Frog Applause by Teresa Burritt for August 01, 2018

I was taught cursive so it’s like I have my own secret language that nobody, not even I, can understand.

I can do the math and spell my brother in cursing cursive.

dogonet.

All I know is that several years ago several states decided that kids today needed keyboarding more than cursive. Now they’re returning cursive to the curriculum. That doesn’t help the kids that went to school during the years it was removed from schools.

I still hate Babar. What four-year-old knows cursive?

In my second grade classroom, back in the Pleistocene, we had a long, long poster with all the letters of the alphabet in cursive, capitals and lower case. It was a source of wonder to me that Sister Pauline could write them so exactly the same way – on the BLACKBOARD no less. It struck me as an essential skill that you had to master to be a nun who taught.

Take heart, young girl, your apparent amazing peripheral vision will get you through cursive, brother and parent anxieties, cheating classmates, basketball, and line jumpers at Worlds of Fun in Kansas City.

Cursive is old people’s secret code.

I guess they don’t teach the Palmer Method in school, anymore ?

I taught my girls cursive starting in the second grade. With fountain pens. The three of us are left-handed. We have other superpowers.

A possible new and untapped market – cursive decoder rings. A search turned up none lots of results but no actual ring cursive decoders.

Also I got interrupted while composing the above. My wife called me up to see that the two Monarch Butterfly eggs we’d saved that are on leaves from a broken off milkweed stem had hatched. Instructions for doing that were easy to find and seem to have worked well.

When I was 18 my cursive had deteriorated to the point that I couldn’t read the notes I took at school. I got an italic nib fountain pen to replace the medium I was using. I learned a simple cursive italic. My handwriting has been totally legible ever since. Not scribe quality but legible.

If technology fails and the satellites all fall it’s back to the swamp for one and all … or not … ribbet !

I hardly think cursive is a dying practice. It seems to be the prefered mode of expression in forums and comment sections across this great @#$!&*%! land of ours.

My own cursive was adequate, if not neat, until I took a drafting class in high school and fell in love with the clean and concise language of shapes and geometry used in drafting. Everything was printed from there out, and that eventually morphed into my own distinctive printing style. I liked the idea of combining precise functioning form with style, and what was communicated at the intersection of the two. Probably why I fell into the Art World and had loads of fun with sculpture. Taking an abstract idea and designing a translation into three dimensional space really rocks my world.

Lately I have been mixing my cursive writing with my printing … anyone else, or should I be worried …?

I still remember the day in 7’th grade when I was in writing class. I kept mixing up the tails on g’s & q’s and my teacher called me out on it. I replied “Cursive, foiled again” and it was the first time I heard my teacher laugh out loud in class.

Back in my day, sonny, we not only learned Palmer Method, but in early grammar school years had a class called Penmanship, which included exercises that today might be described as training muscle memory. And I learned this so-called Secret Code (poor, ignorant puppies!) and still use it well when I write with care (scribbled notes easily become illegible with age, however)—as in writing checks or occasional letters (you do remember writing “letters,” in the pre-computer age, don’t you?), or even notes on Christmas cards (though I don’t bother to send many anymore).

So, I pity your brother, smug Little Sister!

I’ve had to resort to printing on cards to the grandkids so they can read them. Bring back cursive to the schools.