I Just Learned That They Don't Teach Cursive Writing In Schools These Days.....

[hunter]

16. I considered it a form of torture.

I seem to be missing the processing circuitry that makes cursive an optimal writing system for many people. My ordinary non-cursive handwriting isn't much better, but people are able to read it, and more importantly I can read it myself if I'm taking notes and such.

I made a huge effort practicing cursive, trying to "get it," being forced to rewrite papers, but nothing came of it.

Demands that I write in cursive, especially on quizzes and tests, seriously damaged my grades and enthusiasm for school, maybe almost as much as the bullies who called me "queerbait" and frequently beat me bloody. I was an odd, squeaky, skinny, highly reactive kid.

One of my eighth grade teachers was among the worst. He seemed to think if I mastered cursive, looked him in the eye, and acted "like a man," then all my problems would magically go away.

All my problems with him did go away when he took me out into the hallway one day to lecture me and I ran off, jumped the fence, and vanished.

Frantic school administrators called my mom who reassured them I'd probably be home for dinner, and I was. A school counselor who'd known me since fifth grade had a talk with the teacher, and he backed off, but it was also clear he wasn't adapting, he was simply writing me off as one of the retarded kids, some kind of idiot savant unreachable by his method of teaching.

Later I quit high school for college, and it was one of the better decisions I've made in my life. I typed all my papers, and later used computers, and nobody ever knocked a grade off exams and quizzes for poor handwriting.

My great aunt especially, and some of my other elderly relatives had lovely handwriting. I do think it's an art worth preserving, but it's not for everybody.

For Intelligent Children With Autism, Handwriting Is Barrier

For most kids, learning handwriting can be dull and repetitive, but it's a task mastered midway through elementary school.

For many children with autism, though -- even those with higher IQs than most -- handwriting becomes an arduous chore, because the very act of writing letters takes them so long to do.

A new study out this week in the journal Neurology explains some of the reasons for that phenomenon -- and why bad handwriting might even lead to nonverbal communication problems.

While researchers may have realized that many autistic children have bad handwriting, they did not know if it related to their autism, or whether it was a problem understanding the forming of words, or whether it had to do with motor skills.

--more--

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/AutismNews/autistic-children-handwriting-biggest-challenge/story?id=9036125