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

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" 😆

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).

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!

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.

I had some funny memories come back that I was thinking over this morning. (Well, funny to me, anyway.)

I learned print and cursive in school (went to public school). Don't remember which grade I learned cursive, just that it was exciting yet intimidating. I do remember that after I learned it, I think we used both print and cursive in school, but I rather think we used print more. I also remember a teacher or two despairing over my handwriting. My fifth and sixth grade teacher (had the same teacher both years) was the teacher who actually got me to talk now and then, and I remember her scolding me at one point about my handwriting. It might have been the sort of conversation where the teacher asks, Don't you want your handwriting to be pretty and legible? and I think to myself, No, not particularly, but nod and try to write a bit neater just for her anyway. I think I was using mostly print at that point, but I can't remember for sure. (I don't remember what sorts of things we did in school to practice our handwriting. I'm sure we did--but I was stubborn, and plenty miserable enough that worrying about penmanship along with everything else was simply too much, so it may not have been particularly effective with me.)

After elementary school, I know that I used mostly print in school (I guess I never got very comfortable writing in cursive before, we probably hadn't used it enough). Until I started learning Spanish in 8th grade. My first two Spanish teachers required us to write everything in cursive. And--I was surprised to discover that my cursive (once I got comfortable using it) looked nice (pretty nice, anyway) and was much more legible than my print! Not to mention it was much faster for me and much more comfortable. So I eventually ended up switching to writing in mostly-cursive (which is how I generally write even now).

Nowadays, when I /do/ write in print, I can write neatly if I don't write very much, but if I'm writing much, either my handwriting gets gradually worse and worse or I eventually end up switching to mostly-cursive without realizing it. 😛 So cursive is good. It makes my writing legible. 😆 Although I do worry sometimes if I should use it, I'm never sure who can read cursive nowadays. I know my older brother forgot how to read cursive. 😛

Thanks, everyone! It's really interesting to hear how many different experiences there are out there. Ajjie, I'd never heard of that hybrid writing style. Fascinating. ( I chuckled over the thought of your being able to read Greek but not cursive at one time.)

I remember all the penmanship exercises with the directional arrows and dotted lines, and indeed I have actually created a few dotted-line models (but just for print letters) in some of the books we've done. Islie, I'm not surprised to hear that you only started enjoying script writing much later. A lot of script writing depends on fine motor skills, and those develop over time, at different rates depending on the kid and what the kid spends time doing. Ironically, writing in script actually improves fine motor skills, so that kids who just press keys on a keyboard to write are missing out on that development. This is one reason that dinosaurs such as me would like to retain cursive writing instruction for everyone.

In fact, Tooky, something you said connects with a clever idea I just read this week, You said that you use cursive writing for artistic stuff. Some teachers, because they have no time allotted in the day to teach penmanship, teach cursive in art class. It can be a work of art, after all.

NG11, your friend who lived in France reminds me of a pen pal I had years ago. He was much older--he was a sort of family pen pal that MiniMom and I met on a trip once, and I was in charge of writing to him because I knew French. His handwriting was gorgeous, very old-fashioned because he was so much older, and I often couldn't read it. I would get a French-speaking friend to read it aloud to me in French, so I still had the fun of translating it to myself. Another friend whose mother was Swedish also has a beautiful script writing; she must have learned it at her mother's knee, because no school here ever taught that style of script.

If nobody learns cursive anymore, I'd like to know how people will create a signature. Will people sign legal documents in block printing? Will rock singers and movie stars autograph their pictures in lettering they learned in the first grade? The mind reels!

The answer: With great difficulty. For ages I struggled to get a decent signature that didn't look simply like my normal handwriting. I guess the fact I wrote in Nelson script and not print helped; I'd developed a kind of flowing way of joining up letters with tails a very little like cursive by about grade 4/5, so that helped somewhat. Eventually, I came up with something by overlapping my initials slightly.

On this topic, I thought I'd ask a related one. Do you guys start writing in pen from First Grade, or do you start out in pencil? In my primary school we were only allowed to write in pencil in Grades 1, 2 and 3. At some point during Grade 4, if our handwriting was considered neat enough, we could switch to pen (it was a privilege, though I guess by the end of the year everyone had been allowed to switch). The most annoying bit about the system though was that when you switched to pen, you were only allowed to use "rollerball" pens until the end of the year. From Grade 5 you could use ball point. Rollerball pens have wet ink which is a nightmare for left-handers like myself, since your hand smudges what you've written as you go along. Thankfully my mum found a pen that was labelled as "rollerball" but had fast-drying ink. I'm not sure where she found it (it wasn't more expensive or anything, I think she just stumbled on it), and it was such a good pen it lasted a really long time. I was allowed to use it because it said "rollerball" on it 😉

The only time my school required us to use pen was in setting our goals for the next day (the way the system works is that students tell themselves how much progress they're going to make in each of their subjects; rules to this applied, but that was the concept). Everything else was done in pencil since we would correct our work (the system had us score our own work against answer keys).

We had to wait until I think third grade before we could write in pen. It was a milestone of which we were very proud. I don't know how things have changed today. LIke you, Ajjie, I am a lefty and had terrible smudge trouble if the pen was the wrong kind. MiniMom actually had a fountain pen that she let me use once or twice, and that was even worse, which is too bad because ink can make for a lovely handwriting. In middle school we got to do lettering, with a special broad-nibbed pen, and again I had difficulty. Finally I solved that problem by learning how to letter righty (since it's slower than regular writing, I was able to control my movements enough. I haven't lettered in awhile. I should give it another try!

IT'S SNOWING!

And I'm freezing. Snow is great and all. Not being prepared for it AT ALL is not so great.

WAAAH, I WANT SNOW.

I haven't seen snow in years 😛

Edit: I take that back -- I saw snow this May when we were traveling through Oregon/Washington. That was really fun. It was only a little teeny bit though, barely enough to cover the ground.

*burrows gleefully into snow and disappears!* 😀 I love snow.

It snowed here today too! 😀 It didn't stick around though, but it lasted long enough for our outdoor dog class to be cancelled.

I haven't seen snow for the longest time. because we have to travel to see it. 😛 The last time it snowed here was when I was quite young, so I can't remember it very clearly.

It's getting colder here. I sat with my heating pad for awhile this morning, because our heat hasn't come up yet. No snow so far. Enjoy it, whoever has it this week!