Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Yoink]

It seems like a good skill to have from where I'm sitting. *shrug*
As someone before put it, why do people feel a need to reinvent the wheel?

[RedKing]

going into a geography classroom and seeing the Soviet Union on the wall map.

That classroom is just ahead of the Putin curve. 

FWIW, I'm not defending cursive as a mode of communication. It's a dying art form. It's also state-mandated in NC because our legislature  = DERP.

[Spehss _]

It seems like a good skill to have from where I'm sitting. *shrug*

Which skill, the underwater basket weaving, the wheel reinventing, or the writing in messy curly scribbles?

[RedKing]

I want to learn underwater wheel reinventing. Because seriously....wheels don't work so well underwater.

[Baffler]

Going into a school classroom and seeing students learning cursive is every bit as outdated, and should be equally horrifying, as going into a fourth grade class and hearing the students chanting multiplication tables (a method that was once used for brute-force memorization as the "proper" way to teach math) or going into a geography classroom and seeing the Soviet Union on the wall map.

Heh, I learned the multiplication tables like that when I was in the second grade, but that was quite some time ago. And one of the two large maps in the geography classroom did have the Soviet Union on it, but there was a more current one in there too. It was just a really good looking map and the teacher'd bought it her first year of teaching so she decided to keep it around.

[TempAcc]

Personally, I find cursive to be far easier and less awkward than manuscript. Its A LOT more fluid if you actualy bother to learn and practice it (being able to write most words with a single move, etc), and its also much quicker than manuscript for most people (that actualy know cursive), making it superior for taking notes. Its mostly a personal preference thing, I guess, but I personaly have a much easier (and quicker) time writing in cursive than in manuscript. Of course, this is comming from me, someone who learned cursive on the very first days of school, along with manuscript.

Its a useful skill to have if you actualy hand write things often, and no, its not a massive cruel ordeal to learn it like some people make it seem, unless you have substandard dexterity or some sort of impairment. Its also not very nice on dyslexics, since it requires decent symbol/pattern recognition.

[Harry Baldman]

It's rather odd, seeing a discussion like this when you were taught cursive in the first grade and pretty much everybody wrote in cursive throughout your school life, with perhaps one or two exceptions.

Cursive is faster to write in if you practice it, I think, but it seems that a lot of people don't anymore, and are much more practiced at manuscript instead. Myself included at this point, in fact. And here I thought primarily writing in manuscript made me special. Maybe it's different in Europe?

It's weird to find somebody who can't read cursive, though. Dyslexia I understand, but being unable to read it seems strange.

Manuscript is nicer-looking on average than cursive, though. Makes up for crappy penmanship like mine.

[Baffler]

Cursive is easier for me to write as well. It may or may not actually be faster, but it looks quite nice if your handwriting isn't awful and you have a good sense of where serifs are appropriate to add.

[Lord Shonus]

Its a useful skill to have if you actualy hand write things often

No, it isn't.

Both India and Britain have proposed measures to make it illegal for doctors to use anything but printed capital letters professionally because using cursive for prescriptions kills people.

Draftsmen (who still often make preliminary sketches by hand because they're away from their computer), architects, and engineers -all of which hand write on a daily basis- never use cursive, as a significant part of training for those professions makes use of cursive instant failure on an assignement, for the same reasons. Minor errors on the plans for a skyscraper or bridge means people die.

[TempAcc]

Which is why hand writing is in the proccess of being phased out on such mediums that require smaller error margins. Cursive doesn't kill people, irresponsible and lazy doctors/engineers/draftsmen/architects kill people. Lazy/bad manuscript penmanship can be just as bad as lazy/bad cursive penmanship.

[penguinofhonor]

Except that requiring people to use manuscript seems to make these things happen less?

[RedKing]

I dunno....my handwriting is for shit regardless of whether I use cursive or print.

hands y u no work write?

I mean, I literally find myself having to struggle with my hands to get them to move in the proper direction sometimes on certain letters. It's like the muscle memory I was supposed to have developed as a kid got dementia.

[Lord Shonus]

Except that requiring people to use manuscript seems to make these things happen less?

Much, much less. I've spent the last fifteen years dealing with blueprints in one way or another (in school, at the handful of manufacturing jobs I've worked at, and when the workplaces were being renovated), and only seen a serious handwriting error made once - when a sales guy at my last job added extra customer specifications to a tractor part in cursive and the guy that made the CAD print read 'shouldn't" ' as "should". The part blew up a tractor motor (in the "siezed up and poured oil everywhere" sense), the company not only cancelled the order but pulled all their business (over a million dollars once the cost of making no-longer-wanted parts was added up), and quite a few people got fired.

[Tack]

Page not found. It's been removed?

TL;DR: A better love story than Twilight.

I read this whole thing thinking it was bait, waiting for the switch, but it never came.

I am still unable to believe it or take it seriously.

It's time to be a cynic now.
And skeptics don't cry.

[TheBiggerFish]

If I remember right, this is the same teacher that I got into an argument with on a science test. The test was on the solar system, and the question was "Which planet do you think is the hottest?"

Being an astronomy geek, I answered Venus, because I knew the average surface temperature of all the planets. She marked it wrong, which I protested.

Teacher: "You were supposed to answer Mercury, because it's closest to the sun."
Me: "But that's not right! Venus is hotter, I can show you in the encylopedia where it says that."
Teacher: "Yes, but the textbook didn't tell you that, so you were supposed to answer which one you thought was hottest."
Me: "I did. I answered Venus, because I know it's hotter, so that's the one I think is hotter."

Took my grandparents getting involved in order to get her to change the test score. It was probably not that big a surprise that they called us in over Christmas break and announced that they were moving me from 2nd grade to 3rd grade after Christmas. I've never forgotten that though, as an example of one of the core problems in education (especially basic education): Teachers and administrators that want a one-size-fits-all curriculum and can't deal with kids who are either far ahead or far behind the average. There have been a lot of programs created since to help kids that far behind the curve, but not a lot for kids far ahead of the curve, other than bumping them up a grade (which is a lot less common these days).

4th grade:
Teacher Assertion: Squares != rectangles.
Young!me: "But, they meet all the criteria for rectangles."
Teacher: "The fourth grade definition of rectangles isn't that way."
5th grade:
"Fill out this chart."
"Squares are a type of rectangle."
...Much facepalm.  Some urge to "I told you so."

Strangely, the willingness to accommodate extra INT score in most of my classes went down as I progressed upwards.  Then I switched to a private school.
(Although my middle school, which was still public, was actually decent, but certainly not as good as maybe it could have been in all the subjects.)

And congratulations to your daughter, RedKing.