Fired Font

It only took one visit to my niece's school to realize things are a lot different from when I was a student. First off, every kid has a cellphone which obviously wasn't possible back then. Also, very few kids have backpacks anymore - many of them now carry their books in a small rolling suitcase. This is apparently to guard against back problems later in life but mostly manages to make them all look like little business people rushing to catch very important flights to the playground. With these very obvious changes out there for all to see it shouldn't come as a shock to learn that there are just as many smaller, more subtle differences going on behind the scenes, specifically with the curriculum. There are certain subjects I never would have thought about taking when I was a little kid but there are also skills I had to learn that kids are no longer required to sit through. This week I learned that many schools are no longer teaching cursive to children during their formative years. The thinking is that most kids are only going to need to know to type going forward and learning to write letters in block form will be good enough. As you would expect there are many people against this change in the learning plan, arguing that not only does cursive look more professional, kids will need to be able to read and write in cursive to appreciate history as important documents like the Declaration of Independence is in cursive. I too am against this decision to drop penmanship in schools - not because it is practical but because why should kids today not have to suffer like I did?

I have terrible penmanship and I always have. Honestly, I should have been a doctor. On most days it look as though I decided to write with my left hand as a way to challenge myself. My handwriting is so bad that in high school I once had an English teacher who refused to read my essays unless they were typed out, sending me into the neighboring computer lab during tests while everyone else worked in the little blue books. (It should also be noted that I was not given additional time to do this. That teacher was an asshole.) Cursive is the bane of my existence to this very day. Every time I write my name in cursive while filling out a form it is guaranteed to come back to me with an insane misspelling of my name. My last name is hard enough to spell without my hieroglyphic handwriting making it worse. (Just the other day I got a Mr. Kakauskis, which may be a new record for furthest off.) That is why even though I hate doing it I often end up mixing cursive and printing, which is how I would assume a crazy person also signs their name. But despite all this I think teaching cursive is a good skill for kids to have master. Few things in life look quite as nice as a hand-written note with nice penmanship. Still, we must admit times are changing, so kids probably should learn to type at a younger age, mostly so they don't continue to write text messages that are devoid of vowels. Since there is only so much time in the day something is going to have to go. I vote for the Pythagorean Theorem. I had to memorize that in high school as well and it has come up exactly never since graduation.