Out of the Loop? or Just Out of Touch ??
 

In the F150 supersize thread I mentioned I gave my old F150 to my 17 YO grandson.
While going over the title transfer paperwork I asked him to sign and date the documents where required. In the signature blanks he started printing his name. I stopped him and said no, you need to write your name.

His response? I don't know how to write it, printing is all we do in school. News to me but apparently they quit teaching recursive writing in TX schools years ago.

Are they doing this everywhere or just here in TX or ?? One would think they would at least teach them how to write their name. or am I just an old foggy OWG (rhetorical as I already know the answer to that actually).

They taught the kids cursive at my daughters fancy pants private school. Honestly, I'd rather they teach her how to code in C++.

Some of the schools removed it completely. Our kids are taught that and my older boy loves writing it. He no longer prints. What's sad is there is no black board in some classes. They have a small screen, like an I pad or some type of computer and half of them are broken so the kids sit and wait for their turn. Math is taught like that, no wonder kids in other countries are kicking our kid's asses.

{Geek Alert!} For a short time I collected antique fountain pens...

There are BBS's like Pelican for such things.

On these BBS's there is much lamenting about the lack of knowledge/teaching of cursive (you are correct that it is becoming rarely taught in public schools all over the world).

For a time I toyed with the idea of relearning it... so many things to do... so little time.

I gave up cursive a long time ago.

I've also forgone capitalization and print in all uppercase.

If I could get rid of punctuation I would

Drng cllge I dvlpd shrthnd tht essntly elmntd vwls

I will say I enjoy reading letters from my father and mother.

They still wrote /write in that old world cursive and print that just looks so elegant.

Was taught it, never use it. I hand-lettered architectural drawings for years so my printing is far better. If I try to write cursive it looks terrible and is nearly illegible.

I'll teach my kids to read / recognize it just like Roman numerals, etc. but I don't see why it needs to be an academic requirement.

I'm a real spaz when it comes to writing in cursive, but I use it. Always have been a spaz since we started practicing those coiled circle writing exercises in third grade. My wife is a teacher and doesn't see a need for it. So the current generation being raised is a generation of button pushers. In my view the more things you don't know how to do in life the more you expose yourself to being taken advantage of. Maybe they can code, but can't solve basic problems of everyday life. Like the time some people I know gave me their vacuum cleaner that wasn't working & couldn't determine the problem. I cleaned out the clog & used it for years. Just my .02.

^ +1000.

I was taught cursive. I went to a fancy pants private school for the 5th, 6th, 7th and half of the 8th grade where you could only write in cursive and they graded your penmanship. I have report cards where I got all As except for a C in penmanship and that kept me off of the honor roll. Freakin' Nazis.

Based on my penmanship, I should have been a doctor.

Same here, but my printing is bad, too.

I an going to go against the flow (again ;)) and say that maybe... just maybe some things in life... the finer things in life... are not necessary but give us a better quality of life.
Art, Music... dare I say it... even sports (in school)?
Should we remove all these things from schools because they don't help the kids to be more productive adults?

I can appreciate nice cursive writing. I think it looks great.

I just wish I could have done a better job with it. My writing of all types is a disaster.

I still write this way. Full height for capitals and 1/2 height for non-capitals. I picked this up late in drafting in high school and it moved my illegible writing to quite legible.

Sometime in college, I came across a professor who "never" saw this before. I explained that in drafting, this is how lettering is done. She thought I was writing in all capital letters.

Fortunately, I had a type writer and usually typed everything. Even in class. It was a little electric job. Even worked as an early portable serial printer. Used thermal paper or thermal cartridges and standard paper. Weird typing along in class. Fortunately, it was nearly silent.

Respectfully, beyond nostalgia what difference does it make?

Signatures to this day are made by some with an X or others with completely illegible marks and others looks like calligraphy. My work requires electronic documentation and signatures. All of them hold the same weight and there is no putting the written communication genie back in the bottle.

I type everything on an IBM Selectric. Even this.

My daughter learned cursive in 2nd grade. She is going into 5th grade now. This is in California. On the flip side, the more affluent areas all have iPads by 4th grade, so I don't know if they still write with a pen. My daughter (and presumably everyone in her class) still writes with a pen.

Public schools started dropping cursive in 2010.

Cursive handwriting is disappearing from public schools - The Washington Post

“Cursive writing is a traditional skill that has been replaced with technology,” Hairston said. “Educators are having to make choices about what they teach with a limited amount of time and little or no flexibility. Much of their instructional time is consumed with teaching to a standardized test.”

Since 2010, 45 states — including Maryland — and the District have adopted the Common Core standards, which do not require cursive instruction but leave it up to the individual states and districts to decide whether they want to teach it. A report the same year by the Miami-Dade public school system found that cursive instruction has been slowly declining nationwide since the 1970s.

I still write in cursive and also print from time to time.

My printing is nearly illegible. It takes so long to lift the pen and go from one letter to another I couldn't keep up with the subject if I printed my notes when I do interviews. I have a home-made version of note hand that is mostly cursive but leaves out articles and contracts a lot of common nouns and verbs. "He painted the truck blue" looks like "S paint trk blu" in cursive.

I sign my name in cursive on almost everything, but when it comes to writing out a paper check, (maybe twice a year) I have to think how some of the capitol letter are written in cursive. It is truly a dying art.

I was taught cursive in elementary school, 2nd grade I think. I have my own writing style now, a mix of printing and cursive. I would grade my penmanship a F.

In college, nothing but straight A's on essays. Maybe they couldn't decipher what I wrote, but knew I knew the material. Only a few responded with a ? and circled words. However, one penned a smiley when I started with, "If we keep meeting this way, eventually people are going to start talking".

I was taught cursive in 70's/80's, but it didn't take. I 'achieved' the lowest letter grade (a D) of my entire education (K to Bachelors) in handwriting during the 5th grade. The societal shift towards typed communication hasn't helped at all. I sometimes have difficulty deciphering my own hand writing these days.:(

My experience also. As the OP I wasn't lamenting the loss of cursive as much as I was just surprised it was not longer being taught and honestly don't see the need for it anymore.
In 1968 the USAF (at programming school) issued me coding sheets (for 029 keypunches, block printing in all caps...) which effectively ended my cursive writing skills (which were minimal at best). After spending the next 35 years coding in one form or another, the only thing I can write is my signature, everything else is a weird mixture of upper-case printing and a few written letters..

Signature only for me, and I hate printing as well. I do my best to type everything.

My kids go to a Catholic private school and are learning it. They think it's sorta fun.

Yup. "Back in the day" I learned not only cursive and typing in school, but also drafting and lead typesetting. Our schools now are just standardized testing mills, meaning if it's not on a standardized test, it's not in the curriculum.

I just had a college intern start work and his signature was printed, and not even very neatly.

How times have changed. When I was in school I was delayed being allowed to use cursive writing because my printing was sloppy. then during high school I wasn,t allowed to learn to type properly because I wasn,t in a business stream . I was in drafting and other shop classes instead.
I never use cursive today and had to teach myself to type.

I work in an exclusively non-electronic environment. For most - that means that they just don't take notes and they try to work off of memory.

I take notes. I started with my bad engineer-student drafting characters/script and soon got tired of falling behind. A colleague got into fountain pens and I kind of got dragged along. They're neat tools and are actually pleasurable, in a sense, to write with. My cursive went from "B- in 8th grade" to something that I'd actually send someone in public. It took a few months of many-kilowords/day but I think that I'm solidly into the 19th century by now...

Now I swap pens/inks in my notebooks to mark different days. I'm also "that guy" with real notes of what was said.

In engineering/science I don't know how you can't live without a pen(cil). Supposedly these kids are doing everything with ipads?

I guess, at 40, I'm only destined for that floating raft of burning wood to be sent off into the sea...

I love my tablets, but for quick notes, a paper notepad can't be beat.

Another example of technology dumbing down the next generation......
When the lights go out i'm going to write maps in cursive, it'll be fun to watch how many people are really lost, in more than location. ...

I grew up in Arizona public schools in the 80's/90's. We started learning cursive in second grade; our penmanship was a part of our report card. In 6th grade, we learned calligraphy (had to buy the special pens and everything). My penmanship kinda sucked (always a C) until learning calligraphy. From there, my penmanship got much better.

Fast forward to today, like others here, I print exclusively (except signature), and it's pretty much all caps. My kids give me crap about it. We're back in Arizona, and at my kids' public school, they start cursive in 3rd grade, but aren't graded on it.

I do OK at writing in cursive, but I do really well at printing. I think maybe that came from mechanical drawing classes in high school where neatness was a neccesity. All of my printed notes are perfectly ledgible by anyone who sees them I also am a stickler for puncuation, and capitolization. I keep a folded piece of paper with a list of "to dos" in my pocket for reference, because sometimes my memory fails me. I do have a tablet and a smart phone, but choose to not use them most of the time, and actually forget where they are located. I just started sending out a few texts this year, and have never accessed the internet on my phone, I wait to get to an actual keyboard at home or at work.

This is what I remember. That and those big ole honkin red pencils.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1436379901.jpg

A generation lost in space... that can't read the original Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution or ????

still use it..
and those MEAN Nun's are to blame..
can do so with either hand..
had too..
because lefties were thought of as spawns of you know who..

btw..
when your sitting somewhere alone...
far away from those you love...
few things are as special as receiving a hand written letter..

Rika