Will handwriting some day go the way of Latin?

Will handwriting some day go the way of Latin?

Columns

By: Bernie O'Neill

Is what they teach in York Region public schools keeping up with the times?

This is the question people used to ask maybe 15 years ago, as computers began their invasion into every aspect of our lives.

Hence the push for computer labs in every grade school, which seemed to satisfy us that our kids would be ready for what the world  threw at them — be it a touch-screen cash register or a hand-held mini-computer used when restocking the shelves at the grocery store.

I ask this question as my 10-year-old son takes on some of the big challenges presented to him in Grade 5 — which turn out to be cursive writing and a lot of good old-fashioned math, or what my parents were told was “the new math” 35 years ago.

In the same way people used to question the teaching of Latin (Latin words being the building blocks of Western languages and important in the study of medicine and other sciences), you start to wonder if the curriculum will eventually evolve to where keyboarding is king.

I’m actually both surprised cursive has not been mastered by this age and wonder how much he is ever going to use it in later years of school, let alone in so-called “real life”. (This would be the lives lived by those of us who weren’t smart enough to stay in school for as long as we possibly could and eventually become teachers of some form or another.)

My son was asking me why they call it cursive and I suggested it might have something to do with all the cursing he was doing as he tried to finish his narrative story about a subject of his choice — in this case, the hockey tournament he was in, the Markham Early Bird, in which they lost three games straight.

Not that he really curses. He just lets out an exasperated, “argh!” or “ahhhh!” when his capital Z (for “zero goals for”) or lower-case L (for “lost another”) don’t come out looking quite right.

Or else he forgets and prints a sentence instead of “writing” it, forgetting this is not just an exercise in writing, but an exercise in writing.

No wonder the kids get confused and people have a hard time mastering the English language.

I used to admire him for just getting the work done and handed in, even if it had a few nicks and scratches.

But lately he’s become something of a perfectionist, re-doing things if he forgot to indent or didn’t leave enough space on the margins (I get the impression his teacher is a stickler for this sort of thing).

Which means he has become an expert at erasing, more than anything. After the “ugh” or “rahh!”, he does one pass to erase the bulk of it then goes over it again to remove pencil marks he has missed.

Rummaging through our at-home school supplies, he can tell a good quality eraser from one that’s only so-so just by looking at it. If you asked him, he could probably tell you how to hold the thing for maximum erasive effect or what wrist motion is best to expunge what you’ve written while avoiding carpal tunnel syndrome.

Hence, many an hour will be spent this year at home, perfecting his handwriting, erasing it and writing it again.

Unfortunately, identifying good erasers at a glance does not pay as well as say, picking out a top-quality diamond at a glance, or diagnosing a serious illness at a glance, or scouting out a great hockey player in a beer league or a future Hollywood star who’s drinking a soda down at the malt shop.

I asked him what he thought of cursive and he said, “It sucks!” Then, more contemplatively, “It doesn’t have to be that fancy.”

Steven Graham, a University of Maryland professor, argues in his essay, The Critical Role of Writing in Student Success, not honing handwriting skills can hold students back.

Good note-taking will become important at some point in their studies and they need to be prepared. Writing is faster than printing. At some point, they will need to read hand-written documents and understand them. But I wonder how long that will be the case.

So few of us actually use our handwriting skills anymore, except maybe to write cheques and that’s never fun anyway.

At work, I still take notes in a notepad but I think I am becoming a rarity in the newsroom.

Whether we know 10-finger typing or the two-finger hunt and peck (I used to work with a hunt-and-peck typist who was so fast, while working his way around the keyboard, looked like he was playing the bongo drums, man ... as in, like, groovy) many of us do our “writing” using a keyboard.

We text each other on our phones, send each other e-mails.

A good old-fashioned handwritten letter that arrives in the mail — something I love to get — is a rarity, and usually suggests it was written by someone of a certain age, or it is a direct-mail marketing pitch done by a computer in a cursive font for that personalized touch.

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