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

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

I learned to write in cursive (third grade IIRC), but it was an uphill battle; I am left-handed and a little dyslexic, and my handwriting was never pretty. Even in third grade I thought it might make more sense to learn to type (and even pointed out the cursive font wheel on our household electronic typewriter), to no avail. To this day I cannot write pretty. I can "draw" letters, in the style of an artist or font specialist, halfway decently; but my handwriting is a godawful scrawl that I rarely use, having substituted fast block print for the sake of readability.

It's worth noting that I grew up around enough foreigners who had learned slightly different styles of cursive (Germans notably) and that this also made cursive a difficult process for me. (Hell, it made print tricky; my first grade papers have me making quotation marks on the top AND bottom of the print lines because I'd confused French-style punctuation (which uses a sort of angle bracket instead of a quotation mark) with English, owing to bilingual preschool.

I was actively discouraged from taking "practical" elective classes because I was on a college track. I wanted to take auto shop so I'd know rudimentary car repair and such, and was told it was inappropriate. I took basic aeronautics instead - another shop-like class but with planes instead of cars - for about a week, but the teacher was a sexist bastard and told me there was no place for women in the industry other than as flight attendants, so I switched to something else. Ironically, I dropped Home Ec for similar reasons, and because it was very impractical; I wanted to learn to sew things I'd wear or use, not quilts and dollies, and so on. I took mostly art-style electives - drawing, general fine art, theater and a few years of choir.

I learned a decent amount of electronics and basic hardware stuff (working with power tools, construction etc) from theater tech work. I also had a home basic electronics kit which taught you to hook up basic switches and transistors and things, but I never learned to solder properly (and want to). I re-wired half the phone outlets in my house in high school and also put new plugs on household appliances, but in the UK that's something everyone did (and why more of them don't electrocute themselves doing it I don't know).

I went to three different high schools, so I got both suburban and urban education, at pretty well-funded to very expensive levels. I didn't learn to drive in school because I was in the UK at the time US kids got Driver's Ed.

I could have taken Home Ec or Typing as electives somewhere in junior or high school, but I had already learned those skills outside of school (learned to type in fifth grade from a friend's mom giving lessons after school; cooking from Mom and Girl Scouts and our maid; sewing likewise; woodworking from Dad). At least one of my high schools had a required "Computers" elective, which I dodged mostly by switching schools; I had nothing against the theory, but the class was an impractical mishmash of "what is a transistor" instead of useful things like programming. I did take electives in computer art and learned some (oh, dear, ENTER magazine) BASIC programming on my own.