http://www.popsugar.com/moms/Little-Girl-Gets-Trouble-Writing-Cursive-38503998
Any teacher tries this with one of my relatives and they're going to get an earful....
Idiocracy was a movie and seemingly a documentary.
First, the name on that paper is nearly illegible -writing that a teacher can't read is useless, and a teacher has every right to set standard style requirements for work in their classroom.
Second, cursive is worthless.
Study after study has found that there is not any significant benefit to cursive writing - students that have learned only the manuscript (print) style outperform students who learned only cursive writing by roughly 30% in speed and around 95% in legibility. The only benefit cursive ever had was a relic of outmoded technology - old style pens had a tendency to drip if removed from the page and blot on contact, so cursive writing reduced the chances for that to happen mid-word. Nowadays, pens never drip (at least, not the sort that ordinary folks use in their day to day life), so this problem does not exist. There were benefits to cursive in transitioning to shorthand, but as shorthand is essentially a dead art those also no longer apply.
There is also no legal requirement -anywhere- for signatures to be in cursive.
Cursive should have died a long, long time ago - nobody benefits from knowing how to write it, and knowing how to read it is of limited value, as the historical documents written in cursive have mostly been transcribed (and often have a different style in the first place), so the only people who need it are folks that have to deal with the original copies of things.
Adaptability. Learning a new way to write your own language helps prepare for learning other languages. Also the ... I'm not sure what else to call it but "hatred" for cursive is alarming. The kid signed her name in cursive, (not bad penwomanship for a 7 year old who just learned it, probably without thinking about it, not a terrible crime. It doesn't hurt anything or anyone, but the teacher is giving her crap for it. Doesn't have anything better to do?
It also isn't a "disobedience" issue, because the kid is torn between the teacher and her mother saying opposite things. She's got this teacher for maybe a year, 2nd or 3rd grade, and her mom for life. It's the same deal with "common core" and the new new math. They're reinventing the wheel for no reason, and doing it badly while inventing fake studies to support their agenda.
We're not teaching kids practical life skills, or employable traits, or even how to balance a checkbook. If it isn't on a standardized test, then nobody cares.
Meanwhile, dialog has "completely died and turned into an undead horror" in the US. Communication skills with polite conversation are basically gone, and this is allegedly "cheaper," and thus a good thing.
We're all just shouting past each other using increasingly inflammatory wording with no meaningful value. Meanwhile, everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
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