You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy!
Kid’s cant write anymore!
They can type, but they can’t write.
Penmanship is as elusive as the pin up girl who does beer bongs. Cursive writing is so LOST it’s living on an island with the Others.
Blame it on the new millenium drug; technology.
With the computer and email and text messaging, there’s not as much demand for good old fashioned writing.
I guess I am old school. I remember when you got a silver cross pen as a reward for doing something wonderful. It was the kind of writing utensil that you only used sparingly. This cadillac of writing devices was used for special occasions like signing your first pay check, your child’s report card, or writing your girlfriend a love poem.
Children in this modern world are better prepared to fly a drone aircraft up AlQueda’s ass from the comfort of their living rooms, but they can’t write a simple sentence on a piece of paper.
Cyber is a wonderful place to be, but what if the power goes off? What if you get stranded in the mountains or a desert island? then what techno-brat?
How you gonna communicate your thoughts to your homies then?
You gonna ype on the toaster?
I was saddened to learn that cursive writing is being deemphasized in a growing number of schools. Our children are like trained chimps banging away on key boards. They can throw their crap at the screen, but grasp a pen and put ink to paper, that’s a task they lack.
The creative expression that comes with the swirling joy of cursive has vanished.
When I was a kid, we had no choice but to learn to write. Back in the day, when Watergate was simply a hotel, back before you could use your phone to look up spelling words and play a song from Jimi Hendrix, we were taught penmanship.
My teacher once said; “What did Ben Franklin, Martin Luther King, and John Kennedy all have in common? They all used their pen to convey their thoughts to others.”
Back in my day, we devoted entire days to handwriting. We learned to make perfect loops that joined with the next letter in a harmonious line of ink. Done correctly, and it was like matrimonial consumation.
They say the pen is mightier than the sword. The computer keyboard is not mighter than anything.
I read a report recently that made me so sad, I gagged into my own mouth.
DATELINE: CHARLESTON, W.Va.
West Virginia’s largest school system teaches cursive, but only in the 3rd grade.
“It doesn’t get quite the emphasis it did years ago, primarily because of all the technology skills we now teach,” said Jane Roberts, assistant superintendent for elementary education in Kanawha County schools.
Technology skills we now teach? What technology skills? Playstation 3. Are you going to write a composition using a joystick?
Back in the day, when ink was ink and paper was nervous, we use to write our asses off.
It was called penmanship. We actually got graded for it. If you couldn’t connect the loops legibly you got flunked.
Now a days, kids just need to have digital dexterity and the ability to tap tap tap on a keyboard.
That is freaking sad.
More from the report:
Fewer people are using handwriting. The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.
“We need to make sure they’ll be ready for what’s going to happen in 2020 or 2030,” said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.
You know what’s going to happen in 2020 President Van Sluys? You are going to have a bunch of techno-imbiciles who have lost a valuable skill.
Writing is rewarding. Penmanship creates flavor and establishes individuality.
When you type, you choose a font like an automatron on an assembly line. You are a robot who writes, but something is lost in the translation.
You can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she writes a paper. Are their loops big like their personality? Are their letters crammed together like the uptight individual he is?
What can you tell about me from this sentence; not much except I have a thing for 12 point Courier.
According to the article:
Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, she said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting.
Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University’s College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they’ll replace it entirely before long.
The only good news; apparently alarmists like me have been howling at the moon about the potential loss of handwriting for ions. A guy like me with a quil was dipping his anger into an ink well a hundred years ago lamenting the invention of a crazy little thing called the typewriter.
My kids don’t even know what a typewriter is.
That’s ok, a hundred years from now, kids won’t type anything. The generation that grows upon Mars will think their thoughts and those thoughts will be transported via cornea lasers that project their ideas onto a holographic bubble.
Then everyone will wonder what happened to the good old days when we use to slide our fingers over the glass buttons on our PDA’s and make big letters appear using a 12 point font?
Now that’s crazy!