{"id":7682,"date":"2013-04-14T10:24:51","date_gmt":"2013-04-14T14:24:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/?p=7682"},"modified":"2013-04-14T10:24:51","modified_gmt":"2013-04-14T14:24:51","slug":"curse-you-cursive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2013\/04\/14\/curse-you-cursive\/","title":{"rendered":"Curse you cursive!"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The art of business cursive, circa 1884 (From Wikipedia)<\/p><\/div>\n

Okay, full confession.\u00a0 I’m kind of a wimp when it comes to authority.\u00a0 Always have been.<\/p>\n

Cop pulls me over and I feel like I’m eight years old.\u00a0 Getting called into the principal’s office when I was actually eight years old?\u00a0 Reduced me to a gibbering, cowardly mass.<\/p>\n

The number of times that I’ve actually rebelled in my life?\u00a0 Standing up to the metaphorical Man?\u00a0 You can count my Easy Rider moments on one hand.<\/p>\n

One of those times?\u00a0 Refusing to learn cursive.<\/p>\n

Yup.\u00a0 Way back in the shadowy gothic recesses of a 1970s Midwestern elementary school, I \"\"<\/a>stared down one of those teachers that inspired Calvin and Hobbes’ Miss Wormwood.<\/p>\n

My recollection of the conversation goes something like this:\u00a0 Her:\u00a0 “It’s time to learn how to write cursive, kids!”<\/p>\n

Me:\u00a0 “I already know how to write just fine.\u00a0 I don’t want to learn how to write two different ways.”<\/p>\n

Her:\u00a0 “Cursive is how grown-ups write.”\u00a0 Me:\u00a0 “That makes no sense at all and I’m not doing it.”<\/p>\n

The weird part is that I actually stuck to my guns.<\/p>\n

In an age when cursive was one of those rites of passage you took for granted — like multiplication tables and smallpox vaccination scars — I went all Bartleby the Scrivener on the Education Machine.<\/p>\n

The Plattsburgh Press-Republican<\/a> is reporting this weekend that I wasn’t just a rebel, I was a pioneer.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Cursive] may very well be a skill that is going to provide less and less usefulness as we enter the digital age,\u201d Minerva central school principal Heidi Kelly told the newspaper.<\/p>\n

Indeed, more and more schools are shifting time and energy away from “handwriting” and “cursive” and focusing instead on things like, you know, knowledge and creative thinking.<\/p>\n

Let me say, as an aside, that I have nothing against artful penmanship.\u00a0 One of my good friends is Gail Brill, the incredibly talented calligrapher in Saranac Lake<\/a>.\u00a0 I’m a big fan.\u00a0 That’s why we have art classes.<\/p>\n

And I get it.\u00a0 For some folks, the decline in penmanship is a microcosm of the vast American malaise, the great unraveling, the undisciplined, sloppy heart of Who We’ve Become.<\/p>\n

But here’s the truth.\u00a0 My best ideas aren’t just printed.\u00a0 They’re scrawled.\u00a0 They’re scratched out on the backs of napkins and parking stubs and Stewarts receipts.\u00a0 I like it that way.<\/p>\n

And another truth is that for millions of kids — boys, I suspect, in particular — the finicky, deskbound act of getting those curves and looping lines just exactly right<\/em> is pure torture.<\/p>\n

This is one education tradition best consigned to the 19th century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, full confession.\u00a0 I’m kind of a wimp when it comes to authority.\u00a0 Always have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}