Should Penmanship Return to School?

[KateGladstone]

The poll didn't have a choice that fits my opinion: teach handwriting, but TEACH it — make it a course, not a farce. If a teacher can't/won't teach soundly, and/or won't (or can't) write legibly him/herself at a reasonable speed, then I'd rather see no handwriting taught by that teacher at all, instead of the inevitably bad writing which will inevitably result from his/her Monty-Python-esque attempts to teach that which s/he does not actually know and cannot actually do.

[Pendragon]

IMO penmanship is very important. Of what use is writing if nobody can read it, or can only read it with some difficulty?

 

Using a computer for some communications is one thing, being dependent on it to write is quite another. People are not always going to have a computer handy when they need to write something.

 

And what happens if a pharmacist misreads a prescription? The consequences could be fatal.

[Henrik]

I would very much like penmanship (or at least handwriting) to stay in the curriculum.Having the privilege of teaching disabled children, amongst other things, how to write I have had some experiences in that field I would like to share :

 

Writing by hand and joining the letters to words is important to your thinking, reading and ability to solve problems. In my case, I had pupils with all sorts of disabilities and was looking for a script, that met their requirements, which were:

 

Few simple rules for paper position, movement, and letterforms.

 

Joined letters - so they would learn to tell words

 

Few penlifts- very demanding, when you have no fine motor skills and distortion of orientation abilities

The starting point of letters had to be fixed - so we didn't need obscure guidelines to see, where to put the pencil down - (sometimes in the middle - sometimes from the baseline and sometimes from the top - did not work - every letter, except a few, had to start from the same line).

 

No fine motor skills involved. Most of my pupils have none or very little control of this. This meant using the arm only - the "Palmer way".

 

And finally: How to sit and position and move the paper.

 

Given all this, most of my pupils are able to write a fair Zaner- Bloserlike script they are rather proud of - and they like to "write like grown ups" as one af them said. (a little to my surprise: Italics did not work so well - but cursive did - maybe because the starting point of almost all the letters was at the baseline). It takes a lot of practice - but I think, it is worth it, and goes to show, that handwriting does matter - allso in other subjects.

kind regards

Henrik

[KateGladstone]

Thanks to Henrik for his interesting comments. He and his students deserve credit for all their hard work. He writes:

 

> ... Having the privilege of teaching disabled children, amongst other things, how to write

 

What disabilities do your students have?

 

Re:

 

>Writing by hand and joining the letters to words is important to your thinking, reading and >ability to solve problems.

 

I disagree. Due to my own disabilities, I reached the age of 24 with very little writing by hand, very poor writing by hand, and no joining of letters. Before I had the ability to do "writing by hand and joining the letters to words," I had a college education and 90% of my graduate-school education. It would vastly surprise my instructors and classmates in graduate school, college, high school, and earlier education to hear from Henrik that, without "joining the letters" and so forth, I must have lacked some important part of thinking, reading, and problem-solving.

 

Re:

 

> Joined letters - so they would learn to tell words

 

If your students (or any other people) cannot "tell words" (I think this must mean either "say words" or "distinguish words") without the letters joined, how do they learn to read books/magazines/newspapers/etc. (which do not join the letters).

Myself, I find it much harder (and have always found it much harder) to distinguish words when all the letters join.

 

> Few penlifts- very demanding, when you have no fine motor skills and distortion of orientation > abilities

 

Some folks, as Henrik says, find it easiest to have few pen-lifts. Other folks with and without disabilities (and I must include myself in the "with" class) find the demands of any pen-lift much less than the demands of the most difficult joins required by having few pen-lifts: for such joins as "pa" and "sc" and "gh" and "qu" I must report that I myself (and at least some other disabled and non-disabled people who've come to me for help) find that correctly making those joins on paper (which requires difficult sequences of curving motions) demands much, much more effort and time than making those joins in air (as straight lines — the shortest, simplest path between two points).

If I ever met some student who really did find "pa/sc/gh/qu" always easier and quicker when joined on paper than when joined in air, of course I would teach him/her that way. However, I have not yet found such a person.

 

> The starting point of letters had to be fixed - so we didn't need obscure guidelines to see,

> where to put the pencil down - (sometimes in the middle - sometimes from the baseline and

> sometimes from the top - did not work - every letter, except a few, had to start from the same > line).

 

In Italic, every letter starts at the same place (the top of the letter) except for two letters: "d" and in some Italic styles "e." Not knowing Henrik's students, I would like Henrik to tell me why his students found this (or would have found it) more difficult than starting at the bottom and moving upwards at the beginning of most letters. I find a bottom-to-top movement difficult at first, then more difficult and less controllable as writing-speed and writing-skill increase.

 

>No fine motor skills involved. Most of my pupils have none or very little control of this. This >meant using the arm only - the "Palmer way".

 

Note that one can write just about any style — not just Palmer or its relatives — with arm-only movement. I have seen excellent Italic written by someone who had no writing-arm below the elbow: obviously she used a "Palmer-style" arm-movement method to do it.

 

> And finally: How to sit and position and move the paper.

 

What different sitting-positions, paper-positions, and/or paper-movement techniques did you try? Whichever you used, I congratulate your pupils on their achievement. In my experience, many people can produce a "fair Zaner-Bloser-like" script if they don't go beyond some very slow speed: possibly your students, with all their disabilities, would never write fast in any case, so they would never risk such a script collapsing at speed.

 

For me (and for other students of mine), one of the immensely biggest difficulties of Zaner-Bloser/Palmer/similar styles involves the fact that bottom-starting makes many letters need to change their appearance whenever they occur after the letters "b/o/v/w" instead of after the other letters: for instance, the "r" in "port" differs vastly (in starting-point and in shape) from the "same" letter "r" in the word "part" — the "s" in "post" differs vastly (in starting-point and in shape) from the "same" letter "s" in the word "past." As long as you have bottom-starting, you have the fact that bottom-starting does not work after the letters "b/o/v/w," so I wonder how Hendrik and his students deal with this inconsistency. It posed vast problems to me, and to others — here in the USA, at any rate, when students try to write a cursive "r" and they have learned that this starts from the bottom, this makes "or" look like "ar" because the student goes to the bottom (as s/he learned) after "o" in order to start the "r"! (I have seen this among schoolchildren, teens, and even some adults whom the teachers had rigidly trained to "start every letter from the bottom" — I have even seen it in the handwritings of some handwriting-teachers!)

 

Whatever style one writes, of course, one must learn to READ a fully joined cursive for the sake of those people who do write it ... fortunately, for most of the people I've taught, learning to read such a cursive takes far less time than learning to write it. But (as I said above) if anyone demonstrably gains his/her soundest life-long handwriting from writing a fully joined cursive, s/he should write that way and leave it to the rest of us to read it ...

[Kalessin]

With regard to the bottom-starting for every letter, when I had penmanship (I think it was the Ziller system, similar but not exactly Zaner-Bloser), we were carefully taught how to connect the letters at mid-height after lowercase b, o, v, and w, and how to get the letters that follow to look correct. I wish I could find my box of old elementary school papers and see if I still have my practice books..

[Henrik]

Dear Kate,

Thank you for your comment and interest in my way of teaching. Now I feel a bit handicapped - because I would like to explain - but I don't think my english is good enough - but I will try anyway.

I was just trying to express the weiw, that penmanship should stay in the curriculum, because it is important for reading and thinking - besides practical communication. Then I referred to some observations I made, when trying to teach.

As said: english is not my native language, and I migth have used terms and expressions, that could be misunderstood - by "joined" I did not mean joined by legatures, but put together forming words. I migth have made other mistakes (distinguished was one of theml)? I apologize for that

However, I sense at bit of sarcasm and need to correct me on every point? I feel that I in general agree with you - I just went this way, with these pupils .But I do appeiciate your comments very much, and wil take them in consideration, when I plan instruction in the future.

kind regards

Henrik

Edited December 5, 2006 by Henrik

[KateGladstone]

Thanks for clarifying, Henrik, and for saying that you like my ideas anyway — by the way, I think you mean "alienum" where you have "alenium."

 

;-)

[Henrik]

Thank you Kate, I wasn't wearing my glasses that day. I'm learning something all the time!

kind regards

Henrik

[Ranic]

Found this link on another forum. Great story about fountain pens in school.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061210/ap_on_...ntain_pen_lives

[kissing]

I'm sure most (of not all ) elementary schools in Australia still have exhaustive hand writing classes

 

I remember not enjoying those classes, because my handwriting was not very good with a pencil or ballpoint pen

 

My opinion of this topic is - Yes, to the extent that students have legible writing, but don't make it so that we all have the same handwriting It's good to see lots of different types of writing to different personalities

[johnr55]

I trained in a school system where we all were supposed to match the big handwriting cards around the room. However, by the time we had reached junior high, we had already started adopting our own styles. By the time we were graduated from high school, our styles were quite different indeed--mine as different as any!

 

I dated a professional graphologist many years ago, and I do believe one's handwriting can be an indicator of personality.

[KateGladstone]

Regarding graphology — I've seen the graphologists get things seriously wrong at least as often as I've seen them get things more-or-less right.

[georges zaslavsky]

I think that someone who holds his/her pen wrongly is not something good. Why? Because there is a way to write with a pen as well as to hold it. You don't hold a pen like you hold a hammer. And also some specific position of the pen allows you to write faster and without making too much efforts. Someone who knows how to hold a pen correctly and write fast and enough clearly and with a good spelling is someone who had received an education and is litterate and disciplined. Discipline and coherence are very important today.

[captnemo]

Hmm, I was schooled during the 50's and 60's, when penmanship had been forgotten. I loved watching my father write. He was born in 1891. Now that I have discovered and am studying the Palmer Method myself, I know that this is the method he was taught.

 

I spoke with him and other members of my family, who were raised in the U.S., Germany, Estonia, Russia, about their schooling 70 years ago and learned that nobody had ADD, or "dysgraphia", or dys-anything else. Everyone successfully learned the three R's and everyone had good penmanship. This was basic.

 

As far as whether good penmanship is important today, yes it is. As a former employer of as many as 55 people, I can assure you that employers judge potential hires in many ways including neatness of dress, and penmanship. Employers try to get a " feel" for the people they will be letting into their business. Sloppy handwriting implies (but does not guarantee) sloppy thinking, poor work habits, and lack of attention to detail. In other words, not caring.

 

While lack of good penmanship never stopped me from hiring a person who was known to be a good engineer, it was something that I and my associates noted as something that might be reflected in his or her work -- and it usually was. Imagine that.

 

So that's my argument for the importance of good penmanship, or at least clear and legible handwriting. Right or wrong, people DO judge you by it, and that makes it important in school.

 

/phil

[KateGladstone]

Re:

 

> I spoke with him and other members of my family, who were raised in the U.S.,

>Germany, Estonia, Russia, about their schooling 70 years ago and learned that

>nobody had ADD, or "dysgraphia", or dys-anything else. Everyone successfully

>learned the three R's and everyone had good penmanship. This was basic.

 

For the record:

 

My paternal grandmother (born in Warsaw, Poland in 1900 — expensively educated by a wealthy family — spoke/read/wrote in five languages) showed every symptom of dysgraphia, dyslexia, and ADD.

 

My paternal grandfather (born in Rovno, Lithuania in 1890-something — homeschooled — spoke/read/wrote in four languages) showed every symptom of dysgraphia and dyslexia.

 

My maternal grandmother (born in Volhynia, Poland in 1906 — brought to the USA in 1917 and enrolled in a demanding high-standards public school which taught Palmer Method for at least an hour a day — spoke/read two languages, and spoke/read/wrote a third) showed every symptom of dyslexia and ADD, and several symptoms of dysgraphia.

 

Captain Nemo: with such people in my family, how can I adopt your view that we didn't have dyslexia/dysgraphia/ADD seventy years ago?

[sonia_simone]

They didn't used to call it ADD, they just used to call those kids stupid and abuse them until they dropped out of school. That's only changed very very recently.

[captnemo]

For the record:

 

My paternal grandmother (born in Warsaw, Poland in 1900 — expensively educated by a wealthy family — spoke/read/wrote in five languages) showed every symptom of dysgraphia, dyslexia, and ADD.

 

My paternal grandfather (born in Rovno, Lithuania in 1890-something — homeschooled — spoke/read/wrote in four languages) showed every symptom of dysgraphia and dyslexia.

 

My maternal grandmother (born in Volhynia, Poland in 1906 — brought to the USA in 1917 and enrolled in a demanding high-standards public school which taught Palmer Method for at least an hour a day — spoke/read two languages, and spoke/read/wrote a third) showed every symptom of dyslexia and ADD, and several symptoms of dysgraphia.

 

Captain Nemo: with such people in my family, how can I adopt your view that we didn't have dyslexia/dysgraphia/ADD seventy years ago?

Hi Kate,

 

Good Heavens. I had no intention of offending. I was relaying what I was told by family members of whom I had asked these things. I was curious of their experiences in the early 1900's because my experience in large public schools in the 50's and 60's was that everyone kept up and everyone learned to read and write without notable difficulty. My schools (in Southern California) were large public schools and included deaf kids and blind kids, was racially mixed, and I never ran into anyone who "couldn't do it". (Blind kids used Braille, which I found fascinating) Unfortunately for me, by the time I reached school age in the 1950's, good penmanship had been dropped from the curriculum and I am now, finally, attempting to learn to write as my father and everyone else in my family older than I does (or did).

 

The overall point that I was trying to make was not about schools and all the diagnosable illnesses that have cropped up over the past 30 years but that, despite the lack of penmanship instruction in today's schools, or in the schools I attended nearly 50 years ago, and despite the universal use of computers for writing, people today still do notice one's penmanship and one is judged by it. Fair or unfair, like it or not, this is how it is. Penmanship is important. (Mine is very legible, people like it, but measured against the standards of 70 years ago, my handwriting stinks.)

 

I'm sorry if my life experiences differ from yours and offended you. I was relaying "old school" school thinking, I suppose.

 

Best regards,

/phil

[KateGladstone]

Captain Nemo — rest assured, you did not in the least offend me: I meant only to share some info/observations that (so it seems to me) must affect your conclusion.

 

I definitely do agree that, fairly or not, people still judge you by your handwriting — in fact, even folks with abominable handwriting will often disdain another abominable writer! (particularly if his/her particular type of scribal abominableness differs much from their own: I've seen teachers who produced one form of illegibility label as "stupid" or "disordered" those students who tended towards some other form of scribble than that which the teacher generated and therefore favored.)

On the other hand — and even more unfairly — I've known mediocre-to-abominable handwriters to disdain those with particularly *neat* handwriting (even handwriting that the mediocre/abominable scribe confessed s/he found very attractive). Some people consider illegibility (in their own writing or in another's) actually a mark of distinction — perhaps they think it signifies that this writer has much more important things on his/her mind than the "abc"s — and I have actually seen/heard people state that only the less than fully literate/educated make efforts to write neatly: a view that, for all his good sense otherwise, George Orwell seemingly shared:

 

"Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate ... " (NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, chapter 5)

[captnemo]

Captain Nemo — rest assured, you did not in the least offend me: I meant only to share some info/observations that (so it seems to me) must affect your conclusion.

Hi Kate,

 

Whew. I'm glad to hear that. I'm still very new here on FPN and I was not pleased that I had stepped on somebody's toes already, or thought so anyway.

 

I have run into both of the hypocrisies / idiocies you cited. Amazing isn't it? It tells you quite a lot about the person who would take these positions, too.

 

Learning disabilities are a fascinating thing. Some people carry it too far, and some people take up their disability and carry it like a banner before them, hoping that it will buy them some sort of extra privilege, but this is to be expected from human nature.

 

My first experience with a person with a learning disability came when I was well into adulthood. I had an associate named Rick who was extremely intelligent and an excellent writer, but a very, very poor speller—astonishingly bad. This puzzled me greatly because, up to that time, I could not imagine separating the two. I am one of these people to whom words are sounds, and meanings, and visual shapes. You can hand me a page of dense single-spaced typewritten text and without reading it, just by glancing at the page, the three misspelled words jump out at me as though they were highlighted – two seconds and I've spotted them. Working with my friend Rick taught me that some people just don't have the “spelling gene” and that poor spelling has nothing to do with anything else.

 

Since then, I have run into others, including a roomate for a year who suffered from ADD all his life. We spoke about it a lot. I wanted to know all about it firsthand and, for the first time, I gained a real understanding of it. He is also extremely intelligent and was very good at describing in detail the way his mind worked so that I could imagine it myself – what happens when he tries to read a book and what happens when he sits down to watch a movie – how his mind jumps the track and how thoughts jump into his mind that obliterate whatever he was thinking about before so thoroughly that he cannot even remember what he was thinking about before the unbidden thought popped in.

 

But my lessons in learning disabilities are about to get serious. I have three grown kids and four grandkids. One of them, a six year old girl, has been diagnosed with all manner of learning disabilities as well as a very strange speech problem. (She speaks fine but from time to time, several words will come out completely garbled and then she's fine again.) Personally, I see a bit of ODD (Oppositional Defiance Disorder) in her as well, and that's not good at all. Starting in June, I will be taking her under my wing and working with her closely. I can see that she's going to be a major long-term project and I'll be an expert by the time she grows up. Fortunately, I'm pretty well suited for the job. I may sound like a hard-*ss, but I'm not really. I'm known for being gently persistent and infinitely patient, and will probably need plenty of both with this girl. I'll let you know if dysgraphia is one of her problems. ;-)

 

Thanks for jumping in and clarifying, Kate. I did not want to leave the impresson that I'm just a grumpy old curmudgeon.

 

Best regards,

/phil

 

PS. Regarding the Orwell quote, I can see how some people might get that idea. If EVERYONE is schooled in fine penmanship, then there is no relation between penmanship and intelligence or knowledge. And it is possible that there was some truth to the statement. A dumber kid would spend more time diligently practicing and refining his penmanship, while a smart kid, interested in many things, would spend less time on the drudgery of the Palmer Method. Just a thought.

[KateGladstone]

Re:

 

> Hi Kate,

 

> I have run into both of the hypocrisies / idiocies you cited. Amazing isn't it?

 

Yes, and those strange ideas go back a lot further than George Orwell.

 

Consider this from Shakespeare:

"I once did hold it, as our statists do,

A baseness to write fair, and labour'd much

How to forget that learning. But, sir, now

It stood me yeoman's service."

(HAMLET, Act Five, Scene Two)

 

... or this from Quintilian:

"The accomplishment of writing well and expeditiously, which is commonly disregarded by people of quality, is by no means an indifferent matter."

[Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory, Book I, Section 28]

 

Re:

 

> ...some people just don't have the “spelling gene” and that poor spelling has

> nothing to do with anything else.

 

My paternal grandmother definitely did *not* have the "spelling gene." She could not spell even in her native Polish, a language of exceedingly simple spelling (no spelling-exceptions at all, one unvarying sound per letter or per letter-combination — as she herself told me: she could recognize that English spelling lacks these advantages and that Polish spelling has them ... but she said she couldn't handle Polish spelling, let alone English spelling. People who know Polish — which I don't know more than a few words of — tell me that she made far fewer spelling-errors in her Polish writing than in her writing of English, but I can't think of any language that she spelled correctly even though she read voraciously in several.)

 

Good luck, Captain, to you and your children & grandchildren as you embark on your own serious "lessons in learning disabilities." If I can help here in any way, let me know. At the very least, I would like to refer you to a colleague of mine (a medical-man-plus-handwriting-enthusiast/literacy-specialist, Dr. Bob Rose: rovarose@aol.com) who has done some excellent research on the acquisition of handwriting skills and how this aids reading/learning. Please talk with Bob, particularly about your six-year-old (what Bob does works best with the younger set) — and please tell Bob that I referred you to him.

 

Re:

 

> ... Regarding the Orwell quote ... If EVERYONE is schooled in fine penmanship,

> then there is no relation between penmanship and intelligence or knowledge. And > ... A dumber kid would spend more time diligently practicing and refining his

> penmanship, while a smart kid, interested in many things, would spend less time

> on the drudgery of the Palmer Method. Just a thought.

 

This seems plausible enough: so if we want the smart kids, too, to aim for fine penmanship, we may *conceivably* need to present them with something less drudgery-rife than Palmer ... Back to Orwell: although he associates neat penmanship with illiterates, his NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR nevertheless shows real appreciation of quality writing-tools — note this from Chapter One ...

 

" ... the thing that he was now about to do ... had ... been suggested by the book that he had just taken out of the drawer. It was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He could guess, however, that the book was much older than that. He had seen it lying in the window of a frowsy little junk-shop ... Winston fitted a nib into the penholder and sucked it to get the grease off. The pen was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had procured one furtively and with some difficulty simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a real nib instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil.

"Actually, he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose. He dipped the pen into the ink and then faltered ... To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote April 4th, 1984."

 

Hmmm ... he loves old pens and old paper ... bought some from a second-hand shop ... and, despite less-than-marvelous handwriting he has good reason to write by hand ... hey, this guy would fit "write" in around here!