Originally Posted by KCQuestor
Kids who are in school now will graduate to a world where they can take notes on their personal devices much faster than you could type or write -- even shorthand.
So he's a dinosaur. What's the value in that? He doesn't allow recordings which forces students to rush taking notes as fast as he can talk? Like teaching is a contest and the fastest notetaker gets the best notes? That's a professor who doesn't understand his role.
I agree with your thoughts here. Very good. The professor in question was trying to drive home the need for the students to think for themselves on fundamental matters, a thing that most people do not do. I always questioned his methods, but not his intent.
You use what you know. Everyone does. And because it works for you, you think everyone should learn that skill. I totally get it. My dad taught me a bunch of mnemonic rules of thumb to help me calculate baseball batting averages on the fly. (I can figure the avg of a player who is 203 for 787 and what he needs to do to get to .300 really fast). It's a useful skill and I use it almost every day -- but not for batting averages. I'd love for kids to learn this handy way to divide large numbers to generate fractions, but it is not a skill that will make a huge difference in their lives.
Every skill one can learn makes a difference in our lives, we should all try to learn as many skills as possible and have as much fun as possible while learning many items. For example, I took the time to teach knot tying to my granddaughters. Maybe they just liked the attention from grandpa, but they learned to tie the same knots that their brothers learn in boy scouts.
Teachers teach what they know. Calling teachers lazy because they don't teach cursive is ignorant.
There is much discussion about the lack of value the recent tread for teaching computers even in kindergarden. Until recently, by the second grade all of the kids were proficient in cursive.
I do not grasp how anyone can effectively use printing to write a letter. We use computers a lot, but failure to teach cursive hinders everyone to some degree throughout life. They may think they are getting by without it, but they are hindered. One of my managers could not sign documents with a readable signature. Not acceptable, she had to practice making a readable signature to stay in the organization. No excuses, you are not educated, if you can't sign your own name.
It's not like they will use that time to sit around doing nothing. That's time spent on other things -- like the CONTENT of the writing.
The ability to grasp content is a BIG part of testing high school students and for college placement. If you can't quickly discuss what the content is, you have a very big problem. That said, the discussion of content is really not germane to the topic of the need to be able to have legible handwriting.
Schools teach the methods of the previous generation. They are too big and too sluggish to teach to the future. I graduated from high school in 1985.
Very good. Totally agree. Schools are sluggish. One of my biggest complaint about schools concerns how the summer vacation time has been shortened because the kids need the time away from schools to develop other skills. The many summer jobs enabled me to develop mechanical and construction skills that were not taught in the school classrooms. I have some friends who are high school teachers that have indicated that much of the problem with the long holidays that prolong the school years, needlessly, are because the administrators all seem to want to take extended vacations (visit their condos, as been discussed) instead of getting back to work. The result from my view point is that several of the very valued women in our organization must make arrangements to take care of their children during these times, usually by taking vacation themselves.
Back then, "technology" class meant programming -- because that's how you had to use computers. Now I am all in favor of teaching programming to help students learn problem solving and critical thinking, but few of the students I went to school with needed to know Pascal or FORTRAN. They grew into a world with Windows and Macintosh.
Cobol, Fortran and Assembly were my computer programming languages in 1969. Cobol is still used for business programming, but don't ask me to write a program in it because I haven't used it in years.
I started teaching in 1992 and "technology" class focused on HTML and networking. Again, that's how we needed to use the Internet back then.
I was on the internet in 1967. Does that tell you who I was working for? Hint, I was drafted into and from the USMC for the work. A lot of line code to even get into the thing.
The students who graduated from our school entered a world where Wordpress and Tumblr and Google let them create all the web sites they want without knowing a lick of coding. Again, its good to know basic HTML, but it isn't REQUIRED.
I am the one struggling with Wordpress. Help!
The point is that teachers who grew up using cursive, wanted to teach cursive. Our current teachers, who didn't grow up using cursive, don't see it as necessary. They see other skills as necessary, which THEIR students will see as useless. It is a never-ending cycle.
I got your point. However, writing skills are important. I was amazed when one guy who only printed referred to my hand written note as calligraphy, No, it was simple cursive that was taught from an era when having acceptable writing skills were demanded from everyone.
If you spend years teaching kids to write in cursive, forcing them to use it when it is not necessary, they are going to graduate into a world where they rarely need it.
Rarely needed is not never needed. How often do I, or my granddaughters, need to tie a knot? Not often, but it is a skill that makes life nicer for anyone.
I haven't written a word in cursive (other than my signature, which is a squiggly line) since junior high. That includes a high school diploma, three degrees, three published books, and more seminars, workshops, and meetings than I can count. I don't miss it.
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Education Needs for a Changing Society
