The Writing On The Wall

I am the computer teacher at my school. Why would I care if the kids I teach have readable handwriting? It's a digital age. At this point, I'm happy when I can get kids to type with ten fingers instead of two thumbs. Navigating the strange and often arcane seas of proper penmanship seems like unnecessary torture for children of the twenty-first century. My own son has handwriting that prepares him primarily for a career in medicine, but his scrawled notes to himself remain as impenetrable as his scribblings in Kindergarten. That's about the time that his mother and I sat him down in front of "Reader Rabbit Teaches Typing."  We surrendered. Now he texts and types much faster than his late-twentieth-century elders, but we still don't seek him out for his mad cursive skills.
Maybe we were just ahead of the curve. State leaders who developed the Common Core Standards have omitted cursive for a host of reasons, including an increasing need for children in a digital-heavy age to master computer keyboarding and evidence that even most adults use some hybrid of classic cursive and print in everyday life. Penmanship is a dying art. But that hasn't kept seven of the forty-five states that have adopted the Common Core Standards from fighting to keep Handwriting as a part of the curriculum. "Modern research indicates that more areas of the human brain are engaged when children use cursive handwriting than when they keyboard," said Linden Bateman, a state representative from Idaho.  "We're not thinking this through. It's beyond belief to me that states have allowed cursive to slip from the standards." Bateman, who handwrites one hundred twenty-five ornate letters each year, adds, "The Constitution of the United States is written in cursive. Think about that."
I wonder if Mister Bateman thought about how hard it is to read that document, and what a treat it would have been for the framers to have access to a word processing program that could have done all the additions, deletions and amendments to that big old piece of parchment with ease. No matter, it continues to be part of our heritage and a link to our past, and so we will continue to ask our kids to slow down and think as they write. Come to think of it, maybe I should start issuing an all-cursive blog.
Please, don't hold your breath.