How to scare today's youth.

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Bill

That's funny!!

My 17 year old Grandaughter can read and write cursive, my 16 year old Grandaughter can't. They are are both honor students, and very active in school. I've told the younger one, that she isn't to old to learn.....

WR

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God, Country, Family

Good penmanship, in earlier generations, was a source of pride. (Handwritten communication was also legible, unlike, say, my own scribblings nowadays.)

When I was in elementary school, so 60+ years ago, I remember those penmanship classes where we were taught to write cursive with lined paper workbooks that showed how high small letters were compared to capitals, and how one letter connected to another. And I remember, third grade or so, when we were first allowed to use pens. (Kinda like graduating to long pants a few years earlier.) But even in those days the skill was not stressed for long, and soon most of us in my generation degenerated into our own idiosyncratic styles. Unlike, say, my grandparents' days, when good penmanship was really drilled into young people during their education so that it was ingrained throughout one's life.

I agree with making it optional to learn nowadays, though. I don't think it is anywhere near as relevant to a successful career, or to simple communication, as it used to be.

I thought the OP was going to say telling them they would have to work
for a living.

I remember all that from my times in Catholic grade school in the 1950s.

My writing was so bad I had to answer to 2 different nuns that no I was not born a lefty and forced to write right handed!

FWIW my writing over the course of time has got even worse.

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14 S&W Revs none with locks!

Just tell them they need to move out when they turn 18. Be sure and take them outside when you tell them so when they wet themselves it won’t get on the floor.

That’s funny.

However, I do think in real life the reverse is much more realistic:

A scared old fart holding a smartphone, trying to understand an emoji- and abbreviation-loaded text from the grandkid who is trying to explain to him how to program that internet-ready TV using the many buttons on the remote ...

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Who watches the watchers?

"What's wrong, Obi-Wan?"


"I felt a terrible disturbance in the Force, like a billion teenagers pressed send...AND NOTHING HAPPENED!!!!"

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Release the Kraken

Mine was in the 60's nun standing over my shoulder, did not help me write better.

I suspect that we are only a generation or so away from a signature that is comprised of an "X". It is done on the the interweb now. I also know several younger people that are incapable of "writing" their name.

I ask my young co-workers to be patient with me, and explain to them that I'm barely past the point where I think a "mouse" is Mickey and a "cursor" is my Dad...

My 4 kids graduated H.S. from 1998 to 2003, they have their feet planted in both worlds! They understand and have done the older ways of working, communicating, and being responsible. They also have computer skills and understand Text speak! Number two son works for an IT firm and tries to hack their program every day! (a good day at work means agony for the three programmers!) They also have the advantage over the kids going out into the world now, in that they understand not only how to work, but also understand that they are expected to work all the weekdays in a row!

Ivan

want to eat get a job, want a smart phone, get a job, want to sleep in a warm bed, get a real good job. And yes work is a four letter word.

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Carpriver.

If you want to scare today kids just unplug the WiFi

Based upon how I made my living before I retired, and what I do now to keep occupied, I wasted a lot of time learning cursive . . .

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Wisdom comes thru fear . . .

A friend copied his draft notice and doctored copies and sent them to college guys in our crowd.

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SOS USA

I hardly ever write cursive because in college when I had to reread my notes they were much more legible if I printed. I had to learn how to write really fast printing and have been doing it ever since.

I took a drafting class in college and after that I pretty much quit using cursive. There is no compelling reason to use cursive. Printing is much clearer to everyone and not one bit faster. Signature is about all I use cursive for and there is no reason you could not have a printed signature. Analog clocks are nearing midnight too. Ye no longer need little motors pendulums or tiny springs or the like to twist hands folks and digital watches are much more accurate and never wear out. A small solar strip and the batteries would never die. Rotary phone? Please and a TV without any form of remote goes back to the power sucking failure prone picture tube.

Should I lament that kids can't start a car with a crank, use a slide rule or change the points in a car too. I can saddle a horse and put a pack on one, but I sure can't hitch up a team and so far nobody has laughed about that. How many of you can stoke a coal fire and remove the clinkers, remove a tire from a rim and repair it without a machine. Used to be pretty common knowledge and I did it just a couple weeks ago with a 15" trailer tire. I can still use a brace and bit and there is one and set of bits in my shop somewhere. But, just why pray tell is it in anyway important to know how to use it, when I have a stack of battery powered drills several corded ones a drill press and a magnetic drill.

We can laugh at the modern youths lag of ability in these areas, but in the grand scheme they are pretty worthless. Remember that the next time you have your grand kid fix your computer problem

I can relate to both of these. Sister Kenneth was the terror of the second grade. The old ruler to the knuckles trick failed to improve my cursive though.

By the time I reached college I printed all my notes as even I couldn't read my cursive. My answers to essay questions on exams were also printed in hopes the prof would be able to read them.

I had no idea that educated young people could not read cursive.

or tell time with a clock that has hands!

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14 S&W Revs none with locks!

Probably the main reason to learn cursive it that it's been shown to be very good to develop fine motor control. They're still teaching it in my kids' elementary school.

I have to write a good deal and use "printsive" .

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SWCA #3356, SWHF#611

My thought was ...If you can't write cursive, how do you sign a check?
Then I thought ..oh yeah, they probably don't even use checks !
But, .... on many other "official forms" your "signature" is required. Do they block print when a "signature" is required these days ?
What does an "autograph" look like from a "can't write cursive" young celebrity ?
If they have any family member's historical letters (such as a great grandfather's letters home from his service duty in WW11), do they take them to someone to have them "translated" ?
It may not be too far in the future that cursive is no longer accepted unless it has block printed "subtitles".

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Y. B. Ord & A. Ree

X--"his mark"

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de minimus non curat lex

When You are in the service industry and have to write out a service report and do three copies, handwriting has to be legible. Some of the people I worked with were so bad that They had to take penmanship classes, or find another job. At $30+ per hour it is expected that You can write. And these people weren't that young.

The root problem here is that the US of A school system sucks. Parents complain that their kids are too stressed with all that stuff they have to learn and hours of homework that limits their time to snap chat. So, the curriculum gets dumbed down. In my era they not only taught the 3 R's, but life skills as well.

When I think of all the **** I learned in high school, its a wonder I can think at all. At the time I thought I would never use any of it. But as I get older I often do something and remember that was something that as a kid I thought was unnecessary to know.

I worked in factories for 45+ years. The salary for new hires was awesome. The clocks were analog. We had youngins that couldn't fill out their production reports because one line had "time" in it.

A kid was killed on my street because he was walking in the driving lane. A few months later my own niece was killed in the same manor. Both were wearing black and tweeting at the time of impact. Both were rear impacts. Now, surely you can fault the drivers, but we all have a duty of self preservation. They still teach defensive driving and used to teach how to walk, but not any more.

At the University I leaned how to program computers. Today's models are woosy - learning how to use one is easy peasy. To say that olders are lost just isn't true. If the technology is there, why not use it?

We have a mountain cabin with no electricity. Sure, my cordless drill, saw and sander are wonderful. But when the batteries go dead we use hand tools. I'm proud to say that my kids can use a brace just as well as Great Grandpa used to.

In the 60's my writing was so bad that when in 6th grade I started printing in all block capitals, none of the nuns complained. Got through high school and college with that.
Then I started typing on computers in caps and people said, why are you shouting? I was too lazy to shift up and down.
Guess you could say I was shiftless.

I scared the heck out of my mid-20's niece and nephew this last Halloween and dressed up as a job.

I just fire up my generator. But yea, I can use hand tools. Butt, my point is that it is a waste of time to teach cursive and analog clocks are just about history. Slide rules still work, but when is the last time you used one. Why would you anyway a $10 calculator is way better.


We don't use sun dials any more, The horror. Is it the schools fault. I guess so.

People have been getting ran over, stuff dropped on them etc for centuries what has that got to do with it. I will admit that loss of focus is bad and cells and portable music especially with headphones doesn't help, but how is that on the education system?? The schools never told me to stay out of the street and don't wear dark clothing near the road at night. MY parents did and I see a lot more failed parents than schools. Parents now believe the school should teach their kid manner, common sense, responsibility, hygiene, etc etc. Plus ,heaven help them if the teacher tries to teach the little darlings discipline. Something lots of parents fail to instill in their kids along with the value of learning. Half the kids now are almost feral. No wonder the school hasn't got time to teach little Johnny to do algebra or waste time teaching something as worthless as cursive. Little Johnny didn't get ran over, do drugs, end up as making french fries at McDs so much because of the schools failed as the parents did. My step daughters both go to public schools and get straight As, One won the regional spelling Bee for grades 5-8 as a 5th grader and gone to both have gone the state geography finals. We sure didn't teach the all of it, but we helped them , encouraged them and gave them a value system along with telling them to stay out of the road. I am truly sorry about your niece, I lost a son to a car wreck, neither of them died because the schools failed. The kid my son was riding with made a bad decision one day and it cost my son his life. My other son has cerebral Palsy and still managed to get a masters degree and makes a decent living. School didn't fail him.
I am not saying the schools couldn't do better, But most parents need way n=more improvement that most schools.

I teach my kids a lot in my shop by the way and even teach them about how it used to be. But hopefully we are not going back there,

I resemble that remark!

I have to tell young people that i'm dealing with on the phone to slow down, I didn't grow up with a computer in my crib.

I could write in cursive beautifully if I had the time to do it. But now I am the Secretary of the Borough Planning Commission and I couldn't begin to keep up while taking notes if I had to slow down to write beautiful cursive minutes. Like Farmer17, I had to learn to print fast and I can keep up at the meeting and have something that I can read to refer to when I type up the meeting minutes.

I must admit I learned to touch type because of my lousy writing skills. Like another guy above, a drafting class taught me a lot about being more legible, but still prefer a keyboard.

About the schools. Once upon a time, they used to teach stuff and show how it related to the real world. Now, the scholastic mafia teaches methods that someone got their advanced degree developing, but has little or no relation to the real world.

When I was in Grammar school I WAS taught life skills....like wearing light clothes, walking on the left side of the street, don't do drugs, etc. They also taught us how to make change, how to greet customers and how to be respectful to our elders. Our teachers assumed we would need those skills while we worked thru college, or at worst, if we didn't and had to live with McD type job. But we were encouraged to go for the gold.

The school system was there to encourage us and be a voice that reinforced what our parents stood for.

I blasted the school system, and I still do. But you are right, it was always the parent's job and way back them we had moms and dads to encourage us and make sure we didn't go the wrong way. Today, way too many single parent households. The school used to be the backup for good parents, and the basis of our values if we had bad parents.

Today, parents are the ones that are the idiots and the kids have no one to look up to. My wife is a 45 year teacher veteran. The things she comes home and tells me makes me want to advise families to home school. The schools not only ignore the things the kids should know, but they tell them things that are completely wrong.

I grew up thinking that a person can't be a valuable asset to the community unless he learns something new every day. My Dad and my Grandpa spent half of their retirement years in the library reading about things they didn't know. Both were the smartest men I ever knew....one graduated from the 8th grade and the other quit in the 11th grade (the day after Pearl Harbor). Although Dad never graduated from High School he was the one in his shop in the 1970's that was in charge of running what was in that day an early process computer system.

Sure, cursive isn't "needed" today. But if you know it and have an inquisitive spirit, you'll go war farther than the kid on snapchat. Its up to you and I to see that our kids and grandkids are motivated, since the schools aren't into that any more.

I do agree that wanting to learn is really key. I also agree that the school isn't there to teach kids how the "world is supposed to be" There is a lot of dumbing down. When I was in Washington people were up in arms because their little Jimmies were failing the mathematics and science part of the new advancement testing. The solution? Make the test easier. Then they wonder why little Jimmy took out 80,000 worth of student loans to get a $30, 000 a year job. Maybe little Jimmy couldn't do the math to figure it out. .

It always interested me that you had to have 4 years of English to graduate HS. But only 2 of math and one of science. Little darlings know who wrote Cantabury tales, which is really handy at boring cocktail parties and not much else, and yet they no idea why electricity will kill them if they use it in the swimming pool. Tell one of them that 1/4" steel plate weighs 10# to the square foot so what will a 4"x8" sheet weigh and you get the deer in the head lights look. Gee, lets see 4x8 is 32 and 32x10 is 320. Man thats hard.

I appreciate nice cursive writing. Too bad that I am terrible at it.

As an Army brat, I attended many schools. We moved toward the end of my 2nd grade year, and started a new one for 3rd grade. They had already taught cursive in 2nd grade, and the teacher had no patience for me, especially since I am left handed.

As a result, I print pretty much everything. That is also the reason why I took typing as my 1st HS elective, and at one time during college I was doing 80 wpm on an IBM Selectric after learning on old Royal manual machines.

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Only a cold warrior

I took typing in HS. I got up to 24 words a minute and a got to know lots of girls. Typing classes had lots of GIRLS

Schools, as such, did not get to this point by themselves. Most of the school board members were parents and along with the State Board of Education were the ones that selected or rejected the courses being taught.
The lack of discipline and the inability to discipline is also a big factor in the down slope of education. My daughter grew up knowing that she wanted to teach. She enjoyed it for years but things gradually got worse and she took a decreased retirement the first day that she could, which was between semesters.
Most teachers are dedicated but like anything else, there are a few that should not be teaching and are hard to get rid of. There are lots of parents that should not be parents and the actions of some of the kids that they send to school definitely cause a problem for everyone. In those cases you cannot fault the kid, it falls back on their home life. It is a problem.

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Mighty 90's,Trying 4 a 100!

In my various jobs, being that I was often reading documents that predated typewriters, it was a good thing that I could read cursive, and some really old cursive at times. And I could print three levels of characters into a space on a legal pad for when I was creating what was essentially a flow chart of the history of ownership of a parcel of land. People were amazed that I could print that small and it still would be readable.

I used to write things in cursive for the staff to type, and I thought my cursive writing was very legible. But after a few times of the staff saying they couldn't read something, I decided that that printing everything was the most efficient practice since it saved a lot of interruptions for both the staff and me. With all that practice printing I got to be pretty fast and that now serves me well in taking minutes at the Borough Planning Commission meetings.

I think part of the incentive for me to write as legibly as possible was the realization that my work was going to provide guidance to others for decades to come. People at my former office have told me that they have referred to my prior work, and I left there in 2002.