Typing has mad a big difference in my life.... How can one learn to make fast notes with just printing: you can't.
Originally Posted by JRLawrence
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.
I had one professor who told us that no recordings were allowed in class; one had to use only the notes you were able to take, and he talked fast.
Originally Posted by JRLawrence
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 use cursive every day, all day. Learning to write properly is being dropped by the schools, not because it is not necessary; it is because the teachers are too lazy to teach an essential skill.
Originally Posted by JRLawrence
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.
Teachers teach what they know. Calling teachers lazy because they don't teach cursive is ignorant. 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.
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. 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.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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.