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

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

By 'drive', I mean that I took and passed a drivers' ed course, not that I actually learned a damn thing in it.

[ignescent-fic.livejournal.com]

One of the things I adored about my first highschool was that woodshop and home ec were both required courses. It also helped that I got better grades than my boyfriend in both classes. :)

[bare-bear.livejournal.com]

Whoops, I accidently clicked "Yes" for the gender question. Sorry about that. Gender didn't play a role at all when I went to school. Of course, I went to a small rural school, so everyone pretty much took all the same classes.

And hey! I'm 29, why didn't I get the option of age categories! :D

[brilliant-snark.livejournal.com]

I was taught cursive in 3rd grade, and in middle school I took Home Ec which taught me cooking and sewing. The sewing stuck, the cooking not so much. I mean, I can follow a recipe, but it's not something I have a knack for. I also took Shop, where I got to learn how to work with some power tools and make a car out of wood and plastic. I enjoyed it, even if the boys all looked at me funny. Traffic safety was mandatory at our high school. It was all classroom and simulator based, though...behind the wheel was split between my dad and lessons after school we paid separately for.

[brilliant-snark.livejournal.com]

Oh, and typing. That was middle school also. We started on actual typewriters, which then got swapped out about 2 weeks in for shiny new (bulky) computers. I finished the typing textbook in the first quarter and spent the rest of the year playing Tetris and Oregon Trail.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

It's the not READING cursive that freaks me out. There were always a few kids who never quite mastered writing it, but the idea that it's illegible? A generation from now, are we going to need trained epigraphists to decipher 17th century English letters?
As for the writing, you know my answers already. Left-handed + OCD + something to prove = impeccable cursive.

[yarram.livejournal.com]

It takes a trained epigraphist to read pre-WWII German handwriting (and pre-WWI block printing), because the base font is so radically different from today's presentation forms.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Couldn't answer question 2, as I went to school both in the suburbs and in a city.

[shadowravyn.livejournal.com]

In my elementary school, cursive was taught in second grade and was mandatory for all school-related work until fifth.

We had computer courses, but they didn't focus on actual typing, more "this is how a computer works."

In middle school, everyone had to take a session of sewing home ec, cooking home ec, metalshop and woodshop in both 6th and 7th grade. I wouldn't say I actually know how to sew, work metal or wood, (and cooking is something I leaned from my mother), but during 7th grade I sewed a pillow, made a coatrack, built a candy dispenser, and baked a cake in those classes, so I feel as if it should still count. The effort was made to teach me, regardless of how much I retained.

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

I'm saying yes to writing in cursive; in honesty, in the UK nobody writes in cursive, so I'm mentally substituting "a consistent form of joined-up-handwriting which I was taught to write in using fountain pens" as I reckon it's a reasonable equivalent.

[fala-redwing.livejournal.com]

My youngest stepson can neither write nor read cursive, and in fact still has inferior handwriting overall for his age (I have my theories on why this is). I write in partial cursive much of the time, and I don't adjust for him if I write him notes in the hope that he'll at least be able to read it in the future.

[kel-reiley.livejournal.com]

my handwriting is absolutely TERRIBLE and i don't really use cursive at all anymore... it's possible i've forgotten how to write out certain letters without having to think about it first, so not very seamlessly

also, i'm dyslexic, so sometimes things come out in the wrong order or missing altogether

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

I wish the geography question had been multiple choice, because I spent most of my childhood in a suburb of Miami before moving to NYC just in time for junior high.

[puella-nerdii.livejournal.com]

By the time I hit middle school, they'd renamed home ec to Family Studies and woodshop to Tech Ed, but you had to take both regardless of gender. My high school didn't really offer home ec/Family Studies/the class where you learn how to cook and sew, but we did have Tech Ed, and I'd always liked that class, so I took it again. (The requirements went something like this: you needed .5 credits of health and 1.5 credits of tech ed, and you could get the latter by taking Tech Ed and something else, usually a typing or engineering or computer course. I picked a semester each of typing and graphic design.)

[evil_plotbunny]

To clarify, I learned several of those skills at home but then either was required to take them in school or took them as an elective (I think metalworking and cursive were the only skills I learned first at school). I don't remember if we were require to take shop in high school or I took it as an elective, but I don't remember being treated any differently than the boys in the class. All the home ec courses were relatively evenly split (some of them may have been required).

The reason I didn't take driving through the school is that I have a September birthday.

I don't believe there was an electronics course, or I would have taken that too.

[cruentum.livejournal.com]

Learned cursive in 1st grade and was reminded to write like that until 4th. From then on no one cared what your handwriting was like as long as people could read it. Mostly people ended up switching to a mix of cursive and print or only print or whatever they ended up using to write essays or whatnot in school.

I have to admit I never thought cursive writing was an in any way necessary skill to have.

As for the others, sew and woodworking, none of the other options.

[adelheid-p.livejournal.com]

While I took "Industrial Arts" instead of "Home Economics" in junior high school, this was unusual. For the most part, I was the only female who actually followed through and took the classes (a few of my fellow female classmates actually signed up for them initially but switched). And I was the only person in my metal shop class not to permitted to actually pour the melted aluminum into the molds. All the other male participants got to do it including a boy who was smaller than I was at the time. I think my presence actually made that teacher nervous. I already knew how to sew and cook when I signed up for the classes and decided I wanted to learn something that I didn't know. I did fairly well except in drafting. I couldn't keep from smearing the carbon from the pencils on my drawings.

[adelheid-p.livejournal.com]

Also, I hate the look of my cursive writing. I thought my grandmother's cursive was beautiful and whatever standardization they did of teaching the skill later on totally turned it into an ugly form as far as I could tell. My husband has virtually forgotten all cursive except his signature.

[tod-hollykim.livejournal.com]

As to the driving one, I was actually just a little under age for that when it came time for me to take "Behind The Wheel" part of driver's ed. So while I did well in the class room part- got the certificate that said I didn't have to take the written part to get my learning permit- I never got the practical part.

As to the shop part, just didn't think of it. Wanted to learn both woodworking and metalworking tho'.

[riverrocks.livejournal.com]

We moved a lot (three kindergartens, two first grades, two high schools and several moves in between), and since there wasn't an all of the above option I left the where I went to school question blank.

Gender impacted what skills I was taught, but not in the way we usually assume. With the gender I was assigned at birth (and attended school under), I wasn't supposed to get to take shop (metal working, woodworking, drafting) but two of my friends and I petitioned to change those rules under the reasoning that we wanted access to skills we couldn't/wouldn't learn at home. The principal relented (making it clear that he was only allowing it because we were all in the "gifted" class, and if we didn't all get A's no one else would get to "bend the rules" in the future) eventually, so Ellen and I took shop and Wayne took home economics (cooking and sewing).

I didn't take drivers ed in school. I wanted to take physics instead.

[riverrocks.livejournal.com]

oh, and the lettering we learned in drafting both shaped my hand writing for the rest of my life and ruined me for cursive.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Learned (partially) to drive *outside* school, but it seems to be a uniquely American thing to offer "driver's ed" as part of schooling.

Gender was a big divider - my secondary/high school, though it did serve boys and girls, was very largely segregated, and so was the curriculum. I really didn't get the chance to try out some of the more "male-associated" activities offered until my last two years at school (an electronics elective module in A-level physics, and weight training as phys. ed. rather than ball sports).

Mind you, I don't know for sure if there were ever 'shop' classes at my school. The electronics lab wasn't opened until about three years before I left it.

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

Two notes, first, I checked "sew" because it was taught it -- not because I learned it in the four or five miserable years of textile crafts classes.

Second, I'm in Germany, cursive is *still* standard writing, although they are messing around with the shapes to make it "easier" (whatever).

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I learned cursive around 3rd grade I think. I took that knowledge to new heights over the next ten years as I became adept at forging the swooping cursive signatures of adults. I made some pocket money forging signatures on late homework notices and the like.

My handwriting was pretty good and always in cursive until I started learning Russian. First we learned to print the Cyrillic letters and then we started learning the sometimes baffling and different cursive variant. From then on, my handwriting became a jumble of print and cursive. (And often a jumble of Latin and Cyrillic characters.)

[custardpringle.livejournal.com]

I would have taken shop so hard if my school had offered it-- I really wanted to, but we didn't have it.

We did have a theater tech class that involved set building, but you needed to take freshman acting classes first and I hadn't.

[ursamajor]

I started kindergarten in the mid '80s, where we learned how to print. In second grade, we were taught D'Nealian specifically as a "transition to cursive," which we learned in third grade. I changed schools in fourth grade, and by middle school, we were being encouraged to print again as we'd get new kids in every year who hadn't learned cursive, or whose cursive was not up to the standard of writing simple essays legibly. In high school (mid '90s), all papers were required to be typed, and you had to take a typing/word processing class twice a week until you could type 40 wpm.

Sewing was definitely gendered for me, but that's because what I learned of it, I learned in Girl Scouts; I remember reading books about "home ec" and being very puzzled that these kinds of subjects would be an actual Class During The School Day - in my experience, school was supposed to be a lot of book learning, with PE the sole exception. I remember wondering if this was a difference between public school and parochial/private school, but I asked my (local-to-the-Bay-Area) public school friends if they had to take sewing or woodworking or cooking classes, and they all agreed that that "only happened in books from long ago." (We were 12.)

[jeliza]

I was taught cursive... briefly. In pre-school (private Montessori) and maybe the couple of weeks I spent in first grade before they skipped me. I remember my penmanship grades being horrible; my cursive is still nigh-illegible.

[kathrynrose.livejournal.com]

I'm 49 and I chose the older option because 1. I feel old today and 2. I went to school in Louisiana, which is typically behind the curve education-wise.

Gender played a huge role in what we could take. I bucked the system loudly to get out of taking home ec, and there were classes I was not allowed to take because I was a girl, even though I had a 4.0 GPA.

No, I'm not still bitter about that. Not a bit. Really.