You gotta wonder...

Today I read a web posting that posed the question "Is cursive writing a dying art?"  It mentioned that cursive used to be taught from 3rd thru 6th grade, and now it is often only taught in 3rd grade.

I remember that we used to do what seemed like page after page of practicing cursive letters in what seemed like every grade in grade school.  It was always the same - the page would start out great and about halfway through you could tell that I was getting tired or bored.  Those capital "s"s started getting skinny and laying down!  I always hated getting those pages back and the whole last line was crossed out and I had to redo them.  Of course,we could all write pretty well and legibly.  We didn't have an option!  We had to write.  We also didn't have the option of using a computer or even a typewriter.  Everything was handwritten, and everything was cursive.

I think that it was sometime in high school when we didn't have to always write in cursive any more.  Somewhere along in there I stopped writing cursive all together except for my signature.  One of the questions in the article was whether kids today will even have their signatures in cursive... an interesting thought.  Every now and then I try to write in cursive and it's hard!  I have to take my time and concentrate really hard to remember some things... like the tricks of how to tie the different letters together,  and what a capital Q looks like, and that an "m" has three, not only two bumps.

I have tried to make it a habit as of late to write some things in cursive - you know - try to hold onto the skills that I have before they all fade away.   My wife is incredible - she has beautiful handwriting and her cursive is wonderful to read - a real work of art.  I think that there may be a guy/girl factor in this whole thing, too.  The letter on the left could have been written by me.

What about all of you?  Do you still write in cursive at all?

Putting Pen to Paper

 

Anymore, this is really just a saying.  When was the last time any of us really took pen or pencil to paper and wrote someone a letter?  I would bet that we all have written a bunch of letters in our time.  The obligatory thank you letters to grandmas, grandpas and in-laws for Christmas and birthday gifts; the letters to Santa Claus asking for all those special gifts; most of us even wrote letters to some elected official as part of our schooling.

 

As I shared, I’ve been going through some old boxes.  I ran across a bunch of letters and was reading them to my daughter.  I read one where my brother wrote to me when I was in college and asked me to forgive him for peeling out in my Camaro.  You see, he had dropped me off at a friend’s house whom I was riding back to school with, and had shown off in my car as he left and broke the tires loose. (It was a sweet car!)  This was in a letter I received about a week and a half later.

It hit me that this was the soonest he could’ve talked to me about it.  Of course, we didn’t have cell phones back then.  No texting.  Long distance calls were expensive – like charged by the minute.  My family and I would arrange to talk on the phone and would usually have at least 2 weeks between calls because it was so expensive to talk long distance.  This concept was lost on my daughter.  In these days of instant communication, the idea that it would have been this long before we could actually talk about it was unfathomable to my her.

Anyway – we could sure surprise some of our family or friends if we actually physically wrote them a letter and sent it to them in the mail…

Think about it… it might be fun just for the reaction!