When is the last time you wrote in cursive besides writing your signature? If you answered honestly, it has probably been months if not years since you have last written a letter or document in cursive. Cursive is a style of penmanship that supposedly allows you to write faster by connecting the flow of the letters together. The handwriting is most popular among the older generation. State legislatures are currently going back and forth discussing if cursive writing should be included in the Common Core curriculum for students. Debates have arisen in the nation as to why or why not cursive writing is important for students to learn. Do you feel that your child should be using cursive in the ...view middle of the document...
They do not want their children to be constantly disappointed when they receive a letter written in cursive that they cannot comprehend. Also, parents struggle with the fact that their children will not learn how to sign their name during class time. They feel that their child learning to sign his or her name is essential. Although it is important for your children to be able to do these things, is it necessary to take time away from their education to teach them the skill?
The new Common Core that has been accepted as the public school curriculum of multiple states makes standardized testing a key component for your children’s promotion and the teacher’s evaluations. The standardized tests are full of specific objectives that the students will be tested on in certain areas. The subjects that appear on these standardized tests are English Language Arts and Mathematics; cursive, however, is not. To help the teachers get your children ready for the final examinations, teachers must focus on the objectives tested and spend all of their valuable class time reviewing over the tested material. Since a limited number of school days are allotted just to cover the required curriculum paced out by the Common Core, there is no time for unnecessary topics to be taught. In support of this point, the Los Angeles Times editorial board argues, “When society adds new skills and new knowledge to the list of things public schools teach, some other items have to come off the list” (Davis). Cursive is one of the skills that needs to be taken out of teacher’s lesson plans in order to help the students learn the required material. Instead, students need to be extensively learning math and reading comprehension, which they will need to have mastered for the exams at the end of the year.
Like the Common Core curriculum, the No Child Left Behind Law forces schools to teach specifically toward the standardized-test objectives. Over the years cursive writing has been phased out from the standardized-test objectives, causing schools to avoid teaching cursive in the classroom. Kathleen Wright, a national project manager for Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of education writing materials exclaimed, “As it happens, cursive is also not on the tests that rate schools under the No Child Left Behind law, and increasingly schools gear their curricula to excel at those tests…If it's not assessed, it tends to fall by a little because people are teaching to the test" (Braiker). While teachers scramble to use every last minute of their valuable class time, in order to focus on the specific objectives, they are unable to squeeze in a minute of teaching an unnecessary skill that their students will not be questioned on and will never use.
Cursive may have been a useful skill for teachers to teach students years ago, but it has recently become useless by the expansion of technology in our world. As you know, many important historical documents, including The Declaration of Independence...
