random poll

[rm]

Super busy. Am suddenly curious about this. Apparently most kids entering college in the US this year don't know how to write in cursive. I suspect this is less a sign of the apocalypse than it feels like to me.

So, tell me things (as usual, poll is un-scientific and reflects my biases and experiences (and 49-year-olds can choose which age category they like better!) -- if the boxes don't work, my apologies and comments super welcome.):

[Poll #1607173]

Comments

[ayoub.livejournal.com]

To explain my answer to question 2, I went to an all boys school :D

[andrewducker]

Me too.

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

Argh, I missed one.

I just remembered I was taught how to sew in art class in first grade.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention it, so were we. But it was art-project-level sewing, definitely not home ec.

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

Just to clarify I LEARNED to cook from my parents, elder brothers, grandmother, and our maid. I was required to take classes in school that involved cooking.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

Same here. Actually, I ended up *teaching* cooking in HS, because I knew how to stir-fry and in suburban New England in 1972 this was a rare skill.

[sethg]

When I was six, I went to a Montessori school that taught not just cursive, but italic. (I don’t know if this was a Montessori thing or just a weirdness with that particular teacher... she was weird in several ways...)

[rm.livejournal.com]

Italic is a goodness.

I didn't learn it. I did have to learn caligraphy though. I suppose in case I didn't marry well enough and had to address my own fucking invitations.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i wouldn't say school taught me those things, but i did take classes in them all. still can't cook, though, and i haven't done woodworking or metalworking in years.

[pshaw-raven.livejournal.com]

I had to re-learn cursive in sixth grade, actually. When I was in second grade, I learned it the first time from an elderly neighbor who was a retired school teacher, and my handwriting still has an "old fashioned" look. I made horrible scores in penmanship because I was never quite able to shake the original lessons.

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

I didn't tick any options for school location - partly because I had racked up ten different schools across three continents before I turned sixteen, and partly because the majority of them were private boarding schools whose rural location probably didn't have much impact on the syllabus.

I suspect gender did make a difference; several of my schools were all-girls schools and while domestic science/home economics were part of the main syllabus, I would have had to try quite hard to be taught woodwork or metalwork.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Ah, you make me wish I had known how to frame class questions in this too. Because I remember being shocked and sort of horrified when I went to public school after Miss Hewitt's and wood and machine shop were mandatory, as opposed to things like Latin and calligraphy.

[kallaneboi.livejournal.com]

I learned cooking, sewing, and woodworking from my mother and grandmother, and more woodworking in college in an art class. Also, we learned typing in school, but I learned it at home, but I checked it anyway.

[valancy-joy.livejournal.com]

In terms of the gender impact, I said no ... but ...

In our middle school -- grades 6-8 -- every student did stints in home ec (basically cooking), sewing, wood shop, metal shop, and I think we had a leather crafting segment to. Also typing. MANUAL typewriters :)

When you got to high school you could elect to pick up more advanced versions of most of these. And of course at that point you didn't see too many girls taking shop ... and even fewer (if any) boys electing to do the home arts/child minding stuff.

[valancy-joy.livejournal.com]

oh, and p.s. the cursive thing was only in Elementary school... where we had regular weekly penmanship time.

[fourzoas.livejournal.com]

I went to an all-girls school; they taught Home Ec, but I opted for typing and computer programming instead.

[nysidra.livejournal.com]

Yes, I know certain things were available because of my gender, but all of them were electives. I took homemaking and woodworking and learned *loads* from them both. I think everyone in high school should go through 'trade skill' classes. Yes, I'm calling cooking a trade skill.

At least I can go to my grave saying I've sanded and put varnish on a bookshelf and made an apple pie.

I envy people who had an electronics option. *pout*

I learned to write in cursive in the 2nd grade.

[cozzene.livejournal.com]

My schools in Erie, PA had metal, wood, electronics, even auto repair available to all genders from grade 6 on. I was a band geek and just didn't take them because of my schedule.

[rarelytame.livejournal.com]

I clicked suburban, for area, but I think those should have been ticky-boxes because a lot of people (including me) move around. I learned cursive in a small, rural elementary school in Illinois. The rest I learned in a suburban school in Georgia.

If you're keeping track of such things, the Illinois school, even though it was rural, was a much better school than the one in Georgia, with better teachers, better funding, and so on. I honestly couldn't tell you if the Georgia schools taught cursive or not. The Illinois school offered a LOT more than the Georgia schools. Orchestra and Chorus were offered to kids as an elective starting in the 3rd grade in Illinois. Every grade included a brief introduction to a foreign language (in 2nd grade we learned a bit of German. In 3rd a bit of French. Like that. Not enough to speak it, but I think it helped me later when I took Latin.)

In Georgia, "Band" wasn't offered until either Middle School (7th grade) or High School (9th), and included no stringed instruments. Only instruments you'd find on a football field during half-time. Chorus was offered in 7th or 8th grade. Foreign Languages weren't offered until high school, and only French and Spanish were available to incoming freshman. If you wanted to take Latin, you had to wait until you were a sophomore or junior.

So... I think it's possible the problems with education may be regional, not age-related.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Both regional and class-based. I went to school in a respectably sized town (probably 50,000 residents) that was the largest population center for two hours in every direction. I checked suburban because it wasn't rural, but it was technically classified on sociological maps as "smalltown USA."

My experience was almost identical to yours. I think of it as the meat-and-potatoes version of public education options. Edited to clarify: identical to your description of the Georgia offerings (and we didn't have a Latin option, just Spanish/French/German).

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

I didn't learn to do any of those things in a classroom because I never went to school.

(But for the sake of answering your main question, no, I don't write in cursive apart from signing my name. I got partway through teaching myself but I never kept it up.)

[graene.livejournal.com]

This sounds like what I do when I write in Hebrew. Drives my students nuts, especially since the bulk of them never learn to write Hebrew letters at all.

[sageautumn.livejournal.com]

I definately learned to write in cursive and to type in school. (Though hours and hours of mudding did WAY more for my typing skills than any class ever would.)

I took classes that involved woodworking and cooking... I couldn't do either of those now if I needed to, though.

[steeldreams.livejournal.com]

I learned to type in school, too. I learned to type well and quickly in a MUD. As a result, I have literally frightened a few people who have seen me type, including the monitor for a department of economic security typing test I had to take to apply for a particular job.

And they say computer games are a waste of time and don't teach you anything... ;-)

[contentlove.livejournal.com]

Haha, I see I'm the geezer so far. I love that ;) I too forgot that there was a sewing class in my distant past...part of a home ec class I was required to take in a rural high school I attended for 2 years. I think there was also cooking but it was dismal horrible cooking I laughed at - my parents were rocking awesome gourmets and cooking is something I learned to do well, at home, long before 9th grade. Lastly, cursive was something we learned in first and second grade, if memory serves, along with things like reading in the first and times tables in the second.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

I question how vital it is that people know how to write in cursive, really. I was taught how to write in cursive when I was seven, and by the age of ten had stopped again (though I still retain a reasonable memory of how to do it, as you have seen). My mum has gorgeous copperplate cursive handwriting, but she's the only person I know whose cursive is both pretty and legible.

I much prefer people who have been trained in drafting script, because they can do it just as fast as someone can write cursive (or they hybridise the two) and it's usually much easier to read :D

[newsbean.livejournal.com]

An interesting factoid: One of my younger friends (I think she is about 22?) can't even *read* cursive because she was never taught how to write in it. To me, that's the danger we run. It may not be very important to write in it ourselves, but it is important to know how to read it.

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

Anyone could take shop or home ec, regardless of gender; but the reality is my home ec class had two boys, and shop had maybe one girl. She was doing totally rad punk rock stuff.

Driver ed was an after school class but I included it 'cause hey, it was taught AT school.

[anterastilis.livejournal.com]

We had home ec in Junior High - we had the choice between sewing, cooking, and woodshop (maybe more, it's been so long!) and we had to take two of the options. I took sewing and woodshop. Even though they weren't divided up by gender, I remember very few boys in the sewing class and very few girls in the shop class.

I took a typing elective in High School. My grandmother told me that "if you know how to type and how to wait tables, you can go anywhere!". I took that to heart and learned to type and waited tables all through high school. I have to say...both came in really handy. I never had a problem getting a serving position (after four years of experience in high school). Knowing how to type quickly and without having to look at the keyboard has made life much easier. I had friends in college that still typed by hunt-and-peck. I would type up their notes and papers for them for a buck a page or so.

[anterastilis.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I grew up in a large city, graduated in '96. And everybody took Driver's Ed through the school. I remember it was a much better deal than taking the classes elsewhere.

[juniperus.livejournal.com]

(driving was taught through the school system but it was done in the summer, so I didn't include it as 'regular class time')

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Same here, either in summer or as a weekend activity. It wasn't part of regular classroom instruction.

I wouldn't say that I *learned* cooking in class, though. It was Scouts and AYH bike trips that did it for me, although as part of 7th and 8th grade Home Ec class we had cooking and sewing, across the board, regardless of gender.

This was out on Long Island in the mid-1970s

[iterum.livejournal.com]

For "suburbs" read "small city of 40,000 surrounded by rural area, located half an hour from the state capital, and connected to it in the years since by strip malls and housing developments that replaced the cows and corn."

I went to a public school with (in high school) a complete vocational program, but only woodshop, typing, and home ec (including sewing and cooking) were required for the non-vocational populace.

[bethynyc.livejournal.com]

I remember learning cursive writing in elementary school--perhaps second grade? I remember the paper with lines on it and practicing making the "L" and "F" letters in lower and upper case cursive. I like the flowing lines of those letters.

As I said above, I learned cooking, sewing, woodworking, and Latin in school. However, most of my sewing and cooking skills were gained at home, helping my parents to cook dinner. When we were in high school, my brother and I were together given responsibility for one meal a week, since the parents worked and there just wasn't time. Learning to cook was sort of organic, and I was encouraged to pick and try new recipes on a fairly regular basis.

I still use these skills today and I'm considering trying something from "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" at some point. That's my new bedtime reading!

I want to cook duck. Someday.

[jigglykat.livejournal.com]

I learned cursive in elementary school, but it wasn't a requirement to write in cursive in middle school or high school. In fact, some of my classes required papers to be typed because it was easier on the teacher's eyes. I did have one English teacher who liked handwritten essays.

I took a couple of Woodshop classes instead of Home Ec. in middle school. My classes were about 50/50 girls/boys. There were more Woodshop classes than Home Ec. classes.

Driver's ed was not part of the high school. It was a separate private group that I went to every Saturday.

To this day, I don't cook or sew. Oh, I can do enough to get me by, but it's not something I would inflict on others.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

When I took the GRE three years ago, it required that you copy, in cursive, a statement of ethics. So far, the examiner said, everyone had been able to dredge up some form of joined-up writing, but it wasn't pretty.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Really? Why cursive? Do you have to prove you can write cursive as part of your score?

*fascinated*