Signing a credit card slip, writing a check and composing a thank-you letter are all instances when one uses cursive handwriting to complete a document. In the future though, cursive appearances may dwindle as cursive has been omitted from the common core state standards that more than 40 states, including Tennessee, adopted last summer.
Julie Legg, director of K-5 literacy and K-12 ESOL programs for Hamilton County Schools, says Tennessee state standards currently address handwriting in K-5 by expecting students to “create legible documents for reading by forming uppercase/lowercase letters; writing from left to right/top to bottom; and tracing/reproducing letters and words correctly,” to “create legible documents for reading by forming legible letters and utilizing correct spacing;” and “to write legibly in manuscript and cursive.” She emphasizes that the focus is on legibility.
“In education today, we must face the reality that we simply do not have enough time in the school day to get to everything that we would like to. Teachers are forced to prioritize the curriculum, and in Hamilton County, teachers are directed to utilize the state standards to do that,” Legg says. The common core state standards, which have been adopted by the state of Tennessee and will be fully integrated in K-12 by the year 2014, address handwriting in a limited way as well.
The college and career readiness anchor standards for writing expects that students “produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience; develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach; use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.” There’s no mention of cursive writing here, she says, because the common core standard emphasizes that a “key purpose of writing is to communicate clearly.”
“One could certainly argue that the content of a student’s writing is much more important than the format in which they write it [whether] print, cursive, keyboard, et cetera,” Legg says. Legg says she agrees with many who argue that cursive writing provides opportunities to engage students cognitively. “The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Research indicates that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better, which is a lifelong benefit,” she says.
“Teachers need to be able to read what students write in order to evaluate them effectively. Where we must be cautious is in the amount of time we spend in this area. The days of spending hours tracing a page-full of letters has long past. If primary teachers are spending more than 15 minutes a day on handwriting, they are wasting the student’s time and theirs.” For now, cursive is still widely taught in U.S. public and private elementary schools, according to a 2007 nationwide study on handwriting instruction by Vanderbilt University, as reported on usatoday.com. The Vanderbilt study surveyed a random sampling of about 200 teachers in grades one through three in all 50 states, and 90 percent of the teachers who responded said their schools required instruction in handwriting.
Of those who taught it, half of second grade teachers and 90 percent of third grade teachers offered instruction in cursive. Furthermore, teachers said they spent about 60 minutes a week on teaching cursive – the amount recommended by handwriting experts, said Steve Graham, an education professor at Vanderbilt and the study’s lead author.
Legg cites Graham’s study in which he also discovered that the fastest hand writers don’t use the traditional cursive taught in school. “They instead use a mix of printed and cursive letters and his research shows they gain speed without sacrificing legibility. Graham found half of students in elementary school use this ‘hybrid approach,’ presumably because it’s easier for them and because they’re under time pressure,” Legg says. “If our ultimate goal is to prepare students for success in college and career, then our responsibility is to ensure that they can write legibly so that the reader can easily understand the information,” Legg says.
Fifth grade teacher Sue Cooper, who teaches at a rural school system in the northern/middle Tennessee area, says: “I think that it is the worst thing that we can do for our children [to remove cursive from the curriculum] because they are losing the ability to sign their name on such documents as checks or loans. “Kids are limited in their skills now as it is. Why debilitate them further by removing something most found interesting? Cursive writing used to be a coming of age of sorts and now, without it, children are missing out on a fine art that is part of our culture.” Parents and teachers may not have to imagine the absence of cursive any longer, because this may be the case as technology and class room time constraints continue to phase out older methods of communication.