Keeping Cursive in School

By Sean Scarpiello

There has recently been a running debate among educators on the usefulness of teaching cursive in elementary schools. Everybody remembers spending countless hours in second and third grade perfecting their cursive. Today, teachers are thinking about cutting it from the curriculum for several reasons. Educators are not calling to question the importance of cursive, but some feel that it isn’t worth it. There are several pros and cons for educating today’s youth cursive.

First, the major problem that arises with teaching cursive is the opportunity cost. Teachers ask, “What else can I be doing in class during the time that it takes to teach second graders cursive.” This question makes many teachers think because there is a large chunk of class time dedicated to teaching cursive. Students practically are relearning the alphabet in a more fancy and complicated style. This means they need to spend a lot of time constantly writing out their cursive over and over again. For me, cursive was practiced first thing each morning for about an hour over a time span of about three to four months. Each hour of dedicated to cursive can add up over time and this time could have easily been elsewhere.

Another problem that accompanies the instruction of cursive is that cursive is a dying art as technology is quickly taking over. Many argue that people never use cursive to write letters as email has taken over. Even in the workplace, documents are typically typed and if not people just print because it is easier. Therefore, it seems preposterous that schools spend a lot of time on cursive when it is used little, if at all, in the future. This especially holds true when teachers see that time teaching cursive can be changed to time teaching students to use computers and other technology. In the long run, it would definitely serve students better if they were taught to use the computer and type rather than learning to write in cursive.

On the other hand, there are still many arguments for keeping cursive in school. For one, students need to learn it for signing signatures in the professional world and even in their daily lives as adults. Cursive has always been regarded as professional and practiced only the well-educated individuals in society. If there is an end to cursive, many people would come across as being flat out dumb. Even today, too many students do not know how to professionally sign a letter or signature. It is still important to not completely cut cursive from curriculums.

The best alternative to this problem would be to assign cursive as homework. Also, cursive could be done independently over summer. This would give teachers more time in class to teach other important things that may be overlooked when trying to squeeze cursive into a full curriculum. An advantage to cursive is that it easy to learn and can easily be picked up by students on their own at home and independently. This advantage should be taken advantage of by teachers. Especially when there are subjects taught in classes that are not as easy to grasp for second and third grade students.

The Importance of Writing

By Sean Scarpiello

Writing is very important for students but often seems to be overlooked by many professionals in the education field. These days, there seems to be a large variation in the importance of writing among colleges. In general, many colleges do not stress the usefulness of writing.

One of the reasons that students do not have sufficient writing skills is because many of the large universities do not focus on writing as much as they should. Since there are so many students being pumped out of these large universities and state schools, quality is overlooked in educating quantity. All schools have special requirements that students need to meet. For example, some schools require two years of English and/or Writing courses. When these schools are one of the goliaths like Ohio State or University of Florida, many of the students were in classes with hundreds of other students. When professors are teaching classes with such a high number of students, they will not assign the same amount of essays to write. Neither professors nor teacher aids will want to grade such a large number of papers. Plus, there is a lack of feedback for students when they are in very large class sizes.

Smaller colleges generally address the importance of writing more than larger colleges. That is not to say that if you graduated from a large institution you are a bad writer. Smaller class sizes allow professors to assign a sufficient amount of papers and to grade them individually. Also, professors can then meet one on one and address any strengths, weaknesses and comments for the paper. Feedback is crucial to learning and becoming a better writer. The feedback allows students to directly improve their writing for future assignments and the workplace. This same lack of feedback that can be found on college campuses may also be prominent for many online college students. The sorts of writing assignments that are done by online students may not be up to par with other students. There are ways where students can receive feedback from their online course assignments, but it cannot be as useful or meaningful as a one on one conference over an assignment.

One other factor about writing that is constantly overlooked is the form of writing which students study. A science major’s form of writing will be very different from the form of writing a political science or an English major has. Scientists are very direct in their writing and avoid using flowery wording in their literature. A scientist will have an extremely different style than that of a journalist or professional writer. It is important that people studying to work in these different types of occupations are taught the correct ways to write literature in their field.