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

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

Argh, I missed one.

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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[fourzoas.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.

[valancy-joy.livejournal.com]

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

[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.

[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.)

[lizblackdog.livejournal.com]

It makes a big difference. I wasn't ever taught typing at school because of the unspoken assumption that we were meant to be being trained up for a life above secretarial work, for example. I rather wish I had been; although conversely I am very glad to have been taught Latin and Greek.

[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.

[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.

[bethynyc.livejournal.com]

I went to a suburban public school through to 8th grade, and in junior high (7th and 8th) we had shop and home ec (which included sewing and cooking) switch off, one each semester, and art and music switched off in the same way.

I learned calligraphy in jr high art classes and took Latin as well. This was a well-funded upper-middle class suburban school district that is still rated one of the best in Massachusetts.

I'm middle-moving-up, as Mom and Dad definitely grew up lower middle, and now I have the tastes of upper-middle but the income of working poor.

I think class definitely enters into it. My cousins who were from the more lower-middle town went to the vo-tech, while my brother and a different set of cousins went to the private Catholic high school that was the closest college prep school to the Cape.

[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

[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.

[arianhwyvar.livejournal.com]

My middle school was like this too -- it was only grades 7-8, but in 7th grade everyone did a rotation that included home ec (cooking and sewing, but I didn't mark cooking because I only recall us using a stove to make candy), woodshop, metal shop, 2D fine art, and music; the last half-term you could choose one of those to go back to.

In 8th grade we could pick from art electives which included variants or advanced versions of all of those, but also included some new stuff: the woodshop teacher also taught silk screening, so I took several terms of that.

In my high school for me, too, things seemed to break down into more gendered lines in terms of what classes people chose to take, such classes being fully elective, but I seem to recall that the new stuff like drafting and photography had a mix of genders.

And cursive was taught in early-to-mid elementary school, and penmanship completely ignored after that.

[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.