There’s a fascinating article in tomorrow’s Post about the decline of cursive handwriting. I’m 37. And I certainly remember fairly intensive instruction in handwriting — first block letters and then the more daunting and advanced cursive handwriting, with the dreaded off-white paper with one solid line, one dotted below it, and another solid beneath the dotted one — all to keep your letter creations bounded and in check. But, I guess not surprisingly given the ubiquity of computers and keyboards these days, instruction in handwriting has dwindled to almost nothing.
According to the article, primary school teachers spend ten minutes a day or less on the subject.
Another interesting factoid. When the SAT introduced written essays in 2006, only 15% of students wrote their essays in cursive. The rest printed them.
Not only do many young people today have difficulty writing cursive, many also have difficulty reading it. And that seems to be one of the main remaining reasons it’s taught — to maintain some basic level of cursive literacy.
On first blush, it seems hard to figure that young people would really have a hard time reading cursive writing. But it actually makes sense to me. In a former life I was studying to be an Early Modern historian — focusing on the 17th and 18th centuries.
Read cursive handwriting from people who lived a hundred years ago, even up to close to two hundred years ago, and as long as their handwriting isn’t especiallys sloppy, it’s not too difficult to read.
Reading 17th century English handwriting, even after quite a lot of practice, was a task I at least found extremely challenging. Some words or passages of words I was never able to decipher. (As a side note to this point, I had historians of earlier periods — who often covered longer spans of time in their area of specialty — tell me that one got to know eras of relatively good penmanship and ones that were atrocious and almost impossible to decipher.)
So does it matter? Do we really need to drill kids to learn cursive when it’s a skill they just won’t use very much except to sign their name?
Possibly so. The article points to some research that suggests that cursive handwriting leads to cognitive advancement. Kids who learn cursive handwriting express themselves in more complex thoughts. Given the tie-ins between cognitive development and hands, I guess this isn’t that surprising.
Here’s a question. When you jot things down in your daily life or take notes, do you write in cursive? I found that as I got older, late adolescence through early adulthood I guess, my cursive writing slowly died away and was replaced by a sort of hybrid of printing with a little cursive thrown in.
I’m looking here in one of the tablets I take notes in during the day. And the way I write isn’t really quite either. But it’s closer to print than cursive. How about you? How do you write when you put pen to paper? And how old are you?
Will someone come out and say what a monumental twit Condi Rice is as Secretary of State.
Here’s the CNN brief on their article about Rice blaming Bill Clinton for the president’s latest failure.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Tuesday defended the Bush administration’s refusal to hold bilateral talks with North Korea in the face of Pyongyang’s claim of a successful nuclear test. She told CNN the Clinton administration tried that approach in the 1990s and it had failed.
Bill Perry has a good rejoinder to this nonsense on the Post oped page.
But let’s review the salient facts one more time.
“Failure” =1994-2002 — Era of Clinton ‘Agreed Framework’: No plutonium production. All existing plutonium under international inspection. No bomb.
“Success” = 2002-2006 — Bush Policy Era: Active plutonium production. No international inspections of plutonium stocks. Nuclear warhead detonated.
Face it. They ditched an imperfect but working policy. They replaced it with nothing. Now North Korea is a nuclear state.
Facts hurt. So do nukes.
Conservatives’ left-wing Foleygate conspiracy theory takes another hit. That and other news of the day in today’s Daily Muck.
Bush press conference at 11 AM. Will he get any real questions about North Korea? What would you ask?
Does President Bush have an incentive to whip up a crisis over North Korea? Consider the incentives. Or rather consider whether there is any dirty laundry that could be uncovered during the president’s last two years in office if the Democrats gain control of one or both houses of Congress. Do the math.
Just listening to this press conference, I’m really surprised his handlers had him hold this sort of appearance. His statement was a long meandering catalog of his policies — a bit confused, with various defenses, none that great. Just in terms of effective communication, I would have thought they would have had him hit a few basic points — international threats, make tax cuts permanent, etc. But my gut tells me anybody on the fence at this point would not feel reassured or heartened by what the president is saying.
On North Korea, needless to say, he fibbed about the basic issue, elided the key points. We’ll see if the press teases out what he ignored and misstated. He let the Agreed Framework lapse. The excuse is alleged (and probably true) uranium enrichment research, which wouldn’t have come to fruition for many, many years. The result was ramping back plutonium production which has now already created a bomb. The president’s boast is that his failed negotiations have more participants around the table.
Wow.
Hastert now says he was duped into meeting with crooked evangelist.
I’m curious to hear from you on this. We’re listening to the Bush press conference here. And evaluating it as objectively as I can, it really sounds like a train wreck. The last question had a line in it asking the president if he feels ‘like the walls are closing in on him’ with declining support for his Iraq policy. The other questions have been pretty relentlessly negative. And the more pointed ones the president hasn’t been able answer, even with effective bamboozlement. But tell me. How do you think it’s going?
Late Update: That’s got to be the slogan, my failed diplomacy has ‘new equity partners’.
Rajiv Chandrasekaran responds to former CPA deputy Dan Senor’s comments on Rajiv’s book.