Sunday, February 21, 2010

Writing in a Classroom

2 & 1/2 and already a computer junky! by Wilson (Army Gal)
  
                                    http://www.flickr.com/photos/machado17/ / CC BY-NC 2.0
   The other day I was having a discussion with some of my classmates in my TE 348 class.  We were talking about how most schools are taking cursive out of their curriculum.  This is a crazy concept for me because from about 3rd grade to 7th grade I was required to write in cursive.  However now a days educators feel that the future students will not need to know how to write and read cursive.  Computers have taken over the world of text, students are now expected to type up a lot of their homework and other various assignments.  We were debating on if students should still learn cursive.  We feel as though yes technology is a huge part of our society, however you need signatures, which are usually in cursive.  But if you never learn how to read or write in cursive, everyones signature will be printed. This will be much easier for others to copy and forge.  This could lead to a future problem in our society.
    What do you think?  Do you think technology is prominent enough to end the teaching of cursive?  If so where do we stop? I mean one day will we not teach out students how to even write print?  Will our future students just learn how to type everything?  Instead of notebooks to take notes will all students bring in a laptop?  Will they soon take tests on the laptops as well?  I know some of this is far out there, but what do you think?  Cursive was a big part of our education while I was in school and to just stop teaching it seems a little dramatic to me.  How do you feel?

1 comment:

  1. I think they will stop teaching it all together, and I think it will be okay. Most people today write in a mixture of cursive and print, but, at least for me, that is only out of laziness. It takes so much work to actually lift your pen off the paper (ok that sounds completely ridiculous). Most of the letters that I write in cursive just turn out that way because I don't lift the pen. As far as signatures, I think the same thing will happen. People will use a mixture--you can't read signatures anyways so why not just scribble?
    I'm sure my comments must seem extremely lazy and like I don't care, and maybe that is true. But I think that, especially since most of the world does everything online, I would rather take the time that I used to use to teach cursive and use that time to make sure we learn everything on those dang hard standardized tests!

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