Cursive writing is hanging on by a loop in classrooms across Southern Maryland.
Gone are the days of elementary school report cards showing grades for penmanship. Although cursive is still taught, it has given way way to an emphasis on keyboard skills, as students write more assignments on computers.
“I think it is still necessary,” Greenview Knolls Elementary School Principal Elizabeth Servello said of cursive. “People should have the option.”
Servello said she finds cursive faster and easier than writing block letters.
Mary Hafner, a third-grade teacher at Greenview Knolls in St. Mary’s County, teaches cursive to her class for 15 to 30 minutes a few times a week. “It’s a lot of practice,” she said.
The hour or so of cursive a week is comparable to other third-grade classes in the state, other teachers said. That is less time spent compared with a decade or two earlier, they said.
Hafner doesn’t require students to write regular assignments in cursive; she lets them decide whether they are more comfortable with printing or cursive.
While writing neat and legible letters on an interactive whiteboard in her classroom recently, Hafner told her class, “Today we’re going to work on lower-case ‘h,’ and it looks a lot like lower-case ‘l,’ except you put that hump in there.”
The 8- and 9-year-olds were instructed to write the letter 10 times each on three lines; within seconds, some began pulling out large pink erasers to fix mistakes.
Some students pick up the skill quickly, Hafner said. Others can learn to refine their cursive with practice.
“I love it,” said Jocelyn Finnecy, 9. She has been waiting to learn how to write in cursive for at a year or two, she said, adding that it’s fancier than printing.
“It’s kind of something to look forward to. It’s kind of a rite of passage,” said Leanne Meisinger, Calvert Count schools elementary English and language arts supervisor.
Most Maryland schools introduce cursive in the latter half of second grade but do not delve into penmanship until third grade.
“Teachers select how it is taught,” said Meighan Hungerford, reading specialist for Charles County public schools. “They continue to reinforce it, but it is not as much formal instruction” in later elementary grades, she said.
The new Common Core State Standards, which are being put in place in about three dozen states as a way to better equalize school lessons and compare results, do not specifically include cursive instruction. States that are adopting the common curriculum are allowed to add more standards if they choose.
Maryland signed on to the federal initiative last year and is in the process of switching over to the new curriculum.
“We did put it back in, up to grade 5,” said Kathy Lauritzen, Maryland State Department of Education coordinator of reading, English and language arts. “Research is very split about it.”
Officially, in second grade, Maryland students are expected to “produce writing that is legible, including the correct formation of cursive letters,” according to the Maryland Common Core state curriculum framework.
By third, fourth and fifth grades, students should be applying cursive handwriting skills “neatly and legibly when handwriting is preferable or technology is unavailable,” according to the curriculum for teachers. This leaves the door open to students typing assignments instead of writing in cursive.
Occasionally, Lauritzen said, she will field calls from parents concerned about losing cursive writing in schools.
“It still needs to be there, I think,” she said. “We don’t want somebody to be stymied by it because they can’t read it. You get that letter from Grandma and you want to be able to read it,” Lauritzen said.
Some schools and school systems, including the Indiana Department of Education, have dropped cursive requirements altogether. This summer, during a revision of Indiana’s curriculum, any mention of learning or using cursive was omitted, and instead students are expected to become proficient in keyboarding skills. Schools and districts in Indiana may still teach cursive.
“We do need keyboarding skills to keep us in the 21st century,” Meisinger said.
But writing, cursive included, helps children develop motor skills at younger ages, she said, and being able to write easily allows children in later elementary grades to focus on the content of their narratives.
She acknowledged that some parents and educators are in favor of continued cursive instruction, while others are against it.
“If we don’t teach it, it could just go away,” she said.
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