Also, I think your experience is out of norm - not writing cursive doesn't imply writing with block capitals. I print in both upper and lower case and so does almost everyone else I know.

Can you print your upper and lower case as fast as I can write cursive? I'd be very surprised - and I'm not very quick, compared to those skilled in cursive.

In 20 years, hand-writing final exam essays will be a thing of the past. I'm surprised we still do.

What planet do you live on? Quite a number of my classmates didn't own their own computers, and that was at a fairly expensive private university.

When you factor in all the poor/rural/disadvantaged school systems, there is a very large body of students (~30%) who don't have a computer, even in the US.

when/where I was, people kept flogging off their iPads and similar...


I mostly just used desktops + laptops.

well, except going back further (middle and high-school), where I didn't have a laptop. because back then (many years ago), they were expensive, and this was generally prior to things like Android and iOS as well, like all people could really do with cell phones was call people and send text messages and similar...

(not really like anyone else had laptops then either, I think this was more in the years of the popularity of accessorized cell-phone strings).

can a person read it? not really.

I'm talking about clear, legible cursive, not chicken-scratch - the type of cursive that requires a solid foundation in primary school, and continual reinforcement throughout secondary education.

not seen this sort of thing, usually it is more just trying to pick letters out of a wavy line...

I personally find it a lot faster/easier to write in block-print, and if a person does a reasonably good job at imitating the form of the usual PC fonts, it is more readable as well.

I was most disturbed by the claims that programming isn't real work. Now, I'll admit I've never held a physical job, but come on! I wonder how much of the general public shares that perception.

I was most disturbed by the claims that programming isn't real work. Now, I'll admit I've never held a physical job, but come on! I wonder how much of the general public shares that perception.

probably the same people who think that it is along the lines of the sort of wizardry commonly portrayed on TV, like where a "programmer" hits keys rapidly for maybe 5 or 10 seconds, and all sorts of otherwise rather implausible stuff starts going on, or at least they manage to pull off something which more realistically probably would have taken at least a week or a month or more to write.

(like, seriously, pull off a non-trivial plot-relevant program in a matter of a few seconds? realistically they probably couldn't even pull off a plot-relevant email in that time...).

(nevermind the "scientists"...).

but, the sad thing is, reality is actually pretty dull, and stuff tends to require lots of time and effort and similar, and stuff happens over very long time-frames, ...


(edit/add: nevermind a recent movie, where they established in-movie that they were operating under the time-frame of a bomb set to go off in a matter of *several minutes*, so presumably the movie was happening in near real-time, yet involved some "clever coding", video-editing and composition, ... which could not have happened at the rate the events were appearing on-screen... as it would have taken at least several minutes for the person to edit the footage, and by then the bomb would already have been going off, ...

more so, since the bomb initially had a 60-minute timer, and most of the ~ 2 hour movie was during the time after the countdown was activated, ... ).

swiftcoder, on 01 Mar 2013 - 10:42, said:

Oberon_Command, on 01 Mar 2013 - 09:59, said:

Also, I think your experience is out of norm - not writing cursive doesn't imply writing with block capitals. I print in both upper and lower case and so does almost everyone else I know.

Can you print your upper and lower case as fast as I can write cursive? I'd be very surprised - and I'm not very quick, compared to those skilled in cursive.

SnowProblem, on 01 Mar 2013 - 09:59, said:
>In 20 years, hand-writing final exam essays will be a thing of the past. I'm surprised we still do.

What planet do you live on? Quite a number of my classmates didn't own their own computers, and that was at a fairly expensive private university.

When you factor in all the poor/rural/disadvantaged school systems, there is a very large body of students (~30%) who don't have a computer, even in the US.

Pushing for cursive writing is looking backwards. Everyone I knew had their own laptop in college. But let's just say that isn't the case. Most schools have computer labs now that are sufficient for classes, and in 20 years this will commonplace. We should prepare students for the future they enter, not the world today.

swiftcoder, on 01 Mar 2013 - 10:42, said:

Oberon_Command, on 01 Mar 2013 - 09:59, said:

Also, I think your experience is out of norm - not writing cursive doesn't imply writing with block capitals. I print in both upper and lower case and so does almost everyone else I know.

Can you print your upper and lower case as fast as I can write cursive? I'd be very surprised - and I'm not very quick, compared to those skilled in cursive.

SnowProblem, on 01 Mar 2013 - 09:59, said:
>In 20 years, hand-writing final exam essays will be a thing of the past. I'm surprised we still do.

What planet do you live on? Quite a number of my classmates didn't own their own computers, and that was at a fairly expensive private university.

When you factor in all the poor/rural/disadvantaged school systems, there is a very large body of students (~30%) who don't have a computer, even in the US.

Pushing for cursive writing is looking backwards. Everyone I knew had their own laptop in college. But let's just say that isn't the case. Most schools have computer labs now that are sufficient for classes, and in 20 years this will commonplace. We should prepare students for the future they enter, not the world today.

and, nevermind that the linked statistics were apparently from around a decade ago as well, so it is harder to say how much this relates to the present situation...

Pushing for cursive writing is looking backwards. Everyone I knew had their own laptop in college. But let's just say that isn't the case. Most schools have computer labs now that are sufficient for classes, and in 20 years this will commonplace. We should prepare students for the future they enter, not the world today.

You are basing this on the assumption that cursive and typing are mutually exclusive? I've never met a student who can't type, even those with perfect cursive.

And students who grow up in cultures with more complex scripts (for example, Mandarin) have a much harder job ahead of them learning to write, than an English kid will learning to write cursive. But I see plenty of Chinese students in our university and graduate courses who also excel in computer science...

Also, I think your experience is out of norm - not writing cursive doesn't imply writing with block capitals. I print in both upper and lower case and so does almost everyone else I know.

Can you print your upper and lower case as fast as I can write cursive? I'd be very surprised - and I'm not very quick, compared to those skilled in cursive.

Probably not, but I also don't need to. I can write quickly enough to suit my purposes; maybe only a little slower than my usual talking pace. Besides, when I'm writing exams and essays the limiting speed factor is not my writing speed, but the speed at which I mentally process the question and structure the answer. The only circumstances I can foresee myself needing raw writing speed is taking dictation. But there are no foreseeable circumstances in which I would be taking dictation without a computer, and I can type faster (~120WPM) on a computer than I've ever seen anyone write in cursive.

In any case, if speed is the argument, then why aren't we still teaching people shorthand? After all, one can write really quickly with it (world record of 350WPM!), and it's about as legible as cursive.

In 20 years, hand-writing final exam essays will be a thing of the past. I'm surprised we still do.

What planet do you live on? Quite a number of my classmates didn't own their own computers, and that was at a fairly expensive private university.

I live on the same planet as you and almost everyone I know has had computer access of some sort since a young age. Come to think of it, I don't have a single friend who doesn't have a laptop, and this includes the poorest of my friends who are heavily dependent on student loans just to eat. To be fair, I did go to private high schools which forced us all to have laptops in and past the 9th grade. Where did you go to school, and when?

When you factor in all the poor/rural/disadvantaged school systems, there is a very large body of students (~30%) who don't have a computer, even in the US.

I guess I can understand that argument, but that portion of the world's population which does have easy computer access will someday not even be able to read cursive. How well are those students going to succeed when the rest of the country can't understand their writing? How will TAs (especially ESL TAs, which are very common where I go to school) mark their essays when said TAs can't read cursive?

I'm talking about clear, legible cursive, not chicken-scratch - the type of cursive that requires a solid foundation in primary school, and continual reinforcement throughout secondary education.

The latter kind of cursive is unfortunately the more common. "Clear, legible cursive" is a contradiction in terms in my experience.

And students who grow up in cultures with more complex scripts (for example, Mandarin) have a much harder job ahead of them learning to write, than an English kid will learning to write cursive.

So? We're discussing English writing systems, not Mandarin. The choice is not between Mandarin and English, it's between cursive English and printed English. Complexity is also not the issue the post you were quoting was discussing - prevalence is, and the truth of the matter is that cursive is nowhere near as prevalent as it once was. Witness that only 15% of SAT takers in 2006 used cursive.

Plus, I don't think you can really compare English orthography with Mandarin orthography - each Mandarin character is an entire syllable, whereas a syllable in English takes at least 2-3 (or more) characters. Those characters may look complex, but then, they have more information than a letter of the Roman alphabet, so this is to be expected.

But I see plenty of Chinese students in our university and graduate courses who also excel in computer science...

Computer science is a field that (generally) doesn't require much writing. Are you sure that's a good example?

Computer science is a field that (generally) doesn't require much writing. Are you sure that's a good example?

In case you have missed it, there seems to be an undercurrent in this thread that implies that one has to give up cursive in order to teach computer science... Thus my comment that you quoted.

swiftcoder, on 01 Mar 2013 - 12:26, said:

SnowProblem, on 01 Mar 2013 - 12:11, said:
Pushing for cursive writing is looking backwards. Everyone I knew had their own laptop in college. But let's just say that isn't the case. Most schools have computer labs now that are sufficient for classes, and in 20 years this will commonplace. We should prepare students for the future they enter, not the world today.

You are basing this on the assumption that cursive and typing are mutually exclusive? I've never met a student who can't type, even those with perfect cursive.

I'm saying let's prioritize teaching keyboarding over cursive earlier in their education, so that when they reach middle school, there can be programming and computer classes instead of Intro to Keyboarding. Maybe cursive can stay around as an elective.