Haha, no they just got rid of cursive and didn’t add a typing class. So you get a bunch of 2nd graders all doing hunt and peck on their chromebooks.
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As a lefty, I always did poorly on essays and long writing assignments. During the writing ordeal, I would severely edit large blocks of text out of my work as my fingers became pained and cramped.
During my school daze, I developed painful calluses on my pen-holding fingers. Those calluses took well over a year to fade away and heal after I graduated.
In the past I considered toying with mirror writing, but why bother? We have keyboards and printers now.
(Over the years my signature has been streamlined to a few large loops connected by wavy lines. (In situations which require many signatures, wavy lines will be all people get.) Quick & simple, without the pains of using the left hand to write in a script designed by and for righties. Can’t read my name?
Tough doody. It’s my signature because I say it is.)
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OK. I’ll ask the bleedin’ obvious question. Has anyone investigated whether learning to type is also an important tool for cognitive development that helps to train the brain to learn functional specialisation? Because on the surface it sounds like the type of skill that would do exactly that.
Important historical documents written in cursive, or any other dead or dying style, need to be scanned, OCRed, proofread by someone skilled in the script because the OCR will make lots or errors, and made available as a text file. Because even those of us who can read cursive can’t read it anywhere near as fast as printed text, and because vison-impaired people already have “text to speech” solutions that work for text files but fails for cursive. There’s certainly value in historians learning to read old scripts, but I can’t see any point in primary school students learning it.
I found the Wikipedia article on Cursive enlightening. It makes the point that Cursive is a style and that there are many different scripts that qualify as cursive. Includes:
I vaguely recall my 3rd grade teacher saying we were learning Australian modified cursive, but I’ve no idea how it differs from overseas varieties. Perhaps the tails of letters show a greater propensity to go down under the body of the letter. It also left me completely unable to read both my parents’ cursive scripts learned 30 years earlier, and one of them was a trained primary school teacher allegedly with good handwriting.
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… doesn’t teaching the kids shorthand instead of cursive sound like a good plan then 
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As a young nerd in the mid-1970s to early 1980s I actually did use a slide rule in school, even though inexpensive electronic calculators had just become available. They are great for learning about how logarithms work and order of magnitude of numbers. They also tend not to tempt people into using more significant figures than are actually meaningful in typical physics problems.
But I also ditched the slide rule for an HP programmable calculator as soon as I got one in high school.
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You go online and type your name + “signature” into a google images, then copy one you like.
I haven’t used cursive to sign my entire name since I was in elementary school. I started shortening it because my name is long, but it really got chopped down after I started getting hand cramps from signing things for work.
At this point, it’s one and a half letters with some squiggles.
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Wait, they stopped doing times tables? How do they teach multiplication now? (I’d especially like to know because I never really managed to memorize all the times tables in primary school…)
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This is just mean As someone with dyspraxia, It was decided at 13 there was no point teaching me to write, and that i should have typing lessons instead and a laptop and that was in 1993…
I would argue that kids need less writing and more typing lessons, who writes? Now I admit i wont even write down directs for people etc i am probley more pen phobic than most…
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I thought that left-handed people have a distinct advantage when doing calligraphy, as the left-lean and stroke-thickness much admired comes from a left-handed grip, thus those right-handers serious about it have to get a weird appendaged pen.
This fact adds a little notch to my theory that left-handed people around the world invented writing.
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I always had this awful handwriting. My parents tried to help me and gave me these notebooks to improve my calligraphic skills. It was in vain.
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You’re a doctor. Illegibility goes with the job!
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I just learned to turn my page 90 degrees clockwise so that my chubby southpaw didn’t obscure what I was writing. This proved more difficult when I became a comic-book inker for a bit, and the pages were so much larger. #lefthandproblems
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I wonder if, in a decade’s time, there will be a movement among conservatives to preserve the skill of texting by thumb rather than using the new fangled speech to text or mind-machine interface? 
Edit: to add another reply
@awfulhorrid If you never put a full-stop/period in your writing, it can never be used against you in court, as you can always claim that you hadn’t finished, and so your words are being taken out of context; this is just natural law, right…
Edit: as above, so below
@geoduck Apparently, as a small child, I said that I could wait to learn how to write so that I could write things down, and they would be secret.
Edit: Macrocosm in microcosm
@FGD135 Thank you very much for posting that album. I’d not heard of Anne Clark before. That was great.
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That would indeed be silly. Naturally I use Demotic.
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IKR? Dudes, you have a perfectly good ‘t’ character. Why write it as ‘m’??
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That’s the trouble with modern life, nobody can be arsed to cross the 't’s and dot the 'i’s. 
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Better than me; I block print like a drunken spider with inky feet.
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Nuns did what, now?!?! 
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