you can turn music on if you like ...
"Bella Ciao" (anonymous nineteenth- and
early/mid-twentieth-century Italian protest song,
later recorded by Chumbawumba and Leslie Fish
among others) -
here, sequenced by Kate for electronic instruments
WELCOME to the Home of the Handwriting
Rebels.
Show Your Rebel Pride!
Order the "I Hate
Cursive" button directly from its designer,
Zom-B of
FightTheMasses.com --
CLICK HERE to
ask for
current prices and availability.
By "Handwriting Rebels," I mean those brave
and savvy souls who not only saw
that their schoolday cursive did not make sense, but who managed to create something else that made a
lot more sense in terms of legibility, speed, and remaining legible at
speed.
"Handwriting Rebel" writing tends to
resemble quick, streamlined print with a few joins. Often, it combines
the best elements of printed (manuscript) writing with the best
elements of conventional cursive. This way of writing (which many fast,
legible handwriters develop for themselves over the years) has much in
common with the Italic handwriting style of 500 years ago, which today
finds use in more and more school systems and remedial handwriting
programs.
To see results of Italic handwriting
programs, look here
and here.
According
to the Associated Press/CNN and CBS News, about 7% of USA third-graders learn
Italic handwriting rather than following conventional
print-then-cursive handwriting curricula.
Those students who don't learn Italic
have apparently reached their own conclusions on the value (or
otherwise) of cursive handwriting. Have you noticed how many young
people have quietly "voted with their pens" against the conventional
cursive handwriting style? On Sunday, December 3, 2006, the
WHEELING
(West Virginia) INTELLIGENCER consulted Bethany College
Dean of Arts and Sciences Larry Grimes, on the subject:
"As Grimes sat recently
with a stack of hand-written works before him, he was asked if those
students more often print their work or write in cursive. The professor
immediately said 'cursive,' but retracted that early assessment as he
looked through some of the pages.
'Print, print, print, cursive,' Grimes said after looking at the first
few of about 50 assignments in the stack. 'Three-out-of-four.'
He was a bit surprised at what he'd discovered and admitted he hadn't
given much thought to the subject. ... Grimes said he has noticed a
cursive-print hybrid from his students as well.
'They make a quasi-cursive. They blur it, and I’m sure it’s in the
interest of time,' he said. ... "
Young people don't always wait till the
college years to start saying NO to cursive.
On November 13, 2006, the children's magazine SCHOLASTIC NEWS
(distributed by teachers in the majority of USA elementary and junior
high schools) opened an online survey asking its readers in grades 1
through 8:
"Should cursive handwriting still be taught?"
This SCHOLASTIC NEWS page provides results for the
survey (now closed) in numerical and pie-chart form, with breakdowns by
student grade, student state/territory of residence, and student
gender).
Though admittedly not a scientifically
designed and administered poll (no random sampling, and so on), the SCHOLASTIC NEWS cursive survey results cover over
28,000 students throughout the USA.
Some of the more striking results of the SCHOLASTIC NEWS cursive
handwriting poll:
Overall — out of 28,163 students voting
in grades 1 through 8 —
9,948 students (35%) voted YES (for cursive)
18,215 students (65%) voted NO (against
cursive)
Grade by grade, on this poll of first-
through eighth-grade students, the highest support for cursive
handwriting instruction came from first-graders: the
students least likely to have had any experience learning or using
cursive.
90% of first-graders voted YES to cursive.
Only 10% voted NO.
The lowest support for cursive handwriting
instruction came from eighth-graders: the students most likely to have
had at least some time learning and using cursive handwriting.
Only 4% of the eighth-graders voted YES to
cursive.
96% voted NO.
According to SCHOLASTIC NEWS' results, grade by grade — as
student age and education increase — student endorsement of cursive
steadily decreases.
On the SCHOLASTIC NEWS survey, only seventh grade
broke this pattern — the SCHOLASTIC NEWS survey data reveal
seventh-graders and third-graders both supporting cursive instruction
equally (74%).
However, the next year brings a dramatic
about-face: by eighth grade, only 4% (as stated above) continue to
vote YES to cursive: 96% vote NO.
The eighth-graders of 2006 — and college
students like those whose preference for printing struck the eye of Bethany College's
Dean Grimes — will become the parents, taxpayers, and educational
decision-makers (teachers, school board members, and school
administrators) of 2016 and 2026 and 2036.
If the designers, publishers, and marketers of
handwriting instruction materials, textbooks and curricula want to keep
handwriting alive, they will have to sell their wares to people who
have already rejected cursive instruction.
Economics, if nothing else, may put
conventional cursive in the corner. As rejecters of cursive make more
and more educational decisions, an efficient hybrid — with print-like
shapes, without every letter connecting — may becomes the "teacher's
pet."
WHERE DO HANDWRITING REBELS LIVE?
Of the 54 USA locations covered in the
SCHOLASTIC
NEWS student survey (all 50 USA states, the District of
Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands), 25 had a 60% or
greater majority voting "NO" to cursive instruction:Nebraska — over 99% against cursive
instruction
North Dakota — over 99% against cursive instruction
Vermont — 97% against cursive instruction
Idaho — 95% against cursive instruction
Virgin Islands — 95% against cursive instruction
New Hampshire — 88% against cursive instruction
Guam — 83% against cursive instruction
Puerto Rico —82% against cursive instruction
South Dakota — 79% against cursive instruction
District of Columbia — 78% against cursive instruction
South Carolina — 78% against cursive instruction
Louisiana — 76% against cursive instruction
Utah — 75% against cursive instruction
Mississippi — 74% against cursive instruction
New Mexico — 73% against cursive instruction
West Virginia — 71% against cursive instruction
Delaware — 69% against cursive instruction
Maine — 69% against cursive instruction
Maryland — 69% against cursive instruction
Georgia — 66% against cursive instruction
Tennessee — 64% against cursive instruction
Massachusetts — 63% against cursive instruction
Iowa — 62% against cursive instruction
New Jersey — 61% against cursive instruction
Oklahoma — 60% against cursive instruction
In 23 other USA states (Alabama, Alaska,
Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois,
Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New
York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin),
40% to 59% of SCHOLASTIC NEWS survey respondents voted against cursive
instruction.Among survey respondents not stating
where they lived, 51% voted against cursive instruction.
In the entire USA, only 6 states surveyed
(Arkansas, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming)
show strong support (fewer than 40% "NO" votes) for cursive instruction.
CLICK HERE to find the
SCHOLASTIC NEWS statistics for your state.
Here is blog of another person with Asperger's, like me,
who learned to to improve his illegable handwriting with the use
of clasic italic handwriting book
Mature
Autism - Handwriting & Motor Skills
Do you live among Handwriting Rebels?
Or ...
did you become a Handwriting Rebel on
your own?
How, when, and why
did YOU become a Handwriting Rebel?
Fellow Handwriting Rebels,
I want to collect and share
YOUR stories of handwriting rebellion,
YOUR samples of successfully rebellious
handwriting,
and whatever else YOU'VE contributed to the
handwriting revolution!
E-mail me your favorite
stories and samplesof successful handwriting rebellion
against the print-then-cursive
establishment:I'll post the best ones here.
For now, I'll leave you with one of the few
literary descriptions of a Handwriting Rebel. This comes from SIR
GIBBIE by George MacDonald — a tale of an incurably mute feral child
encountering, among the rest of Victorian-era civilization, lessons in
penmanship (with which he cooperates at first not at all, then only
partially) ...
"Chapter VII. THE TOWN-SPARROW.
"They [the town council]
collected enough ... to board him
for a year with an old woman who kept a school ... when she ... brought
him into the school-room, her kitchen, and began to teach him to write,
Gibbie failed to see the good of it."
[Some time later, with another teacher ... ]
"Chapter XXIV. THE SLATE.
Ere long he [Gibbie] began to devise short ways of making the letters, and
soon wrote with remarkable facility in a character modified from the
printed letters. ... "
So much for
other rebels — I want to hear from YOU.
Handwriting
Rebels of today, share YOUR stories with me at
handwritingrepair@gmail.com!
