' is a 'Q' is a 'Q.' When you told me you wanted me to do what Kate said, you didn't tell me that she was going to ask me questions or want to change anything! I don't feel good about being a handwriting teacher after this, especially because the kids who listen to her the most have the clearest and fastest handwriting but it also looks the most different from real handwriting ... " ... so the principal decided that he just couldn't risk having a teacher "feel bad about being a handwriting teacher" and having to do such gosh-awful things as [GASP! HORRORS!] actually taking a look at what-she-did versus what-she-THOUGHT-she-did ... so he sent me home. I got smarmy hate-filled e-mails from her for a few weeks thereafter: the only time I responded to one, it bounced back from her spam-filter.

For the record, Bill — I know of a few actually *good* public schools and districts Co-incidentally (?), they "just happen" to teach Italic rather than conventional print-then-cursive — although conventional print-then-cursive schools/districts surround them and often pressure these Italic mavericks to change.

To see samples of Italic handwriting done by kids (2nd through 8th grade) in Portland (Oregon) public schools using Italic, view/download http://www.cep.pdx.edu/samples/childsample.PDF — of course, I think these kids would have done even better if they'd used fountain-pens!

More sadly — in the mid-1990s, the Williamsport (Pennsylvania) Public School District discontinued Italic after 20 years: switching to Zaner-Bloser, whose sales-reps had apparently received frantic calls from some parents who felt really peeved and disrespected that [GASP! HORRORS!] their children wrote distinctly more clearly and quickly than Mom and Dad. Said one Williamsport mom who sent me hate-mail against Italic after she discovered my web-page: "We uste to have that here to, but we got rid off it and serves u rite, becaus it just isnt' rite a kid should rite more legaby then their parents. When you look at there handwritting, it makes it look like they were the parents and the mother and father are the kid. Its unaceptible."

Schools in North America teach what parents want, in the long run — or so I hear from a few *honest* people in teachers'' colleges here and there. if the parents want bad handwriting, or the parents want science not given priority in biology class (or anything elese you can imagine) once the parents howl loudly enough the schools will go along. So ... what if we could get North American parents to howl loudly for a *good* handwriting style ???

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So that's what you call italic...
Then in my case, they didn't even teach me print. Just italic "the first time around."

Before I saw your sample, I thought you meant they taught...


I don't write like that very much. <_<

Edit: By the way, that was one of those cheap italic pens that come with calligraphy sets. I can only identify it as made by Sheaffer in the USA.

Renzhe does not appear to suck at Italic (other than via some irregularity of a few letter-heights).

Re the remarks of Tytyvyllus:

> ... you love to show how you beat up on the 'high and mighty'

I don't "beat up" on people.'
I do oppose people "beating up" on the low and weakly.
In that cause, I shall use all the aggression that I deem fit to use.

> maybe you should
> try to not be as aggressive.

And just whom would that advantage?

>I doubt that you paid attention to my avatar

What does the word "avatar" signify in this context?
(I know it as a religious term only: referring [in Hinduism] to the incarnation of a god.)
Does failing to attend to another's "avatar" (however I may have committed such failure) rank as the unforgivable sin hereabouts?

I feel grief over your dog's most lamentable death. One of my own dogs too — my childhood favorite) — also died after multiple tumors.
Please explain, TyTyvyllus, how you made up your mind that such a death could not grieve me.