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

[kittymel.livejournal.com]

Note: If I had NOT been on the college track, I would have learned typing, sewing and cooking.

[beccaelizabeth]

I ticked I was taught to type, but now I think on it I reckon that was in the lessons they made up for me to do in detention on account of me being there so often. I don't think everyone in my year got actual typing lessons.

[paragraphs.livejournal.com]

Girls were encouraged to take home ec class, but lots of guys did too. I refused! I took woodworking. I was not good at it, but it was fun. Too bad they've killed alot of these classes...

It would've been interesting to see what countries different repliers are from.

[zeldajean.livejournal.com]

Sewing and cooking were addressed in depth only with girls; they were addrrssed with boys but not to the point of making clothes as it was with girls. Both boys and girls took woodworking, but girls Were Not Permitted to take metalworking. This angered me, because I'd already learned to sew and cook at home and I wanted to learn to work with metal.

My school had sort of "drivers theory" - all in classroom instruction, no behind the wheel. I did take this, but answered no to drive because, well, I still couldn't drive after that.

There might have been an electronics class in high school but I did not have room in my schedule for any of the industrial arts classes. I was math/science/language heavy.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

FWIW:
|
I went to school in a college town with "good schools." In middle school everyone was required to take one semester of homemaking, one semester of industrial arts, and one year of music. Driver's Ed was an elective in high school that fulfilled an applied skills distribution requirement, so lots of people took it (plus, hello, suburbs!).

I took typing during the one semester I was in a different school system in a different state (another college town); I think it was required there. I learned on a manual! Which means I type way too hard to this day.

I don't write in cursive and haven't since 8th grade, the last time it was required for an assignment. Similarly, despite the coursework, I don't drive.

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

Thinking some more about this, it's weird how classes, when I went to school, mirrored not gender, but class, as selected for and created by the three-tiered German school system.

Cooking, woodworking, metalworking and electronics you got in the lowest tier, where you expected to become a blue-collar worker.

Typing you learned in the middle one, where you expected to become an office worker. I took a typing class when I was 14 on my own time and my mother's money, and it was regarded as a sign of modest ambition if you went to the highest-tier school.

Textile crafts and cursive, everyone had to learn in school, and driving, no one. Many of the boys learned to drive during military service, while the girls and the boys who didn't want that, or did not get the opportunity, had to shell out a sizable fortune (five times the rent for my first bedsit after moving away from home!) for driving lessons.

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

I was taught how to write cursive in school, but it didn't stick. Neither did sewing. On the other hand, I've always been glad my mother made me take a typing class.

ETA: In my middle school, everyone (boys and girls) was required to take one semester of wood shop and one semester of home economics (cooking and sewing). The fact that the requirement wasn't gendered was probably the only way in which my school could be described as progressive.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

We were all required to take 7th grade shop, hence woodworking and metalworking. My mother insisted on 8th and 9th grade home ec. I am 6' tall and need to be able to make my own pants.

I took electrical shop in 12th grade, only girl in the class, and I took grief for it from the teacher. (The boys were kinda weirded out by Miss College Prep taking shop, but cool with me)

I did not learn to type, as that was strictly for the business track.

[mieronna.livejournal.com]

I'm not from the US, but since you said somewhere up-thread people from other countries can also chime in, I did vote.

I didn't learn any of the skills apart from cursive, because I didn't go to schools that taught them. We have a very odd hierarchical school system here in Germany - which I hate with a passion, btw - and I went to the schools where you can get the kind of diploma (kind of like the British A-levels) that allows you to enter University. We didn't have any practical classes at all, apart from arts&craft but I don't suppose one wood figurine in 8 years counts as woodworking ;)
I think you can take classes like sewing, metalworking etc. in the other types of schools (that are geared more towards people who are going to learn a trade or similar) but I wouldn't know if the options pupils have there are influenced by gender.
Driving is not taught within the school system at all as far as I know.

We all learned cursive in primary school in grades 1-2 and it was obligatory to write with a fountain pen until at least grade 5. In fact most people I know kept using fountain pens all throughout their school time and some of our teachers insisted we use them for our A-level exams, because apparently it's more readable than ballpoint pen writing. Fountain pens do force you to connect letters more.

I think I wrote some mix of cursive and print by the time I was 12 or so and I still do. Many people my age (23) do still use more or less the cursive we were taught in school, though it's shifting more towards a kind of mix.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

it was obligatory to write with a fountain pen until at least grade 5.

Same here! In fact, I still use fountain pens a lot more than the average, though much less now than before.

[brightlotusmoon.livejournal.com]

To explain #3:

From Pre-K to Grade Five, I was in a Brooklyn, NY Public School. From Grades Six to Twelve, I was in a tiny school that combined junior high and high school, in Sag Harbor, which was a village in the town of Southampton, which was a section of the Hamptons, which I'm calling rural because I don't know if I can call it suburban. New York City was two hours away.

There was so rarely any gender divide in any of my classes that I assumed it was normal for boys and girls to take the same classes (home ec, shop) and I remember getting extremely confused and annoyed when people from other schools would tell me that "boys couldn't take home ec and girls couldn't take shop" in their schools.

[marchek.livejournal.com]

I taught myself to touch type when I was in 4th grade because I was shy. I was part of a group of advanced writing students from 4th, 5th, and 6th grades that was in charge of writing the school newspaper. I really, really didn’t want to have to interview anyone and so I took it upon myself to become the only student that could type and was put in charge of typing up and formatting the newspaper once everyone handed in their handwritten articles.

I started taking sewing lessons outside of school when I was in 4th grade but a rotation of sewing/cooking/metalshop/woodshop was required of all students in 8th grade. I actually took Industrial Arts (which is what they called metalshop and woodshop) in 7th grade as an elective before I realized that it was required the follow year just because I grew up working with tools with my Dad and really liked it.

There wasn’t any specific electronics class offered but in highschool (private school) I took the official technical theatre class in which I did learn about electronics as it related to theater (lights, sound, etc.). Taking the class was just a way to school credit for doing something I would have been doing anyway.

[ruisseau.livejournal.com]

The gender impact was not that the school dictated that girls took Home Ec and boys Shop, but that the prevailing attitude one picked up from parents, teachers, other students was that girls took Home Ec and boys took Shop.

[moizissimo.livejournal.com]

I went to a fine arts school that was very very tiny. We didn't have a shop or a teaching kitchen. By the time I left there and went to another school (grade 10), I already knew how to type and cook and sew, and worked in construction in my father's company. It was recommended that I didn't take woodworking or metalworking, though, since I would be the only girl in the class.

Driving as part of the high school curriculum is just.. odd to me. Even my parents learned how to drive outside of school.

[51stcenturyfox.livejournal.com]

In middle school, we all had to take chorus, woodworking, home ec and art as our electives one year.

Everyone had to take simple computer programming and typing.

(Home Ec was kind of pathetic. I remember sewing an initial-shaped pillow and making things like grilled cheese sandwiches, not anything actually hard.)

[manycolored.livejournal.com]

Cursive was taught to everybody in 3rd grade.

Due to budget cuts, there were very few electives. Courses in the arts were very sparse and I was never allowed to take them because they were reserved for the kids of families who could afford to send them to art/music classes/camps. It was assumed that if you were going to college, you wouldn't be interested in anything but honors academic courses APs. The "dumb" kids were funneled into an afternoon technical school program that was actually quite good, although it obviously suffered because it was assumed to be the safety valve for dumb kids rather than an alternative for anybody who wanted to be a mechanic, electrician, plumber, etc.

Everybody took Home and Careers (mending, cooking, cleaning, bill paying), Occupational Education (looking for job offers, interviewing, making a resume, how to dress, etc.), Health (nutrition, mental health, eating disorders, substance abuse, pregnancy prevention, STDs), Wood Shop, Metal Shop, Lifetime Fitness, Music Appreciation (bullshit), and Art Appreciation (also bullshit.) We were all encouraged to take Basic Swimming, Basic First Aid, Typing, Studio Art, and Chorus.

[graene.livejournal.com]

Sewing and cooking were summer school for me, but I knew boys who chose home ec as an elective when I was off wood working and...should have put metalworking after all for that sculpture class. I also took calligraphy in summer school as well as writing workshops. Anyway, gender was not a factor in what was offered or who chose what from a school perspective, parental influence varied widely.

[tree00faery.livejournal.com]

I didn't learn cursive, but the schools did attempt to teach it - I was just homeschooled for third grade, which happened to be the year they started. I remember asking my parents to teach me, and they were like "uuhh...neither of us remembers it." Then when I went back to public school (after we moved) my teacher let me read instead of practicing cursive. I still don't know all the capital letters.

I'm sure there are some people in my age group who know cursive, but I'm guessing it's mostly private school kids. I remember when I took the SAT, there's a paragraph you have to copy out in cursive and sign - something about promising not to cheat, I think - and at the end everyone was like "Yeah, writing in cursive was the hardest part of that."

I sort of wish I knew script better, but I'm left-handed and I can't seem to get it to look nice, so I've mostly given up.

[sunday-best.livejournal.com]

I learned cursive in second and third grade even though I prefer to write in an awkward combination of print and cursive though. I always wanted to learn calligraphy which would help with handwritten notes and thank you notes.

[zeenell]

I'm 23. I was taught how to write in cursive at the beginning of second grade. I was permitted to use it half-way through 3rd grade, and have generally used it since. (My printing ends up MORE illegible then my cursive since I have spacing issues).

Basically, the school got us to use cursive by telling us that only when you could write it in legibly, would you be permitted to use it. I just happened to be one of 5 kids who's horrid cursive was still more readable then the horrid printing. :-p

OTOH, I was placed in honors in 5th grade, which was when the regular ed kids were offered the option to go back to printing. Us kids in honors could only use cursive or type something up for papers. *ponders* reg. ed kids had no option for turning in typed papers 7th grade.

Most of that was based on the fact that ALL of us were taught to touch-type starting in 2nd grade, but most of us only had access to computers via the school or the public library. Most families couldn't afford computers and many of the kids I knew didn't get comps until 13-ish.

As to gender - 7th/8th grade, my school did something called cycles - you spent a marking period in a different "shop" class each period. I ended up in home ec twice (more boys then girls 7th grade, equal 8th grade), spanish (why it was under shop class at the middle school, no one knows), wood shop (best grade even though I missed the most days of school), art class twice...

The high school had more boys in culinary arts then girls, more girls in auto shop and equal amounts in woodshop - at least for the introductory year.

The ONLY kids who took family life were the ones looking for an easy A or they set up their schedule late and the other classes were closed out.

There was no gender requirement for the classes - what ended up happening is that you had to have one year of "shop" classes as part of the NJ requirement for graduation and most of the classes ran on different periods. If you were taking an Honors English class for your grade level that ONLY met 3rd period and intro to woodshop was only 3rd? You took auto or culinary arts instead.

(...I took JROTC instead - LET 1 had 3 different class periods, so it notched into my schedule. I then took it allll 4 years).

[heyiya.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering this and discussed it in a subcomment, thought I might bring it upthread since apparently this post is my procrastination for the day:

When you say "cursive" (OP and other Americans), do you just mean "joined-up writing" or are you referring to a specific style or technique? I ask because "handwriting" by definition, to me as a 28 year old Brit, is more or less by definition joined up, and the idea that you would write in any other way, or take the trouble to use a special word for joined up as opposed to printed letters written by hand, is very odd. I keep thinking I must be missing something in these conversations.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Handwriting to me as an American is letters you write, instead of letters you type -- they can be joined up or not. Cursive would be any sort of joined up writing or script (same meaning as cursive.

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

In middle school, which was the last time this was an issue in my life, we had to choose between taking choir, instrumental music, or a home ec/shop class split. Since I wanted to sing, I never even had an option to take the crafty/homemaking class.

[quarkwiz.livejournal.com]

I wanted to check off both City and Suburban area because till I was 10, we lived in Paris and then NYC. Then we moved to the CT suburbs. The cursive came from Paris (when I was 5, no less), and all the shop classes came from the suburbs.

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

Clarifications:

I technically learned a little bit of sewing --a few stitches and how to do buttons. However, my semester for home ec (mandatory for all students in middle school) was the semester where the teacher retired, so I kinda didn't learn as much sewing or cooking as I should have.

I learned woodworking a little in tech ed in middle school (again mandatory) and more refined/better in tech ed in high school (an elective, though all students had to take a tech credit, which included things like comp sci). I labeled gender as having an effect as I wanted to take rocketry/advanced engineering (high school, elective), was told I couldn't sign up because the class was full, and later learned that several boys had gotten in.

They emphasized repeatedly that everyone in middle school etc would expect you to write in cursive when they taught us in fourth/fifth grade. I think I was writing exclusively in print in seventh grade (and I started using regular all-caps in tenth, when I took an architecture class where we had something like six different teachers and several months of just subs.)

Yep.

~Sor

[ithiliana.livejournal.com]

I learned to write cursive, but damn I was glad to learn how to type (high school, taught by coach, fall back skill for girlz, or to help us get better boyfriends in college by typing their papers, hah).

Because I hate writing by hand.

And I don't see any reason why cursive has to be taught as opposed to printing.

But it's weird when my students don't have keyboarding skills.

[pocketmouse]

We had to learn cursive in, oh, second grade or so at... one of the schools I went to. I transferred partway through 2nd grade, so I'm not sure which school I'm thinking of. But it was a thing we learned one year or semester, but using it after that was entirely optional. Though I had a social studies teacher in ...7th? grade (at a different school, I'm pretty sure, I moved again after 5th grade) that let us turn in assignments in ink and cursive instead of typewritten.

I took keyboarding freshman year of high school because it was an easy A. It wasn't required at all.

None of those other things listed were ever even offered at any of my schools, as far as I know. We had a computer club, for a while, that would make computers from parts, but that was it.

I went to a series of Catholic schools, so it's not like we ever had funding for any sort of extracurriculars.