Lost Art

Lost Art

I’m willing to bet that many people in my age group remember working diligently to learn cursive handwriting in the classroom from the earliest school grades.  I actually mastered it early on, similarly succeeded with the futuristic skill of keyboarding in high school.  That’s right, I was the only boy in a class of 21 young lady students taking a typewriting class.  I signed up on a dare but the challenge to improve my speed kicked in and I was off and running.

The beautiful young ladies I was surrounded with were a definite inspiration, and in the beginning, I do remember Ms. Burkholder telling me to stop dropping my papers on the floor.  My instructor suspected that I was doing it for purpose to try to sneak a look from closer to the floor level.  Couldn’t have been further from the truth.

Once the challenge of increasing my speed surfaced, I stopped messing around and the papers stopped dropping on the floor from my desk.  I actually overheard my instructor brag about how well I was doing and how they should actively recruit more of the young men to enroll.  The following year after I broke ground (at my school anyway) 6 guys enrolled in typing class.

The whole reason for this post is that once again, I took on the challenge of writing a whole letter in cursive writing, and it took me longer than I thought it would.  Guess what?  It’s not like riding a bike!  By the middle of the third paragraph my hand was cramping.  The quality was not anything to be proud of.

We need to encourage cursive writing in the classroom as a subject.  In the future, if we get away from it, cursive writing will become like a different language altogether.  Many historic documents are written in cursive and many of our young children are growing up writing in text shorthand (OMG, LOL, LMAO, etc.).

As usual, I don’t expect a response by everyone that agrees or disagrees with me.  Food for thought is all I intended to do.  The more we think about our future (youth) the more we need to stay involved in their development, and the educational system.  The best is yet to come…….