A recent Wall Street Journal report delves into Gen Z's surprising lack of keyboard typing skills, featuring interviews with several individuals and revealing some startling statistics.
Cursive is fundamentally less legible and harder work for most students to learn.
It’s way easier to read for dyslexics as q d b p all look actually different, not just flipped/rotated (which makes them the same thing, try it with a pair of scissors). I don’t know what they’re teaching in (I presume?) the US, but this is quite legible. There may be instances where it’s an undue burden, teachers here are trained to spot that and accommodate, just as they do with dyslexia where you’ll get two grades for spelling: One raw, and one with all the dyslexia-typical mistakes (but only those) calculated out.
Pencils, as said, are a good thing: Makes sure that you’re not using too much force. Re-sharpening the thing from scratch every other word gets annoying fast. If there’s coordination issues then that may be a problem but ultimately it’s probably better to bite the bullet and focus on training to not break the lead than it is to hand the pupil a ball point pen because then they’re bound to cramp up.
And just because you got me curious I tried to figure out what part of my body I’m writing with – and TBH aside form “right arm” I can’t really make it out because it’s all so interconnected and all over the place. I think up/down (the page) is mostly shoulder, and so is continuous left to right, while per-letter left-right and off/onto the page is a combination of underarm rotation and fingers. Never got taught explicitly how to do it, but I remember the primary school teacher occasionally telling kids how to not do it. There’s probably multiple ways to do it well.
Oh, and apparently I was wrong: My state did get rid of cursive, then results tanked, now they’ve re-introduced it, but only from year two on, and the ministry is waiting on data to come in. My guess is that they’ll re-introduce cursive from year one. Somehow all the previous generations didn’t have an issue using two different fonts at the same time: It’s not like our books were written in cursive. I doubt Gen Alpha will have. They may be cringe, but they’re not stupid.
It’s way easier to read for dyslexics as q d b p all look actually different, not just flipped/rotated (which makes them the same thing, try it with a pair of scissors). I don’t know what they’re teaching in (I presume?) the US, but this is quite legible. There may be instances where it’s an undue burden, teachers here are trained to spot that and accommodate, just as they do with dyslexia where you’ll get two grades for spelling: One raw, and one with all the dyslexia-typical mistakes (but only those) calculated out.
Pencils, as said, are a good thing: Makes sure that you’re not using too much force. Re-sharpening the thing from scratch every other word gets annoying fast. If there’s coordination issues then that may be a problem but ultimately it’s probably better to bite the bullet and focus on training to not break the lead than it is to hand the pupil a ball point pen because then they’re bound to cramp up.
And just because you got me curious I tried to figure out what part of my body I’m writing with – and TBH aside form “right arm” I can’t really make it out because it’s all so interconnected and all over the place. I think up/down (the page) is mostly shoulder, and so is continuous left to right, while per-letter left-right and off/onto the page is a combination of underarm rotation and fingers. Never got taught explicitly how to do it, but I remember the primary school teacher occasionally telling kids how to not do it. There’s probably multiple ways to do it well.
Oh, and apparently I was wrong: My state did get rid of cursive, then results tanked, now they’ve re-introduced it, but only from year two on, and the ministry is waiting on data to come in. My guess is that they’ll re-introduce cursive from year one. Somehow all the previous generations didn’t have an issue using two different fonts at the same time: It’s not like our books were written in cursive. I doubt Gen Alpha will have. They may be cringe, but they’re not stupid.