They came. They wrote. They conquered cursive.
This was the first of two workshops I am teaching at the New York Public Library. It was just delightful, connecting with participants ranging from 20- to 60-something, representing at least six nationalities. Only one student had not studied cursive as a child, so that made things easier. We spoke about our cursive experiences and then got hands-on practice, using blank or lined paper with soft lead pencils or Bic ball point pens.
There was lots of talk of which letters are hard to form, such as a lower-case R or V. I would add that long words, especially ones like constitution, declaration, and independence can be challenging when you try to keep all the letters connected. Even those of us who regularly write in cursive often lift our pen in the middle of a word to make things easier.
I briefly spoke about current research, which shows the importance of teaching cursive as well as typing: Efficiency (for notetaking and exams), developing signatures, reading historical documents, and cognitive brain function that is specific to cursive handwriting. Anecdotally, I told the story about my fourth-grade tutoring student who printed so slowly I had no idea how she would take the state exam at the end of the year.
The two takeaways that fascinated me were the following:
One student spoke about learning cursive first in a French lycée and it seems that, although I have not delved into the research on this, other Western European and Latin American cultures teach cursive first. The U.S. started teaching print first, during the Progressive education era of the early 20th century, so that students would learn to read better.
The other was the kind of handwriting, whether in print or cursive, that seems to come out of adolescence, where letters are round, dots are circles, or perhaps hearts. I would venture a guess on this: if you got the cursive training for several years and did everything the teacher asked, perhaps you wanted to, in classic teenager style, do things your own way, imbue a little personality, stamp it with individuality.
Tomorrow I’ll share my favorite middle school story: a student watched me write on the board and yelled out, “Miss Bushell, you write like my grandma!”
A higher compliment I have never gotten.