What Killed Penmanship?

[two2tone]

Interesting article:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/style/messy-handwriting.html

 

[The Duck Hunter]

This is behind a pay wall for me.  

[corniche]

1 hour ago, two2tone said:

Interesting article:

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/style/messy-handwriting.html

 

I'm not subscribed to the NYT; so, I'm unable to read the article. From the headline, I take it that they blame technology for it... everyone types now.

 

There is some truth to that, but I also blame the schools for not teaching it anymore.

 

- Sean

[corniche]

24 minutes ago, The Duck Hunter said:

This is behind a pay wall for me.  

Yeah, me, too.

 

- S.

[ParramattaPaul]

The Duck Hunter pay wall comment saved me the bother of even looking for the article.  I don't do pay wall stuff either.  Thanks Mate.

[inkstainedruth]

1 hour ago, The Duck Hunter said:

This is behind a pay wall for me.  

Yeah, me too.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

ETA: Ironically, I logged in partway through the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode where Sisko and O'Brien discover a colony run by a fanatic who is completely against technology (yet uses technology to convince the people she's lured/kidnapped that she's right...).

 

[51ISH]

47 minutes ago, corniche said:

I'm not subscribed to the NYT; so, I'm unable to read the article. From the headline, I take it that they blame technology for it... everyone types now.

 

There is some truth to that, but I also blame the schools for not teaching it anymore.

 

- Sean

 

+1  on the paywall....and +1 on not teaching it in schools anymore  For all that I first started noticing it when I started to employ people 40 years ago 😲  So you couldn't really blame technology back then.  For all that some of the penmanship I saw during my school years was pretty bad even then.  My cursive is not great, in fact it's got worse  as I get older, but at school, I figured if it was at least neat, and pleasing and at least eligible to read, that may just score me an extra mark or two. (no 'modules' or course work back then, you had to produce your best on the day, no opportunity to cheat or 'steal' someone elses work or words. If you had a 'bad day' that was your problem. Welcome to the real world.

[Monophoto]

Agree on the paywall issue.

 

As to cause - the use of technology for writing is very recent compared with the demise of penmanship.  In my opinion, penmanship disappeared when schools stopped teaching it.

 

I know that I wasn't taught penmanship in the public school I attended.  But when I think back to my professional career, the colleagues who had the best penmanship were all products of very traditional parochial schools.  I'm not saying that church-sponsored education is better (in fact, I would argue that church-sponsored schools have serious shortcomings), but at least they did teach penmanship.

[corniche]

15 hours ago, 51ISH said:

 

+1  on the paywall....and +1 on not teaching it in schools anymore  For all that I first started noticing it when I started to employ people 40 years ago 😲  So you couldn't really blame technology back then.  For all that some of the penmanship I saw during my school years was pretty bad even then.  My cursive is not great, in fact it's got worse  as I get older, but at school, I figured if it was at least neat, and pleasing and at least eligible to read, that may just score me an extra mark or two. (no 'modules' or course work back then, you had to produce your best on the day, no opportunity to cheat or 'steal' someone elses work or words. If you had a 'bad day' that was your problem. Welcome to the real world.

You're correct, 51ish. Now that you mention it; I do recall that when I was in the third grade, penmanship, (including cursive), was RIGIDLY taught and enforced... by a blue-haired, hard as nails, old Irish woman in the Palatine school district. But when I got into the fourth grade and got a young, Scandinavian woman who was on her second year of teaching... she believed in "freedom of personal expression" and didn't enforce any penmanship protocols. That trend became the norm as my academic career soldiered on.

 

- Sean 

[kazoolaw]

Since I've retired my day-to-day writing has diminished.  Fountain pens were 99% of what I used.

I've been handed BP's repeatedly to sign my name, and the pen gets away from me without slowing way down and concentrating closely. 

So, my nomination for one of the factors in the decline of penmanship is the

ballpoint.

[corniche]

28 minutes ago, Monophoto said:

I know that I wasn't taught penmanship in the public school I attended.  But when I think back to my professional career, the colleagues who had the best penmanship were all products of very traditional parochial schools.  I'm not saying that church-sponsored education is better (in fact, I would argue that church-sponsored schools have serious shortcomings), but at least they did teach penmanship.

That's funny, back when I had to  hire employees for various businesses, I always used to say, "parochial education a plus" in my headhunter posts. They were generally always better equipped to handle a job than their public schooled counterparts. 

 

- Sean

[kazoolaw]

Attended a Catholic elementary school which taught the Palmer Method.  To my mother's everlasting shame, I was the only student in two grades not to get my Palmer certificate, despite one entire summer of daily drills.

Then ebay arrived:  bought 3 Palmer pins.  Award problem solved, though nearly illegible penmanship remained.

[inkstainedruth]

4 hours ago, Monophoto said:

Agree on the paywall issue.

 

As to cause - the use of technology for writing is very recent compared with the demise of penmanship.  In my opinion, penmanship disappeared when schools stopped teaching it.

 

I know that I wasn't taught penmanship in the public school I attended.  But when I think back to my professional career, the colleagues who had the best penmanship were all products of very traditional parochial schools.  I'm not saying that church-sponsored education is better (in fact, I would argue that church-sponsored schools have serious shortcomings), but at least they did teach penmanship.

You must be a lot younger than me (or not originally from NYS).  I do remember being taught handwriting (if not formal penmanship as such per se) in elementary school but that would have been in the mid 1960s.  Would have had to have been in the first school district I was in -- don't remember it particularly at the school I went to in fourth grade, after we moved from the bottom end of Rockland County to the top end of Westchester County).  

Mostly I remember my mom desparately trying to keep my brother and me out of classes that taught ITA (an experimental phonics system that apparently didn't work -- my husband was in an ITA class and his class was not given ANY sort of remedial work (and to this day thinks that the alphabet starts as "A, N, D) because that's how his teacher was told to teach ITA.  The fact that he's also dyslexic AND that he got *negative* reinforcement to reading for pleasure from his mom growing up didn't help....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[txomsy]

But... is penmanship dead?

 

And if so, where? I suspect not everywhere, at least yet.

[inkstainedruth]

4 hours ago, corniche said:

That's funny, back when I had to  hire employees for various businesses, I always used to say, "parochial education a plus" in my headhunter posts. They were generally always better equipped to handle a job than their public schooled counterparts. 

 

- Sean

That's definitely a generational difference.  My uncle was sent to parochial schools for a while growing up -- and the Protestant side of the family (most of whom were teachers) basically went to my grandmother and say "GET THAT BOY OUT OF THERE AND BACK INTO PUBLIC SCHOOL!  HE DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO READ!!!"

Whereas a friend of ours, who grew up in Youngstown, OH, DID go to Catholic  school (even though she was raised Greek Orthodox) and I'm pretty sure she has a high opinion of her high school.  

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[inkstainedruth]

4 hours ago, kazoolaw said:

Then ebay arrived:  bought 3 Palmer pins.  Award problem solved, though nearly illegible penmanship remained.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

[Mercian]

56 minutes ago, inkstainedruth said:

Mostly I remember my mom desparately trying to keep my brother and me out of classes that taught ITA

Good for your mum! 👍

 

ITA - Initial Teaching Alphabet - was still being inflicted-upon some kids when I was in Primary School.

As its full name suggests, it was a synthetic alphabet that replaced many of the vowels in standard English with synthetic ones.

The idea was to make it ‘easier’ for kids to learn to read by using ‘synthetic phonics’, so that any syllables that sounded the same when spoken aloud would also be spelled the same way on the page.

Its intention was to remove the confusions that arise from the English language’s many ways to pronounce various sounds in spoken English that can be represented on paper by the same sequences of letters; and the many ways of representing the same sounds by different sequences of letters.

E.g.s how many ways can you think of to pronounce the sequence ‘o-u-g-h’ in legitimately-spelled English words?

What about ways of representing the long “ee” sound in written English?

(Or you could just try to read-aloud Gerald Nolst Trenité’s famous poem ‘The Chaos’ on your first viewing of it.)

I grew up in a small village. In our small, two-room, village school ITA was used to try to teach English orthography to the kids who were having difficulties coping with our palimpsestic mongrel language’s multifarious idiosyncrasies*.
So, that would include any children who were dyslexic, or who were ‘not the brightest’, or were even just ‘late-bloomers’.

 

Even when I was a young child who was in the same classroom at the time, I thought that the idea of ITA was bloody idiocy.

I mean, you were taking to one side the kids who were having the most difficulty learning to read-&-write, and then spending loads of teaching-hours drilling in to them the idea that English is supposed to be written in one particular way.
Then, once you had managed to successfully train them to be fluent in that way of doing things, you were having to spend umpteen more teaching-hours saying “forget everything we’ve taught you; it’s actually done in this, totally-different, way!”.

 

Then you can throw-in the cruelty and the desire to mock/victimise their ‘weaker’ peers that inhere in all young children until after adults have spent years-and-years trying to train them to not do it.

That, civilised, stage of ‘developmental maturity’ is not attained by all children while they are still in the first few years of Primary School.

As such, I confidently aver that ITA - may God rot its bones! - is best left where it belongs; languishing as a lamentable ‘Lesson from History’ in how not to try to educate children!

 

* As you are asking, yes; I do enjoy a sesquipedalian word. And yes; I too would balk at the thought of attempting to teach any kids who have just been subjected to ITA to spell that sentence 😉

[inkstainedruth]

Well, part of the issue for my mom was that I already KNEW how to read.  I remember reading something to the rest of my kindergarten class (we all had our chairs in a circle, so it was a formal thing for the entire class).  And she told me that my first grade teacher was like "Yeah, yeah" when my mother told her at the beginning of the school year that I could.  And then was COMPLETELY freaked out, apparently, that my mom had told her the truth....

Trying to remember if that was the teacher who freaked ME out the most by saying that I seemed to be able to immerse myself into a story (about a boy and his horse) even though I wasn't a boy....  And to this day, roughly 6 DECADES later, I *STILL* can remember thinking at the time "Well, whose point of view am I GOING to be 'seeing' from?  The horse's??"  No, I wasn't a boy.  No I wasn't envisioning BEING a boy.  I was just putting myself in the boy's place in the saddle.  Made PERFECT sense to me....

When my husband was in college, he had a professor calling him into to the office to talk about a paper he'd written, and the guy apparently said "You know you have something of a spelling problem...."  And when my husband admitted that, the professor SPECIFICALLY asked if he'd been an ITA class -- because the guy's granddaughter made the same sorts of spelling mistakes....

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[corniche]

3 hours ago, txomsy said:

But... is penmanship dead?

 

And if so, where? I suspect not everywhere, at least yet.

It will NEVER be dead, txomsy,... there will always be the hieroglyphics found on subways, freight cars, urban walls and bathroom stalls; not to mention the occasional grocery or To Do list that are always found amidst the ruins... it's the QUALITY of penmanship that is dying.

 

- Sean 

[knarflj]

Oh my goodness, this is the first place in my life I've run into other people who had ITA inflicted upon them!

 

To be fair, it didn't hurt me much, because like Ruth, I also knew how to read before I started first grade (when the ITA nonsense started).  And my first & second grade teacher was sensible enough to whisk me through an abbreviated exposure to ITA and then work on real reading with me.  But my poor brother and all the other kids my age at our school....

 

When I was in high school, one of my English teachers asked me which elementary school I'd gone to, and was very surprised when I told him, because I was good at spelling (the result, of course, of having figured out how to read before I started school).  Apparently all the high school teachers could spot the kids from my elementary school because none of them could spell.  I know every time my brother was writing a paper, I'd get a constant flow of, "How do you spell...?" questions from him.