Salve omnibus! Si hoc non legere, tune non habetur traditum modi agendi. Pudeat tui!
Hello, everyone! If you cannot read this, then you have not kept up with the traditional way of doing things. You should be ashamed of yourselves!
Or so one might think if one agrees with Darrell Huckaby’s heartfelt supplication in the Gwinnett Daily Post to “protect cursive as part of our culture.” Well, Darrell is right: the instruction of cursive is about to cease, just as once we ceased the instruction of calligraphy, Morse code, and -- pay attention, ladies -- shorthand! Huckaby contends, perhaps presciently, that with the loss of cursive instruction we are “presiding over the decline of civilization” in our society -- good penmanship, he evidently feels, being the hallmark of a stalwart, humane society. So, should cursive handwriting instruction be an element in the education of the modern American student??
I say no. The responsibility of the teacher is not to ensure that the student communicate prettily, with well-formed letters. The responsibility of the teacher is to ensure that the student communicate effectively, with well-formed ideas. I don’t need cursive for that.
Things change, to be sure. Consider this: we don’t walk around these days shouting Ave Maria to every Tom, Dick, and Mary we think highly of. (Whoooooooops, that should be: of whom we think highly -- Lord knows I don’t want to break with accepted traditional rules.) No, Latin is in the dustbin of history -- once universally useful for communicating effectively, but now, not so much.
Modalities of communication change. Quill to inkpen; calligraphy to cursive; fountain pen to typewriter; cursive to helvetica: Tempus fugit. Our job, as teachers and parents, quite frankly, is to keep up with the technology that allows the student to communicate clearly and with the most facility. And for students today, that means on a keyboard -- whether on a computer or a cellphone. This -- like it or not -- is their currency.
Tell it clearly. I don’t care how, as long as your meaning is made known to me.
I’ve seen this in my own classroom. “Tell me about your favorite candy bar.” If I set them loose on the computers, I get 5 paragraphs that I can then help the students revise and make better without too much pain, sorrow, and agony -- even those students that HATE to write. With a solely handwritten composition, however, I might get three paragraphs that they are then reluctant to revise in any way simply because, logistically and mechanically, it is just too big of a pain in the butt.
Here’s the dirty little secret of writing instruction: the final copy is secondary. I’m much more concerned with the effort the student expels during the revision process. This is where writers learn to write -- to communicate their ideas clearly and effectively, rather than merely prettily, cursively. I’ll take a sloppily written but well communicated idea any day over a prettily formed but horribly formulated idea any day.
Time once was, to make a snack for munching during the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights, we’d break out the biggest stainless steel pot from the cupboard, swirl in a couple tablespoons of Mazola, pour in about half a cup of popping corn from its glass jar, set it upon the electric stove on medium heat, cover it with a lid, shake briskly for about ten minutes, and wait for the magic to happen. Meanwhile, a big glob of butter slowly melted in a jelly jar that we’d placed in a pan of water over low heat. Of course, no one today in their his or her right mind would suffer such laborious tomfoolery. Put the little packet in the Nuker (this side up!) and hit the damn POPCORN button!
I teach language arts, for heaven’s sake! You’d think I’d be on the side of this argument hollering for quill pens and ink pots. But I’m not. I mean, when was the last time any of us read a newspaper in cursive? Or a magazine? Or a book? Nothing is done in cursive, save for signatures -- and even those are becoming for the most part obsolete. That slurry of garbled slashes you scribe with the little plastic pen at the credit card reader -- you call that a signature?!?!?
Each teacher has about 180 hours to make sure students know what they need to know in each content area. 7 ½ days, that’s about it. Instructional time is indeed the bugaboo. Yes, I know that many will say that we teachers are simply cramming into the students the bits they will need to know for the end of the year standardized tests. But we’re not. As Huckaby himself explains, the goal of most teachers is to “enrich students’ education and teach them to think, to solve problems and to love learning.” This is all any teacher really wants to do. Yes, some teachers do it better than others, but -- to be sure -- cursive is not their secret weapon.
Many obsess that in discontinuing the instruction of cursive writing, we are thereby ushering in its obsolescence. So be it. Sure, the monasteries stopped teaching the friars how to create illuminated manuscripts in the scriptoria. Well.......that’s because the printing press came around. Can you imagine what the consequences would have been in the 1770s if John Dunlop had said: “Oh, my...we can’t quickly print out hundreds of copies of that declaration; we need to write it out longhand!”
Passions about cursive are totally understandable. Yes, we remember the slates with the special lines, and the difficult G, and how am I ever going to make that twisty, curvy lower case Z. To be sure, Darrell Huckaby makes a passionate case for the importance of cursive writing -- handwritten notes, good manners, and the continuation of civility in a society that seems, persistently, to be spiralling downwards in the civility department. Southern Living magazine, no less, ran a feature article just last October on the important albeit lost art of handwritten thank you notes.
.
“Dear Mrs. Easterling, thank you ever so much for the beautiful engraved set of julep cups. I was just telling Caleb how badly we needed some if we were ever hoping to have friends over this May. You have truly saved the day!!!”
All this, of course, laid out in meticulously crafted penmanship on fine linen paper from Crane, wrought by a Cross pen or some such instrument with a special nib. Hmmmph!
Regardless, I’m not some techno-geeb who thinks that everyone should walk around with a bluetooth earpiece and communicate solely by text message. I went to a 200 something-year-old college and actually learned Greek, Latin, and a took a course called Western Man, precious and antiquated though it may sound. For godsakes, I wear a tie most days! True, we need civility, and I like a handwritten note as much as the next favor-currying-CEO or debutante. It is not, however, going to make our students smarter or better adults.
Darrel Huckaby does have this right: cursive is an art. Regretably, though, just as I don’t have 10 weeks to teach little Johnny or Suzy the nuances of Impressionist pointillism, I don’t have the time to teach them cursive either. Plain and simple -- and, yes, it probably stinks. But such is the result of modernity, just as we must suffer the abomination of apples that have been kept miraculously fresh, Rip Van Winkle-like, through a nitrogen-flushed state of suspended animation .
So, regretably, if you want your child to be a gifted scribbler of cursive (and I dolefully recognize that there are far too many parents out there who couldn’t care less) then go get him or her a tutor -- just as you would if you want them to learn to sing, or play the piano, or throw a sick curve ball. They will sign their checks wonderfully! (What’s a check?)
.Perhaps my favorite argument from Mr. Huckaby is this: “And if we don’t teach students how to write cursive, they also won’t know how to read cursive.” To this I simply respond: “And if we don’t teach students how to send Morse Code, they also won’t know how to read Morse Code.” Huckaby also states: “If we lived through it, so should our kids and grandkids.” Hell, yeahh!!! FREEBIRD!!!
Sadly, the institution of cursive handwriting will not save our civilization, any more than did the institution of Petrarchan sonnets -- sad as that may make you. And nobody bitched too mightily when we stopped forcing kids to pump out line after line of iambic madness. And the world kept spinning.
-- Michael McIntyre
Dacula 2011
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