[lbo-talk] The death of cursive....

Chuck Grimes cagrimes42 at gmail.com
Sat Nov 24 21:06:43 PST 2012


Cursive? Calculators? Computers?

I am not the slightest impressed with computers this and that, especially in school. Learning how to write is to command the language. Now if your disabled, fine use whatever works.

And another thing. I watch a fair number of lectures and find it particularly annoying when the speaker is looking at his/her laptop and fiddling with digital presentations. Unless they are in a real science, they usually can't manage their own graphics. It's just annoying.

I am with Joanna on this one for the simple and obvious reason that it's a skill you need to own with as few technological intermediaries as possible.

I had a real life lesson just last year when I wanted handwritten work orders because I could control them and track parts, labor, and who worked on what---without a fancy inventory and billing program the org wouldn't buy. The receptionist was a recent LA County School graduate and her handwriting was that loopy stuff teenage girls like. It was illegiable. In fact everybody's writing sucked except me and Cesare who was from Chile. It was ridiculous how much basic office work I had to teach, since everybody was on the computer.

My problem was that their computers were part of another company's system, so they were not used to doing daily tracking of the work flow. What happened last week was out in nowhereland called `the computer'.... Oh we can use Excel or some generic small business software that of course we didn't have and were not going to get ...

``On the 2006 SAT, a United States post-secondary education entrance exam, only 15 percent of the students wrote their essay answers in cursive''

Pathetic. I use notebooks and pens all the time and need to read them.

For some reason I can't believe this is even an issue. How are you supposed to take notes in class, do math and science problems, keep lab books, etc?

And what are all these kids going to do after the big one, in the great afterglow... ?

CG



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