Tag: classism

handypolymath:

plaidadder:

marzipanandminutiae:

drst:

awed-frog:

bestillmyslashyheart:

onehellofashipper:

rodentmancy:

boxorino:

pom-seedss:

atreefullofstars:

reading-wanderer:

babyboomerbullshit:

whyyyyy do we need cursive anywayyyy

Most people don’t even use cursive for signatures. Eventually, they all just dissolve into squiggles.

Plus Some people’s cursive can be pretty unreadable even when they do put in the effort.

Oh noooooooo, society is chaaaaaaanging, what will we dooooooo~???

I was taught cursive, told I would need it in high school when we started writing essays.

Teachers didn’t accept anything in cursive. By the end of highschool teachers were not accepting hand-written essays and everything had to be typed. Though, they assured me cursive would probably be a thing in university because you have to write essays in class sometimes too and wouldn’t have access to computer to type it up.

In university, we were warned, that cursive can be a faster method of writing, but harder to make legible when writing quickly. We were warned if the professor couldn’t easily and quickly tell what we were saying, it would count as not having written anything. This included in-class exam essays on a time limit. So no one used cursive.

So while I was constantly being assured that cursive would be very useful when I grew up, it only became increasingly obsolete.

Why would we continue to teach obsolete skills? Why waste the time?

That being said… kids are exposed to a lot of different fonts… some of which are cursive. I think they can figure it out.

cursive is more of an art form than it is a way of life now a days and i appreciate the beauty of the script but its not practical unless you can do it really well and quickly for anything school related tbh.

when i did bank customer service i sure noticed an issue with checks being written in cursive and thus illegible, and the teller taking a guess at what it actually says. youd think ‘just go by the actual numbers’ but they had to go by the text, and often those numbers were also hard to read 

One thing that is interesting is that if a young child has dyslexia, its easier for them to learn to write in cursive! It helps them keep from mixing up which way bs and ds go, because they’re written differently, and it helps because all the letters are connected, making it harder for them to lose track of where they are in a word. I taught at a school for kids with learning disabilities, so that’s what we did.

One of the benefits to teaching kids how to write in cursive is that you are also teaching them how to read it. Until relatively recently all official documents were written in cursive. If we as a generation forget how to write it, and therefore how to read it, we will lose part of our connection to our own past

This is going to make me sound like an Old Person, but I’m really fucking sad about all of this. I’m sad cursive is disappearing and I’m sad so many people seem to care so little about it. I realize you’re like this when you’re young, and I know you mostly outgrow it, but it makes me physically sick to hear this kind of ‘we’ll never need it’ reasoning. ‘What’s this for? When will we ever use it? Why does it matter?’ – that’s what you fucking hear when you try to teach poetry, when you make some comment about a historical figure, when you bring kids to a museum or the theatre. Lately, you even hear that about fucking watches? Apparently telling the time is now a useless skill, same as everything else, because smartphones have digital clocks so no one knows how normal clocks work anymore. Schools are actually removing them from classrooms because kids don’t know what to make of them. And, whatever, maybe it’s hilarious to some people and irrelevant for others, but it makes me really sad. Because the thing is, the world is way bigger than what you see right now and what you are right now. And maybe, yeah – maybe right this minute you don’t need analogical clocks and you don’t need Homer and you don’t need French, but why the fuck are you limiting your future self by not taking the slightest interest in any of those things? And how do you know they won’t actually change your life – not now and not in a month, but maybe ten, twenty years from now? Bloody how? I hate that capitalism is now so aggressive and pervasive and fucking seductive that it can force or convince kids to let go of their natural curiosity. I hate schools have become job training machines. I hate that twelve-year-olds look at something and give it an exact value ‘useful / useless’ based on an hypothetical future life they know nothing about. And cursive – cursive is the perfect representation of all this. Because everything that’s not about you is bound to be cursive – your parents’ love letters and your favourite author’s first manuscript and a beautiful illuminated book you’ll see in some famous library one day – so that’s a clean cut from history, from anyone who’s not your age or doesn’t live in your country (because this bullshit is mostly UK/US at the moment, but let’s wait and see). Cursive is a hostel employee on the other side of the world writing you an address to a restaurant she loves. Cursive is your grandmother’s hand on a Christmas card, and you know old people don’t say it all that often, but ‘Best wishes’ actually means ‘I love you very much’. And cursive also means writing fast, writing when you’re in a hurry, writing in a style that’s your own, writing on actual paper so you can doodle in the corners and add arrows and dates and the embroidered initials of your crush. And most of all, cursive is about thinking. Cursive is the cornerstone of critical thinking. Of summarizing, of making connections, of finding solutions. There are studies showing how different areas of the brain light up depending on how you’re writing – a laptop is not the same thing as writing by hand. Not even close. Taking pictures of the board or adding stunted comments to a Powerpoint presentation is not nearly the same thing as taking fast, accurate and personal notes on lined paper. It just isn’t, and that’s why rich people aren’t doing this bullshit at all. Did you know that? Expensive schools teach cursive. They teach Latin. They teach foreign languages. They teach poetry and theatre and debating skills and everything fucking else. So when they say cursive is not useful, what they mean is that it’s not useful to you. Why should kids know Yeats and advanced maths and how to read a fucking clock when your goal is to keep them on minimum wage doing repetitive, boring tasks until they drop dead on the spot because they can’t afford to cal an ambulance? Again, I heard rich people say this, admit it freely: it’s not that they don’t think Shakespeare is useful. They think it’s not useful to you. That value poetry adds to your life and soul? How it makes you think and dare and explore? Not. For. You. Ten years ago, they were trying to change university programs so they could be tailored by class and wealth; guess what: they succeeded. I did my second degree ten years after my first, and I was shocked by how everything had changed (had become worse: stupid, unimaginative, demanding in all the wrong ways). And school has changed with it. It starts in first grade, where more and more children are barely toilet trained and struggle to speak because their parents are too overworked and exhausted to look after them and teach them, and it goes all the way to high school – you see kids let down by adults every single day – bored out of their minds, scared, alone, anxious, taking meds and throwing up and obsessed with this binary code of death we have forced on them: “Do we need to know this? Will it be in the exam? Is it really useful?”. This whole thing – it sickens me. Guys – Jesus fuck, I don’t care how old you are – don’t listen to what they’re saying. Be curious. Learn stuff. Read weird books, give poetry a try, get to know obscure historical facts, start ten Duolingo courses at once. And write in cursive – with joy and laughter and rage – keep diaries and take notes and draw maps and marvel at the delicate, inherently human connection that’s between your hands and your brain. Seriously: we need to get rid of this system before it swallows us whole.

Repeating for emphasis since the wall is hard to read:

Why should kids know Yeats and advanced maths and how to read a fucking
clock when your goal is to keep them on minimum wage doing repetitive,
boring tasks until they drop dead on the spot because they can’t afford
to call an ambulance?

Again, I heard rich people say this, admit it
freely: it’s not that they don’t think Shakespeare is useful. They think
it’s not useful to you.

Also, I believe cursive has been proven to help the development of hand-eye coordination. That’s a weak little endorsement after the fascinating addition above, but still.

@awed-frog says it all.

The wall of text contains very good points about how one builds an oligarchy and a corresponding peasantry from the ground up.