The lost art of handwriting
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How has our relationship with handwriting changed over time?
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A handwritten note is super important and yet I feel like that's something being lost. It's useless. Cursive is outdated. My wife not so much in agreement on that. I take a lot of pride in my handwriting, actually. I joke that I was a calligrapher in a past life.
My parents started dating back in the 80s, and for a while, they were long distance. This was way before the smartphone, so they sent each other a ton of mail. They wrote letters back and forth, and my dad would make my mom mix tapes to send her. I love it because it's a peek into my parents' lives before me. I can feel the paper. I can see my mom's beautiful penmanship. But it also makes me realize we really don't physically write all that much anymore. But some of you are trying to bring it back. Handwriting is a big part of my life. I've been bullet journaling since eighth grade, and now I just graduated college.
I love writing my notes. I keep a shopping list that my partner likes to make fun of and consistently tries to make digital.
My husband loves to joke that I write enough letters to keep the post office in business. I'm Jonquilin Hill, and this week on Explain It To Me from Vox, the handwritten word. How our relationship with writing has changed, and how that's changed us. First up, learning how to write. I called up Sean Datchick. I'm a professor of special education at the University of Iowa. I'm also a former K-12 teacher, administrator, and former director of the Iowa Reading Research Center. Okay, Sean, it may be a surprise to no one, but it has been a while since I was in elementary school, and things have changed a lot since then. When do students start to learn handwriting in schools, and how is it being taught now?
The vast majority of states, approximately 48, have adopted a national set of academic standards that specifically focus in on teaching handwriting during kindergarten and extends a little bit past the first grade. Now, importantly, the standards only focus on print handwriting, so text that's unconnected. There's a huge range of time spent on handwriting, but on average, teachers report spending as little as 10 minutes a week on teaching handwriting explicitly in kindergarten classrooms. 10 minutes does not seem like a lot of time. Looking back, it felt like so much more. When did handwriting become less of a priority? Yeah, so changes really started to happen around 2010, and that was when the passage of the National Academic Standards, that's typically called the Common Core Academic Standards, were adopted across the United States.
It is one of the most confusing, controversial issues in the entire nation, and it's percolating at the grassroots level, making its way onto the national stage. It's the Common Core. The Common Core raises the bar for students' performance. We have to challenge our students in ways that have them interact more actively in learning. And in those standards, there was a push for students to quickly move past handwriting and to start to adopt keyboarding or typing.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How has our relationship with handwriting changed over time?
0:00–14:28
2
What are the current standards for teaching handwriting in schools?
14:28–19:57
3
When did handwriting become less of a priority in education?
19:57–30:40
4
What evidence supports the importance of handwriting for learning?
30:40–33:39