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Ariel.of.Narnia
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Re: Welcome home

Post by Ariel.of.Narnia » Tue Oct 01, 2013 11:25 pm

@Eria: by "other movies" are you referring to PC and VDT as opposed to LWW? Because if you are, you have to realize that LWW and PC were directed by the same guy who's definitely not a Christian. And as much as we'd like to, we can't always blame stuff on the director because not everything is the director's fault. (We can blame PJ for LotR and TH stuff more than the average director because PJ puts his fingers into many, many pies.)
I'm sure we have a good number of concerns with this announcement, especially if SC were to turn out like PC or VDT in their varying ways. But until we get any info on this, we can only hope for something that would surpass them. I know VDT was a hard blow to many fans for several reasons, but perhaps if Gresham gets more say this time around (he had rather little say for VDT, but I would sooner take the deviations from the book than lose the "another name" line, so he will always have my respect for the way he fought for that line), SC can bring us up from the underland of Hollywoodization.
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Re: Welcome home

Post by miniver » Thu Oct 03, 2013 9:43 pm

It's an imperfect world, alas, and for some reason, the people making Narnia movies seem not to have as strong a sense of the books as Jackson does for the Tolkien works. It's not just that they leave out a lot of the spiritual implications and elements. They often don't even tell a good story! The characters just get lost in the chaos of endless action scenes.

By contrast, The Princess Diaries changed some stuff around from the Meg Cabot book to the film—for example, making the royal grandmother much nicer—but you got a strong sense of who all the main characters were, what they wanted, and how they changed throughout the story. Whereas Lewis was one of the world's most inventive and compelling storytellers, and the filmmakers managed to leave out most of the characterization and a good deal of the story besides. I understand they felt they had to add action in PC and to integrate the separate island visits with a central plot thread in VDT. But they did so in such a boneheaded way. The evil green miasma that made people misbehave against their will? What kind of idiot character motivation is that? No wonder they couldn't let Edmund, Lucy, or Caspian talk too much in VDT. If filmgoers had gotten to know these characters in depth, their meaninglessly contradictory behavior in the green slime scenes would have been so much more glaringly obvious. Grrr.

But with all that, I still have hope that this film will be better. I guess I'm so eager for a film about Narnia that I'll give it a chance. I truly thought that we'd never see another one, so this is like a reprieve. We can but hope.
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Re: Welcome home

Post by Ariel.of.Narnia » Thu Oct 03, 2013 10:25 pm

Amen on the storytelling and characterization fronts!
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Re: Welcome home

Post by miniver » Wed Oct 16, 2013 8:55 pm

Okay, friends, I have another school philosophy question for you. I know that a lot of you are homeschooled (and one or two of you are homeschooling parents!). I recently learned that many states no longer require schools to teach cursive writing. In fact, kids aren't even required to learn how to read documents in cursive! (Like the Declaration of Independence?) I understand that there's not enough time in the day for teachers to fit everything in, and that now kids are required to learn how to type in elementary school so they can take tests on the computer. But I am distressed that this useful motor skill (which trains connections in brain neurons that help with other motor skills as well) is being phased out in many places. Presumably kids will still be taught to print, and they can just learn to print very fast and somehow join the letters together if they need to take notes while someone is talking. Or they can just live on a keyboard for every task they ever have to do.

Which got me to wondering: how many of you learned cursive? Did you have penmanship as a separate subject? I'll tell you that I certainly did, but I grew up quite a long time ago. In fact, when I took a spelling test every week, I got two grades: one was for the words I spelled correctly, and one was for handwriting. I'd be curious to know whether you all have studied cursive. You don't have to give any personal details about where or how, of course. But if you're homeschooled, was there a textbook or workbook that you used?

I remember that there were two huge rites of passage in terms of handwriting at my school. The first one was when you learned cursive letters and got to write "in script." The second one was when they let you write script with a pen rather than a pencil!
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Re: Welcome home

Post by Tenethia » Wed Oct 16, 2013 9:08 pm

I learned cursive before I learned to print, I believe. I had a bunch of little subjects when I was in Kingergarten-4th grade, and I had a whole book dedicated to learning to write in cursive. I had to copy letters and write journal entries and various things like that to learn, and then I learned to print. I don't prefer either script or print over the other, but I do believe we should be learning to do both.
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Re: Welcome home

Post by Ariel.of.Narnia » Wed Oct 16, 2013 9:23 pm

I was private schooled, but the curriculum works very well for homeschoolers as well. The English (as in "language arts") note packets taught cursive writing in... I want to say grade three, but I don't remember. They showed the process in steps (so one stroke at a time) with little arrows showing how the strokes where made. Then they started writing examples out in cursive (dotted-line words, phrases, or sometimes whole answers) in note packets from all subjects. After a while, the curriculum expected the student to write all answers in cursive, which I did.
My penmanship isn't the greatest, but I do prefer my cursive over my manuscript because my manuscript gets sloppy really fast, especially when I write in a hurry. Oddly enough, most of the notes I took in college courses, I wrote in sloppy manuscript that sometimes became a cross between manuscript and cursive and on occasion slipped into straight-out cursive.
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Re: Welcome home

Post by jesusgirl4ever » Wed Oct 16, 2013 10:15 pm

My mother makes me write all school stuff in cursive! I now write in cursive automatically. Habit.
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Re: Welcome home

Post by Ajnos » Thu Oct 17, 2013 4:17 pm

Ooh...cursive. Great topic. Especially as I have stuff to say on it. I started school in the early nineties, which was a turbulent time for schools in South Africa as Apartheid was being phased out and new curriculums introduced. My school year was the first, or one of the first, to go through a lot of new things. We were the guinea pigs on more than one occasion.

In my brother's year (he was three years above me), they learnt print writing in Grade 1 and cursive in Grade 2. After that I think cursive was the norm (I could check that with him if you want). Then they decided to do away with both print and cursive and introduced something they called "Nelson script" which was intended to be a compromise between the two - I've also described it as "print with tails"*. We never learnt cursive and as a result I couldn't read it until late primary/early high school and struggled to read it for a long time. I think at some point (possibly around Grades 5/6) I found a book and tried to teach myself cursive but as I wasn't using it for anything, I didn't persist. When I got to high school, I was jealous of some of my class mates who could write in cursive. Apparently their primary schools had ignored the change and taught them cursive anyway. I also struggled to read my Science teacher's notes (they were mostly handwritten in cursive on old OHP slides). In all I felt particularly disadvantaged by not learning cursive.

It was rather funny when I told someone in the UK about my experience and how I couldn't read cursive for such a long time, and they looked strangely at me and retorted, "But you can read Greek1" :lol:

I should add, however, that "Writing" (I assume that's our equivalent of what you refer to as "penmanship") was an important part of our Grade 1 and 2 syllabus (so separate to spelling). I can't remember if we were actually marked (graded) on it. We had to practise writing letters and sentences as our first activity in class every morning. We still did a little in Grade 3 to a lesser extent.

I think the cursive/non-cursive debate has continued over the years and in the time my mother was teaching in junior primary (till a couple years ago) there was a time when the children were learning cursive and a time when they weren't. I'm not sure what they do now. Apparently they have much less focus on writing lessons now than we did.

* If you google "nelson script" you get something a little different to what we learnt; it looks more like cursive, whereas ours looked more like print. The Sassoon fonts come pretty close, though the capital U had a stick (without a tail) and the tail on the small q was rounder in the version we learnt (ignore the special characters).

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Re: Welcome home

Post by narniagirl11 » Thu Oct 17, 2013 7:29 pm

Wow, this is an interesting topic! Everyone has had good things to say. :)

I'm homeschooled, and my mom chose to teach me and my siblings to write cursive. I can't remember what grade I learned it in, but I remember that I learned it earlier than most kids because I was so excited to try it! I had already learned to print. After I learned cursive, Mom had me keep practicing it for several grades, and I do most of my hand-written schoolwork in cursive. When I'm trying to take fast notes though, I switch between the two. If you hand me a pencil and tell me to write, I will probably do it in cursive.

One of my friends grew up in France, and he said that he never learned to print. He was taught cursive right from the beginning, and when his family moved back to America, he had to teach himself how to print. His print is horrible, but his cursive is beautiful! He definitely has the best hand writing for a guy that I've ever seen!
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Re: Welcome home

Post by Lucy Took » Thu Oct 17, 2013 8:51 pm

I was taught both print and cursive, but I mostly write in print.

I was taught cursive fairly early on, I forget what grade it was, but I think it was in fifth grade that I had to do actual penmenship instead of just knowing how to form the letters, and that consisted of having a book of poems, verses, and short paragraphs and I'd copy one down every day and it had to be in cursive.

Personally I like cursive better when done well as an art form than I like it as a method of transmitting a message. For me if I want to make my writing readable by anyone but me it has to be in print unless I take my time on the cursive, and I've gotten to the point that I can print as fast as I can script so...I kinda find cursive personally pointless on a day to day basis unless I'm taking time to make a card look good.
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