Daily Prompt
Everything Changes
I didn’t find this story on a piece of paper floating down the street.
In the real world nobody uses paper to send notes- they don’t even Write anymore. They print. Probably in blocky letters because that’s what we see on our phone screens and laptop screens and what ever screen is attached to the electronic device that we HAVE to carry with us.
I mean, all of these devices are our secondary brains now.
You know that right?
My sister told me this story and it was so weird and almost unbelievable that I went and looked it up.
Some schools are no longer going to teach cursive and do you what some of them have offered as a reason? It’s a waste of time. Funny considering most kids can’t tell time on a clock with or without numbers on its face anymore.
I have a theory, people aren’t writing at all anymore. They communicate in pictures.
Check your Facebook wall.
We use pictures with little quips to express complete thoughts and ideas.
The Egyptians did that. They wrote in pictures- but guess what. Those symbols made the same sound ever single time.
You couldn’t use random pictures to express random ideas or to let someone know your dog or cat died ( pictures of rainbows over a bridge…that’s all you have to ‘write”) You just slam that on the interwebs with your dog’s name and everyone will know what you ‘mean’.
I remember when I was learning cursive in the 3rd grade ( I’d have been about 9 years old ) , we had these workbooks and until you got the exercises perfect you had to print your schoolwork.
I worked like a son of a gun to be ‘perfect’ so did my friend Darren.
But we had the worst penmanship in class and the only reason we got to final write in cursive was the entire class had perfected their penmanship so we got in by default.
Still, I loved writing in cursive even though our teacher told me and Darren in front of our entire class if he could had held us back and forced us to print for the rest of the year he would have.
So he came up with a new grading system just for us. I could get an ” A ” on my spelling test and an “F” in penmanship so it would knock my grade down to a ” B” or ” C”. Didn’t matter if I spelled every single word write and got the answers right on my test, he still bust me down to a lower grade because my writing was bad.
He didn’t do that to anyone else but me and Darren- because you know, we had the worst writing so it was a special system just for us.
Just as a side note, our teacher went on to be a Missionary. I had hoped he’d end up in one of those places where there were head hunters and cannibals and he’d end up with his head on a stick or stewing in a pot.. Instead he ended up in a place where he hated the people and they hated him right back. So he returned to our school a few years later where he talked about the ” ignorant savages” who couldn’t be saved ( you really shouldn’t talk smack in a small town ) and when I saw him I said, with genuine disappointment:
” Oh. You’re alive.”
My point is this: I worked hard to learn cursive- and I had to learn it from a teacher who thought cetain kids were ‘savages’. So it was a struggle and the day I was allowed to write in cursive was a big day- even though I took a verbal slap to the face on the day it happened.
Cursive isn’t just putting pen to paper- along with telling a good story, or writing a letter it should be pleasing to the eye and the brain. It takes time and it’s worth it.
It actually helps you think about what you’re writing when you can’t just throw up a picture or race across a keyboard.
For a moment, just consider the Egyptians.
Consider all of the work that went into it when they wrote.
When you look at what they wrote you can see the beauty and the grace in it.
What’s wrong with having that in your life? With being able to create it, even if it’s just on a shopping list or a note telling your kid to feed the dog.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it at all.
We could all do with a little more of those two things in our lives.
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I had to teach my granddaughter to read an analog clock. I bought one of those wooden clocks with movable hands. She was almost 10 and nobody had taught her, so i did. It took all of 5 minutes. They aren’t teaching cursive in school either, just block printing. I hope this stuff comes back again. Things come around. I hope reading (as in a whole book), writing (not text talk — real language), and telling time without a digital clock, will be three of them.
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I truly upsets me that the schools nowadays aren’t spending more time teaching children cursive. My bonus daughter was taught, but then not required to use it. My sons haven’t reached the age where cursive would typically be taught, so we’ll see what happens when they do. There are high school students without a signature, children who can’t read the constitution and other documents … Handwriting in general is worse than when I was kid because teachers don’t take the time they used to to teach it. I want to point out, I’m not blaming teachers … Most are wonderful and love what they do. Cursive isn’t a priority in the curriculum anymore, so teachers do what they can with the time they have. Thank you for sharing!
I’m with you, the teachers aren’t to blame.
It does concern me we have a generation of people who can’t read cursive, tell time on clocks- and they don’t have signatures. It feels like we are backsliding
Thank you for the read and great comment!
I enjoyed it. You’re very on point, thank you.