how does your country/region/local school teach handwriting?

[View from the Loft]

I agree with an earlier poster that the National Curriculum in the UK has not helped handwriting, but I do agree with the requirement that it should be legible.

 

We are suffering from a generation of primary (ages 4 to 11) teachers that were not taught penmanship themselves, so how on earth do we expect them to pass this most wonderful craft on to their students?

 

They can only pass on the knowledge that they have, and if one teacher is confident with an italic style, that is what they pass on to their students. If one prefers a more cursive letterform, then that is what they will teach.

 

It upsets me that my children are not allowed to use a fountain pen in school until they are in secondary school - but that doesn't stop me insisting that homework is done with a real pen.

 

Oh, and the excuse for not letting them use a fountain pen in school. Wait for it - it might damage their handwriting!!

[epv]

I remember spending a fair amount of time on cursive in the late 1970's and being required to write schoolwork in cursive up until around 7th or 8th grade at which point we were permitted to write however we liked, and I switched to word processing. I only took up cursive again in my 20s when i felt silly having all these fountain pens and not being able to write very well with them.

[Kathelyne]

New Zealand, rural school, 1990's

 

We were taught to print only. I remember one of my teachers getting us to try "linked writing" which was her word for what I remember as a sloppy form of cursive. We tried that for a week or so and we all hated it, leading me to vote for options 4 and 5 on the last question above. "First style learnt effects learning of others" and "children rebelling over having to learn to write all over again".

 

 

I was in NZ also, not a rural school but a small one in the 90s. We were taught to print, and I remember my mum getting me to ask my teacher in standard 2 (age eight) about joined up writing, how to join the letter 's' because her teacher didn't know and my teacher said you couldn't join an 's'.

 

I was never taught cursive, I made up what I know and hate my handwriting. In J1 and J2 (ages five and six) we wrote stories, but if they were good enough to go into our publishing book (something we took home and showed our parents, had our better work in) we would take it to a parent helper (parents would come an help out, occasionally it was an older student who wasn't allowed on a trip or something) and they would print it into our books for us and we could draw a picture. There was never any aim of getting us to be able to print neatly enough for that! By standard one there was no handwriting lessons.

 

When I changed schools to a bigger school for standard three we had to write in pen, in blue or blak ink and what we chose at the begining of the year we had to stay with (couldn't write with blak then change to blue) but we were never taught any handwriting. We were told at one point our handwriting should be more consistent and that by our age we shouldn't be printing, but that the teaher should be able to distinguish work from our handwriting alone.

 

It wasn't until third form (age 13) that we were taught grammer propperly, one lesson a week and I loved it- most of what I know comes from those few lessons I had and without the I wouldn't know their from there or your from you're or affect from effect. My grammer still suffers from what I didn't have, but I'm glad I had some.

 

Then I moved to Australia and apparently the kids in QLD are taught to write the same way, or at least print and most of their writing was far better than mine

[sokuban]

In Ontario about a decade ago we learnt D'Nealian in school. Printing then cursive.

 

Though cursive was never really enforced/taught, most people were faster and neater with printing and hated cursive. I also simply didn't like the look of D'Nealian cursive, especially the way a lot of the capitals just look like larger versions of the lowercase letters. In elementary school, the only people who actually used cursive were those "neat girly girls"—that was the impression cursive had on the rest of us anyhow.

 

Adults using a different style might also have influenced some. I borrowed a lot of my style from my mother/grandmother and I pretty much rebelled against D'Nealian style capital G's. (My last name starts with a G, and nobody in my family signed with a D'Nealian style G, so I didn't like using it.)

 

Until very recently when I relearnt cursive myself I could not really write in cursive well, and a lot of people in my age don't use cursive.

 

We used fat pencils in early years, and in later years normal pencils and mechanical pencils slowly made their way in. I never used ballpens myself, but I suppose some others might have.

Edited December 28, 2009 by sokuban

[antimony]

I am 30, and went to a Catholic school in Kentucky for grade school. We were taught both print and cursive (Like other posters, it was quite similar to the wikipedia link for cursive, though I think the Q might have been slightly different) after we were taught cursive, I think all school work had to be in cursive from then on through 8th grade (though I think teachers in 6th-8th were a little more easy-going about it).

 

We were graded on handwriting, and I remember getting "needs improvement" scores for handwriting all through the elementary grades - but I now have much nicer handwriting than a lot of the people I work with, and am one of the few people I know who routinely writes in cursive. I find writing more than a few words in print hard on the hands and tiring... all that picking the pen up off the paper and putting it down again, too much effort. Though I have mostly abandoned the more complex cursive capital letters.

[Feanor]

I am 23, and went to a public school in southeastern Wisconsin. We were taught printing, and eventually the cursive script antimony linked to above. I don't really remember us being required to use one script or the other, but my handwriting was so horribly illegible I'm sure all my teachers would have approved of any writing they could read. Even I have trouble reading my own writing when I try to write cursive fast, so I've adopted an all-caps script. I can still print or write cursive (not quite the same as we were taught), and with years of calligraphy as a hobby, I can write several calligraphic scripts, but none fast enough to be suitable for general use.

[Anna Cecilia]

This thread is really interesting. When I started primary school in the early '80s we all had to learn cursive. I'm pretty sure it was the only form of handwriting we were taught, and for some reason I always just assumed it was standard practice everywhere else too. We were told print was only for printed books/texts while cursive was for handwriting. After a few years we were "allowed" to develop personal writing styles and weren't graded on handwriting anymore (although teachers would still comment on it). We weren't allowed to use fountain pens when learning to write, I remember the first time I used one was in my second year of primary school.

So I'm quite surprised to see that so many people never learnt cursive at school and that it's even discouraged. I think learning "proper" handwriting is a good thing. Even if you develop a completely different style later on, it creates a solid foundation for doing so.

[Glaurung]

I hope you will not mind if I resurrect this old thread. I was born, raised and educated in Czechoslovakia. All Czech and Slovak children were taught a normalized style introduced in 1950s which was based on an older standard from 1932 that was based on Czech calligraphy from 19th century which was in turn inspired by English hand. I am not sure if my memory serves me right but from what I remember, we started with pencils and simple strokes but switched to fountain pens quickly. No kids were permitted to use ballpoint pens until they mastered the strokes with fountain pen and got aesthetically pleasing results. I never liked the school approved cheap ballpoint pens called "Chinese pens" so I stayed with ink. Btw. those Chinese pens looked a bit like converted Parker 51 and I hate even their memories. While during the first few years in school the writing standard was meticulously enforced, older kids developed their personalized style indeed and never really returned back to the standard even if they can still write it. My hand remembers the school handwriting well and when I do it, I am eight years old again.

 

Here is what the Czechoslovak normalized style looked like:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Psac%C3%AD_p%C3%ADsmo.gif

[The Royal Pen]

I know that the Catholic schools here teach the Palmer method ( Yes! I know! Wonderful!). I think the public and secondary schools teach their own form of cursive, which was formed by the school board (so I have read).

[stonezebra]

I was abosolutely astounded to hear that children in [some?] parts of the US are no longer being taught any form of cursive handwriting and that some cannot even read it. When I was a child (some 50+ years ago) learning cursive handwriting and using a fountain pen was considered a rite of passage, a sign we were growing out of childhood and becoming adults. We were expected to use cursive on all homework (except maybe math) from the 5th or 6 grade on. This is so sad...

[Ghost Plane]

I was abosolutely astounded to hear that children in [some?] parts of the US are no longer being taught any form of cursive handwriting and that some cannot even read it. When I was a child (some 50+ years ago) learning cursive handwriting and using a fountain pen was considered a rite of passage, a sign we were growing out of childhood and becoming adults. We were expected to use cursive on all homework (except maybe math) from the 5th or 6 grade on. This is so sad...

This is true. I was showing my notes from a conference to a friend [done in Pousserie de Lune in a Rhodia Webnotebook using a B nibbed Montegrappa] and his son marvelled, "It looks like the Declaration of Independence!" Apparently they're barely teaching printing at all, then put them straight over to typing. :bonk:

[stonezebra]

I was absolutely astounded to hear that children in [some?] parts of the US are no longer being taught any form of cursive handwriting and that some cannot even read it. When I was a child (some 50+ years ago) learning cursive handwriting and using a fountain pen was considered a rite of passage, a sign we were growing out of childhood and becoming adults. We were expected to use cursive on all homework (except maybe math) from the 5th or 6 grade on. This is so sad...

 

Sorry! Didn't mean for this to show up twice, I was just trying to fix my spelling! Now I can't delete the stupid thing...

Edited July 22, 2010 by stonezebra