Cursive Handwriting and Post-Covid Persistence

"Thankfully, persistence is a great substitute for talent." - Steve Martin

One of the few things I know I am really good at in life is writing. I wouldn’t be putting my thoughts out on the internet for (a few) people to read if I didn’t know I could write well. If you are looking for the right word to use, struggling with how to word a sentence, or need help organizing your thoughts, I'm your girl.

But handwriting?  Not so much.  Despite my father's diligent attempts to encourage me to write with my right hand, I turned out to be left-handed.  My handwriting can be quite messy, and I regularly have smudged ink on the side of my hand from dragging it across the page.

As you can imagine, learning to write in cursive was a struggle for me.  I can't tell you how many cursive worksheets I had to redo in elementary school, and it was not because I was lazy or defiant. I just had trouble getting the hang of it. 

In my decade of teaching, I have never forced a middle school student to write in cursive. In fact, almost every graded assignment students complete for me is done electronically. As an adult I have never been required by a supervisor to write in cursive. I sign my name in cursive and that’s it. 

Don’t get me wrong. I understand the benefits of teaching cursive, especially in terms of developing fine motor skills. But when I scroll social media, I always run across those posts about what schools should be teaching…life skills, real American history (which always tempts me to ask what fake history people think I’m teaching in my classroom), and of course, cursive handwriting. It’s as if that one single skill will completely change public education. Typically, I just bite my tongue and keep scrolling. 

But I recently saw this article from The Atlantic that really made me question my own stance on cursive writing. In the article, historian and former President of Harvard University Drew Gilpin Faust questions how Gen Z and future generations will interpret the past without knowing how to read cursive. 

Case in point, rewind to a few weeks ago. My 8th grade history classes were studying Jamestown and examining primary sources to determine how the early settlers died.  A few of these sources were written in a wispy cursive font to make them look more authentic. I had several students raise their hand and tell me they couldn’t read the document because of the cursive font. 

I was exasperated. It's not like I was asking them to translate hieroglyphics. I know these students went through elementary school under the 2010 Common Core standards, and cursive writing was not in those standards. But were a lot of kids saying that so I would just read it to them and spoon feed them the answers? Probably. 

While cursive writing is now a part of the KAS Reading and Writing standards, it will still be a few years before I have students who have been taught cursive handwriting.  What should I do in the meantime? Change all the cursive fonts to make it easier for them? Put my content on pause to teach them the basics of cursive handwriting?  Or perhaps ask the Language Arts teachers, who already have a mountain to climb with their own grade level standards, to squeeze in some handwriting lessons when they have a free moment?

Then I got to thinking, is this even about cursive handwriting?  Yes, we are dealing with learning gaps in the transition between standards, as well as pandemic learning gaps. But perhaps more importantly, we are dealing with a lack of  persistence. 

The previous two school years had been filled with virtual learning, modified assignments, and grace upon grace upon more grace. Let’s face it. We let kids squeak by if they merely logged in to their Chromebook and showed up to a few Zoom meetings. And I’m not blaming anyone for that. Teachers were relearning how to do their jobs through a screen, and students were adjusting to a new way of learning.  In many cases, there were life-altering situations occurring at home for both students and teachers.  We were all in survival mode. 

I'm not asking students to read a foreign language, yet many will give up before they even try if I let them. While it would be a lot easier to just change the fonts to something they could read a bit more easily, I’m not going to do that. Instead I’ll print a cursive alphabet guide out for them.  I'll give them extra time to sit with the challenges and persist through them. I'll offer my help without just giving them the answers.  But I will not allow them to just give up without even trying.

We can debate the pros and cons of teaching cursive handwriting all day, but it's hard to argue with the benefits of teaching persistence. As I often tell the teenagers in my classroom, it's not all downhill from 8th grade.  Life is going to keep getting harder.  So until students who know how to read and write cursive arrive in my classroom, I'll continue to teach persistence instead. 

- Meg