how does your country/region/local school teach handwriting?

[KateGladstone]

Another poll -- how do people teach handwriting, where you live?

[Sonnet]

Voted "other" because:

• I doubt every single U.S. school district or individual school is teaching the exact same subject matter via the exact same methods
• I'm sure that what my school district (not Philly) taught when I was in school was not the same as every other school district in America at that time
• I have no idea what every single U.S. school district or individual school is currently teaching and whether or not they're all uniform about it
• I'm not in school and I don't have school-age kids or siblings, so I don't really know much about today's educational environment outside of what my roommate tells me (she's an English teacher for a public high school in the suburbs).

[kuragari389]

I live in Northern California, and at one of my elementary schools we were taught cursive writing (just basic) and at one of them we were not. I actually don't remember which grade it was that we were taught in, probably because of how little time we spent on it. It couldn't have been more than a few weeks and it didn't seem to be a big interest to anybody so much as a chore. I don't think I picked it up again until middle or high school when I had to use it for some assignments. I know though that it was later in high school when I actually began enjoying it and developing my own style of it - giving my cursive writing a little "personality", so to speak. I don't think that if I asked any one of my friends, they could still write cursive. Its a few and far between art of writing.

[KateGladstone]

Sonnet and all -- as a matter of fact, the USA has over 200 published handwriting methods (as different as snowflakes, though -- in my opinion -- not all as pretty as snowflakes!)

 

Some USA states/school districts require a particular method (or one of several specified methods) -- others allow choosing any method but will generally reimburse teachers only for using those methods that have enough supporters/media people generating enough P.R./letters to school-boards/letters to state departments of education "adoption committees"/etc. to put that method on the (generally very short) list of methods that the district/city/state will reimburse the teachers for using (in other words, the teachers CAN pick something else, but then they have to buy it themselves).

 

Some states/districts have requirements just to generally teach handwriting (or to teach print and/or cursive) during a certain year (or by the end of a certain year) in the children's education -- but they don't usually specify how many minutes a day should go to this (even when the curricular requirements of the state/district/city/whatever specify giving a certain number of minutes per day to arithmetic or to English or to science or whatever else the children have to study).

 

Some handwriting programs (to my personal knowledge) encourage their representatives/supporters to spread incorrect information about which parts of the USA require use of their program: e.g., one very widespread school program used to state (until I publicly challenged them on it) that their program was now the only program legally permitted in schools in nine states (I forget by now which other ones they listed) ... when I went to check with the education department of those other states and found that no such situation held true (in some of those states, teachers could use any progam -- in the rest, the program in question was definitely not [and never had been] the "one and only": it was merely one of several programs that teachers in that state could use and would get reimbursed for) --

 

I asked the company about this and the company *eventually* quietly corrected its false statements (but, before they decided to correct the misrepresentations, they spent about a year having about 20 of their representatives send me a regular stream of hate-mail for my "opposition to handwriting education." The way it seems they see it, anyone who doubts any statement made by their company "is opposing handwriting education" because any doubt of company statements may make it difficult for the company to succeed, or may inconvenience the company by forcing it to change or update the advertising ...

 

... not that I blame any malfeasance in the handwriting world on the handwriting-publishers alone.

In at least one state (California) where the currently published curriculum requirements state that students must use either "cursive or joined italic" when they reach fourth grade, teachers who want to use an Italic handwriting program (and who have shown the state curricular standards to the school principal, the district superintendent, etc., as proof that the state allows teachers to do this) have gotten in trouble because the principal/superintendent/etc. prefers to believe that this cannot be in the standards, and does not want to check the standards -- the principal or superintendent just finds it easier to say: "I know, without having to look, that the standards call for students to learn and use cursive; I have never heard of Italic and therefore I know it cannot possibly be in the standards; if you ask me to open our school's printed copy of the standards and see for myself, I will ignore this request -- and if you permit, I will consider you insubordinate because I just don't feel that the standards could possibly have changed in this area." (The updated standards -- which added the words "or joined italic" to a former specification of "cursive" -- appeared roughly 10 years ago. At least one teacher in California found herself in serious trouble when she dared to point out this fact and to ask that the school principal stop requiring her to tell students that the state required them to write in cursive.)

[Renzhe]

Utah. I don't think any particular style is required, as long as they learn to write. In my elementary school, cursive was taught in the third grade. It seems that my school was particularly attentive about cursive, as everyone will have mastered it by the fourth grade. Not everyone in my middle school knew cursive. Competence in writing one style may be greater, for all of the reasons the poll lists.

[Mangrove]

The National Board of Education in Finland require that every student must learn two types of handwriting, the "tekstauskirjaimet" and "kirjoituskirjaimet". The link contains instructions how to write each letter (click the letter), how to hold the pencil and so on.

 

New letters and numbers

 

1. Tekstauskirjaimet

 

http://www.edu.fi/oppimateriaalit/kirjainuudistus/kuvat/tekstauskirjaimet_kaikki_viivastolla.gif

 

2. Kirjoituskirjaimet

 

http://www.edu.fi/oppimateriaalit/kirjainuudistus/kuvat/kirjoituskirjaimet_index_kuva.gif

 

Martti

[KateGladstone]

To Martti -- Hyväa huomenta! Kiitoskia!

(= "Good morning! Thank you"! -- nearly all the Finnish I know.)

 

I would guess that "tekstauskirjaimet" means "script for text" and "kirjoituskirjaimet" means "script for writing"? (Please tell me if I guessed correctly -- my school didn't teach Finnish.)

 

When students in Finland learn "kirjoituskirjaimet," do they learn to join any letters? Or do they write both scripts with entirely unjoined letters?

Edited March 30, 2009 by KateGladstone

[Mangrove]

Good day to you too Kate!

 

To Martti -- Hyväa huomenta! Kiitoskia!

(= "Good morning! Thank you"! -- nearly all the Finnish I know.)

 

Hyvää huomenta ja kiitoksia sinullekin.

 

I would guess that "tekstauskirjaimet" means "script for text" and "kirjoituskirjaimet" means "script for writing"? (Please tell me if I guessed correctly -- my school didn't teach Finnish.)

 

According to Finnish translation engine "tekstauskirjaimet" is "printing by hand" but it's just a simplified version of kirjoituskirjaimet (= "letters for writing").

 

When students in Finland learn "kirjoituskirjaimet," do they learn to join any letters? Or do they write both scripts with entirely unjoined letters?

 

Yes, in kirjoituskirjaimet they join letters. Tekstauskirjaimet use unjoined letters and it's used when students want to write fast or are just lazy.

 

http://www.edu.fi/oppimateriaalit/kirjainu...iittaminen.html

 

Pencil was risen four times in this example. This word "säästöpankissakin" means "in a saving bank, too" in English.

 

http://www.edu.fi/oppimateriaalit/kirjainuudistus/kuvat/kasiala_4.gif

Edited March 30, 2009 by Martti Kujansuu

[KateGladstone]

Thanks very much, Martti! (I won't venture any more Finnish, since I feel embarrassed that I misspelled the word for "thank you" ... )

 

Re:

 

"Yes, in kirjoituskirjaimet they join letters."

 

I presume (since kirjoituskirjaimet uses Italic letter-forms) that in kirjoituskirjaimet they join only some letters, not all of them? Do they learn specific rules about exactly which letters to join/which letters not to join, or do they simply learn some general principles about joining/not joining?

 

" Tekstauskirjaimet use unjoined letters and it's used when students want to write fast or are just lazy."

 

Hmmm, so when they want to write fast (or when they want to make writing easier) they eliminate joins?

Now I would LOVE to put some Finns into a room with some American proponents of 100%-joined cursive, lock the door, and require them all to take a test of legible rapid handwriting (scored in LLPM -- legible letters per minute) before I unlocked the door. (To keep things absolutely fair, each writer would take the test in his or her native language, by writing some paragraph that contained every upper- and lower-case letter in that language.)

 

Because you have provided so much helpful info (and useful illustrations), I wonder if you could possibly also tell me:

 

/1/

When Finnish people revert to their first style of writing (tekstauskirjaimet) for the sake of speed or ease, do they also go back to writing without slant (like the tekstauskirjaimet model you showed) or do they still slant the separate letters like kirjoituskirjaimet?

 

/2/

Do you perhaps know approximately when Finland adopted its current tekstauskirjaimet->kirjoituskirjaimet handwriting method? (I don't expect you to know an exact year, but if Finnish people above a certain age write in a very different way, then that would probably indicate that they had learned some very different method.)

I ask this question because once I saw some Finnish handwriting written by a person who went to school in the 1920s or 1930s, and it looked very much like typical North American cursive handwriting school-models -- 100% joined, many loops on letter-stems, the upper-case letters and some lower-case letters very unlike printing, etc. -- so presumably the Finnish school system changed its handwriting style sometime after the 1920s or 1930s.

 

/3/

When Finnish people today (who have learned to write with the tekstauskirjaimet->kirjoituskirjaimet method) see older Finnish handwriting (or if they study English and then they get a letter in cursive from someone in North America!), do they have any difficulty reading that handwriting, or reading particular letters of that handwriting? (I presume that, if you learned handwriting with the tekstauskirjaimet->kirjoituskirjaimet method, you can answer this question partly from your own experience!)?

As you know, here in the USA people sometimes say that we must require students to write in cursive so that the students will know how to read cursive writing when they see it -- for example, when the students see writing done by older people/people in other cursive-using countries/dead people: in the USA, most history schoolbooks include large, clear photographs of the documents which founded our nation in the 18th century, so people who support cursive often say that writing in cursive is necessary so that our citizens can read these cursive documents for themselves, in the original, instead of relying only on printed copies. So ... do schoolteachers in Finland ever do anything (or do they ever need to do anything) to make sure that students today can easily read the handwriting of earlier (cursive-using) generations?

 

By the way, the web-site with samples of modern Finnish handwriting REALLY interests me! I wish I knew what that web-site says ... could you perhaps translate/summarize all or part of its keyboarded text? (if you have any time to do so -- even a very brief summary or description, perhaps?)

 

[Mangrove]

I presume (since kirjoituskirjaimet uses Italic letter-forms) that in kirjoituskirjaimet they join only some letters, not all of them? Do they learn specific rules about exactly which letters to join/which letters not to join, or do they simply learn some general principles about joining/not joining?

 

I learn to write in 1996 (at the age of seven) when things were different so this is my point of view. I still have my old penmanship book and I have learned (= remember) that only minuscules are joined. The new way (from the link I posted) is that after b, g, j, p, q, s, and Y letters a, c, d, o, ö and s are not joined. Also r and f are always unjoined. Letter z is not joined with previous letter but with following letter.

 

Hmmm, so when they want to write fast (or when they want to make writing easier) they eliminate joins?

 

I write faster with the italic script but I would think a person who learned to write in 2000s would write faster the "tekstauskirjaimet" -style. In some schools they even learn how to type with a computer before writing with a pencil!

 

/1/

When Finnish people revert to their first style of writing (tekstauskirjaimet) for the sake of speed or ease, do they also go back to writing without slant (like the tekstauskirjaimet model you showed) or do they still slant the separate letters like kirjoituskirjaimet?

 

I write both styles with a slant but that is because I'm left-handed so I can't say about others.

 

/2/

Do you perhaps know approximately when Finland adopted its current tekstauskirjaimet->kirjoituskirjaimet handwriting method?

 

The first standardized script was created by architect Toivo Salervo in the 1930s and it was updated till 1980s. Calligraphy Toivo Heiskanen created a new script in 1991 (the same I learned to use) and updated it in 2000.

 

/3/

When Finnish people today (who have learned to write with the tekstauskirjaimet->kirjoituskirjaimet method) see older Finnish handwriting (or if they study English and then they get a letter in cursive from someone in North America!), do they have any difficulty reading that handwriting, or reading particular letters of that handwriting? (I presume that, if you learned handwriting with the tekstauskirjaimet->kirjoituskirjaimet method, you can answer this question partly from your own experience!)?

 

Well, I'm studying history so I must understand old handwriting but people who learned to write before 1980s should understand quite well a text which was written in 1930s since they used updated version of the same script. For reference here's a text from year 1944. It's full of abbreviations and military words but I have a lot of practice reading these kind of texts. The first line:

 

""079:n" (P. Ps. Pr.) kom:lle, AK:n kom:lle."

 

http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/3706/img0053fyx.jpg

 

Martti

Edited March 30, 2009 by Martti Kujansuu

[KateGladstone]

Thanks for a very detailed and helpful response! I wonder -- if you showed that handwriting from 1944 to a Finnish schoolchild today, could he or she read it?

Edited March 30, 2009 by KateGladstone

[elizajones]

I taught second grade in Louisiana until a few years ago. Our district used Zaner Bloser handwriting materials at the time, and think they still do. Z.B. print was taught until mid-year third grade, when cursive was introduced. Handwriting instruction was required by the state department of education, but counted as part of the language arts instructional minutes. It was left to the principal at each school to decide how much formal instruction she wanted documented in our lesson plans and whether or not to use her limited school book funds to purchase workbooks for our classrooms. The workbooks usually had to used as textbooks for several years. We had a fair supply of newsprint ruled paper specific for each grade level. I often ran out by the end of the year, so I bought my own of better quality for special projects.

 

Pressed for time to teach all that is required meant that you often combined handwriting with another skill, such as spelling. Students were also required to "publish" a finished writing piece at least every two weeks. In theory, this was great opportunity to practice the conventions of presentation, such as indenting and managing line breaks and margins. Sometimes getting 24 individual compositions edited for spelling, grammar, handwriting, and presentation was a challenge. It was constant battle between content and appearance within the limitations of time.

 

I know our state has a dreadful reputation for educating our children. But about ten years ago, an attempt to turn the Titanic was begun. We have a mandatory exit exam in 4th, 8th, and I believe 10th grades. Called the LEAP test, it has an essay component for all subject areas, which was implemented over time. The tests have to be hand-graded, so I thought the state would go back to only using scannable answer sheets, i.e. multiple choice. But as far as I know, they are still requiring written essay answers, even in mathematics, science, and social studies as a significant part of the test. Neat handwriting became important once again and we began to see materials available again at the school level.

 

I do not know if the students are required to use cursive or were permitted to use print on their LEAP Test essays, but in the language area the compositions were evaluated for neatness.

[Dimitri]

In the schools I went to in Ontario they used printing, which is very similar to normal newspaper/computer print. No real standard as long as it all was more or less the same. And the cursive is of no real specific type ether just a general over all type that is copied from a variety of workbooks, posters and teaching ads.

 

From Junior Kindergarten to the end of Grade 5 when actual lessons on writing properly seemed to stop I went to 4 schools and they all seemed to have no real way to do it other then to get us writing consistently verses one specific style.

 

Dimitri

[susibilia]

I live in Los Angeles, and have always attended schools in the woefully inadequate Los Angeles Unified School District.

 

Starting in kindergarten, children are taught to print. Once they are comfertable enough with this, in second grade, they learn to write in cursive.

 

After second grade, teachers don't honestly care what the children write in, as long as it is legible. No further instruction in penmanship is given, unless the handwriting is SO awful that the teacher needs to intervene (yes, my teacher forced me to complete additional handwriting worksheets when I was in fourth grade).

 

I stopped writing in cursive in third grade, and my printing remained absolutely atrocious until sixth grade, when I started keeping a journal. While some teachers may teach handwriting further, most don't honestly care after second grade.

[LapsangS]

Finland: I went to first grade in 1985, learned the old cursive style. Nothing else was taught. I had to learn the printing block letters myself. Here is a sample of the Finnish Alphabet in my old handwriting style. Today's kids have hard time deciphering it

 

In the Finnish alphabet, Å, Ä and Ö are not considered accents, but separate letters that are placed after Z.

 

Edited March 31, 2009 by LapsangS

[Tuxedomoon]

Over here, in Germany, all children MUST learn writing with FPs.

I think that's a big difference to the US, I always wonder about the reports about people killing FPs because they don't know how to use it. I could give my FPs to 90% of the people here, and they would all know how to handle it.

Therefore they teach at least 2 different styles of handwriting, one is the normal german Kurrent and the other a more Sütterlin-like-version for the left-handed kids. Even they have to learn writing with FPs.

 

Blockletters are not allowed and not taught in school.

Edited March 31, 2009 by Tuxedomoon

[Achim]

Therefore they teach at least 2 different styles of handwriting, one is the normal german Kurrent and the other a more Sütterlin-like-version for the left-handed kids. Even they have to learn writing with FPs.

 

Blockletters are not allowed and not taught in school.

 

Wishful thinking? Kurrent or Sütterlin aren't taught for nearly 70 years (it was abandoned in 1941 - see Wikipedia on Kurrent for details). But you're right about FPs - they are still widely in use here and I'm not afraid to lend my FPs to someone (even the limited edition VP I use to carry around all the time now).

 

As of "Blockletters" (I think you mean "print" letters) - this is taught as first script in some parts of Germany, but only in the first year at school, later on kids learn to develop their own handwriting by connecting the letters (see "Ausgangsschrift" in Wikipedia).

 

 

[KateGladstone]

Re:

"Wishful thinking?" (in giving information from 70 years ago as if it represented the current state of affairs) --

 

Probably not "wishful thinking," but instead not knowing that some published information no longer holds true.

Many people in the handwriting world, unfortunately, do not keep their information current. For example:

 

There exists a book about handwriting styles around the world (published by an American graphologist -- last name Koppenhaver, as I recall -- as a reference-work for graphologists to use when they deal with handwriting from other countries). This book (published in 1990 and used/recommended as a reference by graphologists, e.g., when they testify in court as "expert witnesses" about handwriting) states that it gives up-to-date (1990) information about the handwriting instruction provided to children in the various countries it covers (which include most of the European countries and most of the English-speaking countries) ... but, when I read the book in 1996 (a graphologist had shown me the book, taking much pride in the book as "proof" that her profession "made constant efforts to provide up-to-date and accurate material on handwriting"), I noted that many countries' pages showed (as "present teaching") handwriting-styles not actually taught in those countries since the 1930s or the 1940s or the 1950s ... for instance, the page for Sweden showed (as present teaching) a handwriting style that Sweden stopped teaching around 1930s (since then, that country has had at least two further changes of teaching-style). This (and other similar things like really out-of-date info for other countries, such as Germany and the USA) disturbed me enough that I telephoned the book's author and asked if she would like to have more current samples for Sweden and some of the other countries that I happened to have more current information on. The author said: "Oh, are you thinking of the style-change that the Swedish schools made in 1971?" I replied, "Yes, among other things." (in 1971, an Italic style came into Swedish schools.) The author then said: "Actually, I know about the 1971 Swedish style-change but I decided that this should not be in the book because I do not approve of that style-change. The style-change was graphologically a bad thing because graphologically it is important to have people write in cursive, so there is really no reason to acknowledge the change." (For some other countries, she offered similar "reasoning" -- she didn't like the present style of this or that country, so her reference-work wouldn't state that the change had happened -- for other countries, she said that she didn't know if the style had changed or not, so she had taken her photographs for those countries from old encyclopedia articles on handwriting, old graphology books which had chapters on different handwriting styles, etc. because [she said] "more recent books didn't have photos of handwriting from those countries: I knew I needed to cover these countries, but it would have been too hard to try to find more current information. Surely you don't expect me to go to the bother of trying to contact people in different countries just to find out if their writing has changed from the last time it was covered in an encyclopedia or any other book?" Since I knew that this author doesn't just write books on handwriting, she also teaches people who want to become graphologists, I asked her what would happen if (for example) someone from Sweden took her course and objected to having to learn & repeat on an examination that seriously out-of-date material "is present-day practice for Swedish schools." She replied: "Too bad -- that student would just have to develop the self-discipline to learn and use the material like anyone else."

 

?!?!?!

[KateGladstone]

I can't recall if the book that I wondered about (and called the author about) was by an author called Koppenhaver or an author called Jaegers -- I borrowed books by both people, at that time, from my friend who was trying to make me believe in graphology.

[KateGladstone]

Much more, with many useful illustrations, comparing German and American handwriting past and present --

http://cndrnh.blogspot.com/2009/03/german-...andwriting.html