THE CURSIVE PARAGRAPH IS THE HARDEST PART OF THE BAR EXAM:

Tempest in an Inkpot: Don't be fooled by the hand-lettering trend in movie posters and book covers--cursive is dead. Who cares? A million angry commenters around the web who extol the virtues of loops and curls. But the traditional form has a history that's less than precious (Graham T. Beck, 8/31/11, The Morning News)

Third grade was the year cursive didn't matter. That's not to say it definitely matters now, or that it didn't actually matter then, but that's what I most vividly remember repeating for the nine months that school was in session: "Cursive doesn't matter." It was my name, rank, and serial number. Handwriting was my enemy. Those who championed its cause: my captors. "Cursive doesn't matter," I'd tell them. "It can't matter," I'd say to myself. It couldn't.

No matter how hard I tried, I was incapable of making my hand shape those precious loops. Despite extra classes, a school-appointed therapist, even mortifying, neon-colored rubber grips that fit like erasers over the shaft of my pencil and forced my fingers into a perfect penmanship claw, everything I put down in cursive was not just inelegant and wobbly but also completely illegible. A symptom of some disease. A signifier of a horrible shortcoming that would show itself days or weeks or years later. Eventually, someday, I'd kill, I'd steal, I'd use swear words like my brother's friend Walter. My future failure was written in my writing. And so if cursive did matter, well, I was in for a life of trouble, so cursive couldn't matter.

In that regard, the past two years have been good to me. Forty-four states¾most recently Hawaii (Aloha) and Indiana (Go Hoosiers!)--have tacitly affirmed what I insisted all those years ago, with their adoption of an education platform called the Common Core State Standards, which replaces decades-old handwriting requirements with a "keyboarding" mandate. "The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers," reads the program's website. "With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy."

Cursive is just another way for The Man to keep us down.

Posted by oj at September 1, 2011 6:13 AM
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