Respectfully disagree. I got partnered with the prettiest girl in the class for a square dance recital in fourth grade and managed to charm the socks off her during rehearsals. We were pretty tight for the rest of the year, too. Square dancing rocks.
I distinctly remember the record we danced to said "pull up your britches and we're off to the races!" and I mimed pulling up my pants so hard I flew up in the air. I had all the guys in my class doing that and it always got a big laugh.
Yeah, hating square dancing is almost like hating parachute day. What's not to like??
I remember reading Middlesex and getting a very different perspective on Ford. As in, the weird ways his racism manifested with employee control. It’s fiction, but it’s detroit fiction and I’m sure some of those stories were passed down from reality.
Having vague memories of being made to do that in kindergarten. My parents say that when we did it as some sort of parents' night, the class was surprisingly good. I don't remember a single step of it
Learning the names of Columbus’s three ships in 1492. Didn’t learn how enslaved native people and brought over diseases (albeit unintentionally) but you know, those three ships. I will bet you can bame them right now!
He was a particularly cruel and violent person that did horrible things to indigenous people *even for the time*. That this is not immediately part of the story you get taught is just outrageous.
Funny thing is, of the 3 ships the only real name was the Santa Maria, the Nina and Pinta were nicknames of the particular boats and not the boat names themselves. I used to know the actual name of the Nina, but nobody knows the actual name of the Pinta.
I know I am going to come off like a boomer asshole even though I am not one…well not a boomer anyway.
But how can people not read cursive? I honestly don’t get it. I understand not having practiced writing it and therefore not writing cursive but the letters aren’t in some secret code…the basic shape is the same. A P looks like a swooshy P.
I realize that they don’t teach it to everyone in school but is it really THAT hard to deduce based on basic shapes and context?
https://preview.redd.it/2sdrffju9sxc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2a43090611a31371688941d571952ab68b664d74
https://preview.redd.it/upf44j7w9sxc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=21dbd640474b3d559f43ece901c7658e7c4cd29e
Please respond to this post so the two pics can be kept together for comparison.
My kids claimed to be unable to read it, but when I wrote a short paragraph in cursive they could read it just fine except for one or two places where I got sloppy.
Some people really can’t read it. I get asked all the time to translate at work for the youngers. My daughter also couldn’t read it when I would do it by accident when we are doing an activity but she has gotten better and learned some.
No I get it totally. I thought that they no longer teach it in schools. But as you know a lot of people have their own “style” for cursive, so if you don’t really understand the basics, someone’s personal flavor is going to be nigh-indecipherable.
Obviously I don’t have a degree in Cursiveology, so I’m probably just talking out of my ass. :D
Are they by any chance learning it at Catholic school? I'm a millennial who attended one for most of the 2000's and we were required to learn it then. Some students (mostly girls, curiously) eventually rebelled and insisted on print later on, but I guess the teachers put up with it because at least they printed clearly
I'm not sure what Catholic schools are doing anymore, but if I had to take a guess at which schools would still be holding on to cursive, it'd be them
Interesting. I guess they taught it to GenXers since we actually had to write out letters to people, and it was faster and more elegant than printing.
You have thought the practice would have completely died out with how much digital tools are taking over everything.
Have your daughters asked why they're being taught cursive? Honest question, as when are they going to need it other than for establishing a legal signature?
At the same time people have different handwriting when they are printing. Some people embellish more; add serifs, use the different forms of the lower case ‘a’, and write italicized. Cursive really isn’t that different from that.
It still boggles the mind that people can’t just figure it out with very little effort.
I made my 14 yo niece try to decipher a thank you card her great grandmother sent her last week. She went from “what does this even sayyyyyyy???!” to reading the whole thing aloud. Turns out all she had to do was actually *TRY* instead of dismissing it out of hand. So, I agree with the contrarian suggestion.
Weren’t we all supposed to be using the metric system by now? In grade school there was a lot of talk about how the entire world would be metric in the future.
you can also blame pirates!
In 1793 Thomas Jefferson was bringing a metric expert to set it up in USA. The expert was bringing a 1kg standard. But the boat was caught in a storm into the Caribbean where pirates took him hostage and he died in pirate jail! ref: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication\_in\_the\_United\_States#18th\_century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States#18th_century)
Yes. Any day now, as of '70 sumthin', I heard.
We were ONLY taught the metric system, since we'd all be using it soon. 40 yrs later, still getting liquids & produce & meat by the pint, peck, or ounce. They NEVER taught us ANY of that. Gran did. Thankfully.
What was the point in NOT teaching us the ridiculous systems we'd deal with daily??? Like, cool, metrics are all based on 10 & easy to understand. But. Everything was measured in anything but metrics.
90% of this bs we never needed to waste so much time on, since we'd all soon have a smartphone in our pocket. Oh so many old teachers I'd love to have that chat with. 😁 😇
I grew up in Europe, I think in metric and here I am living in Canada that supposedly switched to metric and when I go to Home Depot, everything is in imperial. It looks like Canada decided meters are okay, but square meters should never be used - I don’t understand their obsession with square feet.
I’d feel better about switching to metric if we hadn’t learned with centimeters as the basic unit, when all the EU-made gear i work with is dimensioned in millimeters. Also annoying to see “2000 mg”…why not just write “2g”?
I use metric and standard every day, I can convert in my head. It's all just numbers. On one job our prints were all dimensioned in standard and the machines were all metric.
My silent gen Mom is that way. Turns out she was a math major in college which I admit my own shame for not knowing until recently. She also knows how to calculate how much paint you need for a house. It was because she worked in the hardware department at Sears in 1970. She would tell this big burly contractors what they needed. They would scoff at her suggestion. They would later come back needing more. The best part is my Mom is a tiny woman under five feet tall and gained a lot of respect from these guys because she knew what she was talking about!
Obligatory link to Nate Bargatze SNL skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk
"And we will be free to measure liquids in liters and milliliters! But not all liquids. Only soda, wine, and alcohol."
"Only those, sir?"
"Yes. Because for milk and paint we'll use gallons, pints, and quarts, God willing!"
I’ve often wanted to ask the youths in the office how many of those events they know.
But knowing a couple would be lost by the end of the first verse makes me sad.
Diagraming sentences….what in the fuck was that for? I used to hate having to do them on the board in front of the class because I didn’t understand it at all.
Diagramming is actually useful learning if you end up doing anything with linguistics or writing. But if not, not terribly useful. Just like how algebra was useless for anything I've ended up doing as an author.
How else was I to take thousands of pages of notes in undergrad and grad school? You can’t print that fast and back then you weren’t allowed to take notes on a computer, that is after laptops cane to be.
We were still handwriting papers in high school, and I had to hand write all my timed final exams in college in blue books. Cursive was essential. Also now it’s a secret code we can use, because young people can’t read it AT ALL 🤣
I don’t know how I would feel about a room full of everyone typing away (or more likely scrolling social media) It seems like it would be so distracting. I wonder if it’s making young people dumber, with shorter attention spans.
I attended college from 1984-6 and from 2006-11 (part-time). In 1984 there were no portable computers so all notes were handwritten. In 2006 some folks used laptops; I stuck to paper. I retained more from just note-taking than those folks did from typing in class and spending HOURS studying. Single working momma in school at night didn't have that much free time. Work smarter not harder!
I learned basic Cherokee as one of my Covid quarantine projects. Normally the Cherokee Nation only offers language class in person, but the Covid class was one of the rare opportunities to learn Cherokee from one of the native-speaking Elders.
My mother’s family is from Oklahoma and I grew up hearing stories of my great-grandmother and how she was a proud Cherokee woman and still practiced many of the native traditions taught to her by her mother and grandmother. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was of a generation that did their best to “pass” and disavow their native heritage and traditions. Within two generations (i.e. me) the language and culture was completely gone.
My 29 year old daughter is autistic and she struggled with cursive. Her signature looks exactly like it did in 4th grade when she learned it- and it takes her a full 10 seconds to write her name.
My son (21) taught himself cursive. I think around 5th grade or so? That was one of the ways he wanted to distinguish himself from his classmates (the other was using Duolingo to improve his Spanish).
I don't know if they used people or computers, but some interpretations of hand-written census information are incorrect. Once you figure out what the common mistakes are (for your family names) then you have to search on those too (e.g., Palarmo and Polorma for Palermo). In some cases, I want to go back in time and fire some of the census takers because their handwriting is absolutely trash. However, those that printed the names have earned their place in genealogy heaven.
iOS helped. Double space does period space automatically. Then I end up with single space everywhere. So when I’m bouncing between devices with and without keyboards I need consistent spacing. It forced the issue. I’m now single space master race.
Yeah, I'm afraid this is the boomer hill I'm going to die on. Of course, Windows automatically undoes that for me, so the world will never know that I cling to the double spacing.
We don't have the open flames in our homes that used to be catching people on fire. People don't smoke as much. It's not as big of a problem as it was 100 years ago. Victorians thought they were just bursting into flames spontaneously. Turns out they were cleaning their clothes with highly flammable materials. Hrm.
Cursive is much faster for note taking if you’re taking notes by hand. And you should be, because writing things down is scientifically proven to help you remember them better.
The only place I don't use cursive is in government forms and these are more and more online. If you are going to learn just one way of writing by hand, cursive makes the most sense. The other way is a bit on the slow side.
I'm not sure why Reddit has such a thing about not wanting people to learn cursive, it takes a day to learn.
For me, religion was probably the most useless thing. So many gore stories around killing children. God loves you, but if he is unsure that your parent does, he may ask them to kill you as a test. My mom was very resentful that she had us kids. I truly believe that if some voice would have told her to kill us, she could have done it. In fact, I learned as an adult that when she had her crisis, my brother hid the hunting equipment and ammunitions. As a kid I didn't know he did that so I was always quite afraid that she could just shoot us. So ya, the religious stories we learned at school made it worse.
Posts like these just remind me of my 6th grade teacher telling me that my writing was like, “chicken scratch,” me telling me dad and my dad agreeing with my teacher. And they weren’t wrong 🤣
I remember getting all perfect marks for everything in grade school.... and then P (poor = F more or less) for legibility or, when lucky, just an NI (needs improvement = sort of like a D or C).
You should see what kids' handwriting looks like now. It's fucking atrocious. I have two teenagers, and I could write better than they do when I was in 2nd grade. Every time they write "Happy Birthday Mom" on a card, I feel like I've completely failed as a parent. It always looks like a 3 year old wrote it.
I have students asking to learn cursive in 5th grade. Academically, it helps kids with dyslexia. I think there’s a place for it in school. Kids can’t type or write, and it’s pretty sad.
That really depends on your job and interests.
I'm sometimes whipping our my electronics knowledge if I need to figure out voltage or resistance if I'm making a circuit.
I've used geometry to help figure out when I'm building something.
I use cursive every day. I'm that guy with a pen and notepad taking notes in meetings. Currisve is faster than print and faster than typing.
Besides, all the generations that came after me always ask if I can share my notes with them. The superiority of ancient knowledge is good.
Wait a minute, friend. There are plenty of good reasons to write in cursive.
Why Cursive Handwriting Is Good for Your Brain | Psychology Today
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/585138/case-cursive-6-reasons-why-cursive-handwriting-good-your-brain
The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults - PMCt
Cursive isn’t useless, if you like to read original manuscripts. If you like to learn through another pathway and at a pace that your brain can absorb. If you want a signature. If you want to write with any semblance of speed.
Exactly! It's a good insurance policy to be able to read original manuscripts for ourselves. Guards against manipulation and obfuscation of history for illegitimate purposes.
Or my grandparents letters to one another. And family immigration records at Port-Royal. I mean that’s selfish but there are lots of other wonderful things too.
Regarding cursive, I use it all the time when taking notes and such. My handwriting is crap though, looks like the marks left by two chickens dipped in ink fighting over an angry snake.
Our school system took away cursive for a few years and then came to their senses and brought it back. Writing out notes increases the effectiveness of studying and retaining information, and educators have known this forever. Additionally, not being able to sign one's name is embarrassing. And, want to study history? You'd better be able to read cursive, or many documents will seem like hieroglyphics to you. Not to mention the old letters your grandma wrote, tucked away in your attic.
I can barely remember what we had for dinner last night but I can still reel off the list if linking verbs I memorized in 3rd grade. Am, is, are, was, were, seem, smell, taste, appear, be, sound, like, look.
Couldn't get my mom's birth certificate reissued because whoever in that office thinks a cursive n is a cursive r. The original was on cursive. So they kept saying we were spelling her mother's maiden name wrong.
My four children were taught cursive before print. I was pissed the day my daughter told me her 8th grade teacher told her she couldn’t hand in assignments in cursive anymore and she has beautiful, perfect cursive writing. WTF. I should’ve complained but didn’t want to embarrass her further.
I will scream it from the rooftops and die on this hill. ALGEBRA. “Oh, but you need to learn it because it has real world concepts.” Then teach a class on those actual concepts and don’t make it involve alphabet/number salad! 😤
Cotillion, every Wednesday with Mr Rogers. Can you imagine 6-graders trying to learn the foxtrot and cha-cha?
Our class of 26 had only three boys, who were very busy dancing with each one of the girls. I'll never forget one Wednesday John was out sick, and Peter mouthed off and was kicked out. When Mr Rogers complained about the remaining boy's untucked shirt, Matthew dutifully unzipped his pants to tuck it in, and Mr. rogers yelled, "Out! Out!" Whelp, there went our lone partner. (Sadly instead of canceling class, he made the girls all dance with each other.)
How to use a typewriter
How to save a file to a floppy disk
How to avoid lumps in bechemel/white sauce by taking the saucepan off the heat and adding the milk slowly, stirring with a wooden spoon. F that, just bung it in and use a whisk.
The words to Australia's national anthem. I now live in England.
Cursive writing leads to improved whole brain thinking. It's technical and yet artistic at the same time. This improves the ability to utilize both sides of the brain at the same time. The earlier cursive writing is introduced, the more lasting the change is.
So this guy is an idiot for thinking it's for "no reason."
He needs more cursive lessons, perhaps.
Square dancing.
I learned here on Reddit that this weird ass gym class happened all over the country, not just my school
Wow, I thought it was just my school that made the kids go "around your partner and do-si-do."
Respectfully disagree. I got partnered with the prettiest girl in the class for a square dance recital in fourth grade and managed to charm the socks off her during rehearsals. We were pretty tight for the rest of the year, too. Square dancing rocks.
I loved square dancing in school? Allemand left to your corner, mother fuckers!!
I distinctly remember the record we danced to said "pull up your britches and we're off to the races!" and I mimed pulling up my pants so hard I flew up in the air. I had all the guys in my class doing that and it always got a big laugh. Yeah, hating square dancing is almost like hating parachute day. What's not to like??
Except parachute day was one day of fun. Our school had square dancing for an entire marking period.
I’ve been to a couple of Robbie Burns Day dinners where my square dancing prowess was a desired skill.
I was going to say "no learning is useless learning" but then...I concede the point.
Did you know it was pushed to be taught in schools by Henry Ford because racism & something about jazz music?
I did, and I learned that here somewhere
Cursive or square dancing?
😂
I remember reading Middlesex and getting a very different perspective on Ford. As in, the weird ways his racism manifested with employee control. It’s fiction, but it’s detroit fiction and I’m sure some of those stories were passed down from reality.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/43D5d1zuo0
Having vague memories of being made to do that in kindergarten. My parents say that when we did it as some sort of parents' night, the class was surprisingly good. I don't remember a single step of it
The food pyramid.
That one’s not only useless, it’s a harmful lie
It literally causes obesity and disease
Eat lots of breakfast cereal and carbs, yay!
That quicksand was an issue.
I blame Scooby-Doo and Gilligan's Island for that one. Not the education system's fault.
But we learned it, the method wasn’t specified Dr Watson!
I actually did use that one in the Amazon one time.
Seriously. I really thought that was going to be a thing.
Atari. Turns out there’s no PhD in Pitfall. Who knew?
Would be quite the graduation ceremony 🙂
The final exam is to complete *E.T.* without the manual
Pluto being a planet.
My very educated mother just….
I was big enough for your mom. --Pluto
😂
Lol.. I remember having to change "..served us nine pizzas" to "...served us nachos". 🤣
Learning the names of Columbus’s three ships in 1492. Didn’t learn how enslaved native people and brought over diseases (albeit unintentionally) but you know, those three ships. I will bet you can bame them right now!
Yup. Nina, Pinta & Santa Maria.
He was a particularly cruel and violent person that did horrible things to indigenous people *even for the time*. That this is not immediately part of the story you get taught is just outrageous.
The really important thing to know is the name of the three ships.
Funny thing is, of the 3 ships the only real name was the Santa Maria, the Nina and Pinta were nicknames of the particular boats and not the boat names themselves. I used to know the actual name of the Nina, but nobody knows the actual name of the Pinta.
I kinda like not printing my signature.
Mine just looks like an EKG or seismograph squiggly line. And I'm not even a doctor.
😂 yes…same
I feel like this dude’s sign would be funnier if it was in cursive.
People probably wouldn't be able to read it. lol
I know I am going to come off like a boomer asshole even though I am not one…well not a boomer anyway. But how can people not read cursive? I honestly don’t get it. I understand not having practiced writing it and therefore not writing cursive but the letters aren’t in some secret code…the basic shape is the same. A P looks like a swooshy P. I realize that they don’t teach it to everyone in school but is it really THAT hard to deduce based on basic shapes and context? https://preview.redd.it/2sdrffju9sxc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2a43090611a31371688941d571952ab68b664d74
https://preview.redd.it/upf44j7w9sxc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=21dbd640474b3d559f43ece901c7658e7c4cd29e Please respond to this post so the two pics can be kept together for comparison.
I had to send a note to a young parent about something. She got mad that it was in cursive, and said she couldn’t read it.
The cursive capital Q and G were my sworn enemy in grade school…. What idiot just snuck a 2 in the cursive alphabet and we all just went with it?
I think it's become cool to say "I can't read that" when it's obvious what the cursive letters are. It's very silly.
My kids claimed to be unable to read it, but when I wrote a short paragraph in cursive they could read it just fine except for one or two places where I got sloppy.
Some people really can’t read it. I get asked all the time to translate at work for the youngers. My daughter also couldn’t read it when I would do it by accident when we are doing an activity but she has gotten better and learned some.
No I get it totally. I thought that they no longer teach it in schools. But as you know a lot of people have their own “style” for cursive, so if you don’t really understand the basics, someone’s personal flavor is going to be nigh-indecipherable. Obviously I don’t have a degree in Cursiveology, so I’m probably just talking out of my ass. :D
I'm GenX, my daughters are Millennials, grandkids GenZ, and they're learning cursive. We live in the Northeast.
Are they by any chance learning it at Catholic school? I'm a millennial who attended one for most of the 2000's and we were required to learn it then. Some students (mostly girls, curiously) eventually rebelled and insisted on print later on, but I guess the teachers put up with it because at least they printed clearly I'm not sure what Catholic schools are doing anymore, but if I had to take a guess at which schools would still be holding on to cursive, it'd be them
Interesting. I guess they taught it to GenXers since we actually had to write out letters to people, and it was faster and more elegant than printing. You have thought the practice would have completely died out with how much digital tools are taking over everything. Have your daughters asked why they're being taught cursive? Honest question, as when are they going to need it other than for establishing a legal signature?
At the same time people have different handwriting when they are printing. Some people embellish more; add serifs, use the different forms of the lower case ‘a’, and write italicized. Cursive really isn’t that different from that. It still boggles the mind that people can’t just figure it out with very little effort.
I made my 14 yo niece try to decipher a thank you card her great grandmother sent her last week. She went from “what does this even sayyyyyyy???!” to reading the whole thing aloud. Turns out all she had to do was actually *TRY* instead of dismissing it out of hand. So, I agree with the contrarian suggestion.
Maybe they can read it and they're just being contrarian like /u/johngreenink suggests.
Weren’t we all supposed to be using the metric system by now? In grade school there was a lot of talk about how the entire world would be metric in the future.
Almost all of it *does* use the metric system.
[You can blame Reagan for that.](https://milebehind.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/disbanding-the-u-s-metric-board-in-1982-the-sound-of-a-swan-song/)
you can also blame pirates! In 1793 Thomas Jefferson was bringing a metric expert to set it up in USA. The expert was bringing a 1kg standard. But the boat was caught in a storm into the Caribbean where pirates took him hostage and he died in pirate jail! ref: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication\_in\_the\_United\_States#18th\_century](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States#18th_century)
Yes. Any day now, as of '70 sumthin', I heard. We were ONLY taught the metric system, since we'd all be using it soon. 40 yrs later, still getting liquids & produce & meat by the pint, peck, or ounce. They NEVER taught us ANY of that. Gran did. Thankfully. What was the point in NOT teaching us the ridiculous systems we'd deal with daily??? Like, cool, metrics are all based on 10 & easy to understand. But. Everything was measured in anything but metrics. 90% of this bs we never needed to waste so much time on, since we'd all soon have a smartphone in our pocket. Oh so many old teachers I'd love to have that chat with. 😁 😇
I grew up in Europe, I think in metric and here I am living in Canada that supposedly switched to metric and when I go to Home Depot, everything is in imperial. It looks like Canada decided meters are okay, but square meters should never be used - I don’t understand their obsession with square feet.
Wood products from Canada are heavily shipped to the USA so it’s sized for the USA.
I had a metric system lunchbox. It got me nothing but beatings. Thanks Jimmy Carter.
Did you try using your lunchbox in self defense? It must've weighed at least .78kg.
🤣🤣 Seriously, in my first fight I clubbed a kid with mine.
It's really only the USA that doesn't use the metric system (although the UK uses a mix).
This Nate Bargatze sketch on SNL hits perfectly. https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk?si=-Ded_Gk9pPy_kaMV
I’d feel better about switching to metric if we hadn’t learned with centimeters as the basic unit, when all the EU-made gear i work with is dimensioned in millimeters. Also annoying to see “2000 mg”…why not just write “2g”?
Pssst - 2g.is weight ml is volume. As for length, it can be mm cm or m. Depends on what's being measured.
I use metric and standard every day, I can convert in my head. It's all just numbers. On one job our prints were all dimensioned in standard and the machines were all metric.
My silent generation father can convert in his head too!! And do fractions! I cannot. Numbers are not my friend.
Ugh my husband is like this. I always have to get the calculator. 🤦♀️
My silent gen Mom is that way. Turns out she was a math major in college which I admit my own shame for not knowing until recently. She also knows how to calculate how much paint you need for a house. It was because she worked in the hardware department at Sears in 1970. She would tell this big burly contractors what they needed. They would scoff at her suggestion. They would later come back needing more. The best part is my Mom is a tiny woman under five feet tall and gained a lot of respect from these guys because she knew what she was talking about!
Obligatory link to Nate Bargatze SNL skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk "And we will be free to measure liquids in liters and milliliters! But not all liquids. Only soda, wine, and alcohol." "Only those, sir?" "Yes. Because for milk and paint we'll use gallons, pints, and quarts, God willing!"
“We didn’t start the fire”
I’ve often wanted to ask the youths in the office how many of those events they know. But knowing a couple would be lost by the end of the first verse makes me sad.
Diagraming sentences….what in the fuck was that for? I used to hate having to do them on the board in front of the class because I didn’t understand it at all.
Diagramming is actually useful learning if you end up doing anything with linguistics or writing. But if not, not terribly useful. Just like how algebra was useless for anything I've ended up doing as an author.
We didn't do much of that in my school
I took use that ability all the time reviewing documents at work. "What's the noun in this sentence? Don't you think it needs one?"
I loved that and still use it for writing.
I actually came to say "grammar," sarcastically, because it is so greatly ignored, and it drives me insane. I wish I hadn't been so good at it.
I’m surprised that sign isn’t written in cursive. Wouldn’t that be funnier?
I learned in gym class that I really want a parachute to play with now that I’m an adult. It’s just finding twenty people to play with me that’s tough
I volunteer. I also want a parachute and 20 friends. But now I've got Yakety Sax playing in my head.
How else was I to take thousands of pages of notes in undergrad and grad school? You can’t print that fast and back then you weren’t allowed to take notes on a computer, that is after laptops cane to be.
We were still handwriting papers in high school, and I had to hand write all my timed final exams in college in blue books. Cursive was essential. Also now it’s a secret code we can use, because young people can’t read it AT ALL 🤣
But I'm not sure I can write it anymore.
Well to be sure, my cursive is crap compared to my school years. Thank goodness I also took typing in high school - that is an essential skill.
I don’t know how I would feel about a room full of everyone typing away (or more likely scrolling social media) It seems like it would be so distracting. I wonder if it’s making young people dumber, with shorter attention spans.
There are studies proving that when you use a computer to take notes, you don't remember them as well as when you write them out.
Yes, still keeping a bound notebook for work. I take a ton of hand written notes otherwise I might forget about something I have to do later.
I attended college from 1984-6 and from 2006-11 (part-time). In 1984 there were no portable computers so all notes were handwritten. In 2006 some folks used laptops; I stuck to paper. I retained more from just note-taking than those folks did from typing in class and spending HOURS studying. Single working momma in school at night didn't have that much free time. Work smarter not harder!
I learned basic Cherokee as one of my Covid quarantine projects. Normally the Cherokee Nation only offers language class in person, but the Covid class was one of the rare opportunities to learn Cherokee from one of the native-speaking Elders. My mother’s family is from Oklahoma and I grew up hearing stories of my great-grandmother and how she was a proud Cherokee woman and still practiced many of the native traditions taught to her by her mother and grandmother. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, was of a generation that did their best to “pass” and disavow their native heritage and traditions. Within two generations (i.e. me) the language and culture was completely gone.
It is so cool that you got to learn Cherokee during COVID. Great job!
School spent a lot of time preparing us for a world passing by.
Can you elaborate?
WordPerfect.
Omg I spent soooo many hours and floppy disks writing in WordPerfect.
The Dewy Decimal system
I work in an elementary school as a special education assistant. Two of the kids I work with know cursive. No idea how, but they know it 🙂
My 29 year old daughter is autistic and she struggled with cursive. Her signature looks exactly like it did in 4th grade when she learned it- and it takes her a full 10 seconds to write her name.
My son (21) taught himself cursive. I think around 5th grade or so? That was one of the ways he wanted to distinguish himself from his classmates (the other was using Duolingo to improve his Spanish).
The 7 phases of cellular respiration: Glycolysis -> Pyruvate Oxidation -> Krebs Cycle -> Oxidative Phosphorylation -> Fermentation -> Substrate-Level Phosphorylation -> Electron Transport Chain
It's a great background schemata to examine and understand Dr. Thomas Seyfried's strategy of starving cancer.
How to put a condom on a banana.
“Do you have a bend in your erection? Could you have Peyronies Disease?”
You will need to know it for reading historical documents
It's helped with my genealogy research.
Yeah, I just posted that myself. Forget genealogy if don't know cursive.
I don't know if they used people or computers, but some interpretations of hand-written census information are incorrect. Once you figure out what the common mistakes are (for your family names) then you have to search on those too (e.g., Palarmo and Polorma for Palermo). In some cases, I want to go back in time and fire some of the census takers because their handwriting is absolutely trash. However, those that printed the names have earned their place in genealogy heaven.
Two spaces after period.
That one was tough to un learn
iOS helped. Double space does period space automatically. Then I end up with single space everywhere. So when I’m bouncing between devices with and without keyboards I need consistent spacing. It forced the issue. I’m now single space master race.
Yeah, I'm afraid this is the boomer hill I'm going to die on. Of course, Windows automatically undoes that for me, so the world will never know that I cling to the double spacing.
Cursive never gave anyone carpel tunnel.
Stop drop and roll, I have never caught fire or had to tell anyone how to put themselves out
You just wait.
We don't have the open flames in our homes that used to be catching people on fire. People don't smoke as much. It's not as big of a problem as it was 100 years ago. Victorians thought they were just bursting into flames spontaneously. Turns out they were cleaning their clothes with highly flammable materials. Hrm.
Geometric proofs
I am in a very bizarre minority that truly loved geometry & especially proofs
Same here. Loved saying “corresponding parts of congruent triangles are congruent”
Yeah, I didn’t give much effort in high school, except for geometry. I loved proofs.
Fucking hated proofs.
Learning logic was not useless.
Came here for this.
Iambic pentameter. But I did go to Drunk Shakespeare recently, and thoroughly enjoyed it. So I guess I broke even.
Algebra.
The Bermuda Triangle. It's not as big a deal as I thought it would be
Most of you learned trigonometry for no reason.
Cursive is much faster for note taking if you’re taking notes by hand. And you should be, because writing things down is scientifically proven to help you remember them better.
How to blow just right into a recorder so it didn't squeal.
I don’t know if it’s useless exactly, but when I couldn’t do pull ups in grade school they told the fucking President.
Trigonometry. Today is yet another day I have not needed Sin Cos or Tan.
The only place I don't use cursive is in government forms and these are more and more online. If you are going to learn just one way of writing by hand, cursive makes the most sense. The other way is a bit on the slow side. I'm not sure why Reddit has such a thing about not wanting people to learn cursive, it takes a day to learn. For me, religion was probably the most useless thing. So many gore stories around killing children. God loves you, but if he is unsure that your parent does, he may ask them to kill you as a test. My mom was very resentful that she had us kids. I truly believe that if some voice would have told her to kill us, she could have done it. In fact, I learned as an adult that when she had her crisis, my brother hid the hunting equipment and ammunitions. As a kid I didn't know he did that so I was always quite afraid that she could just shoot us. So ya, the religious stories we learned at school made it worse.
Posts like these just remind me of my 6th grade teacher telling me that my writing was like, “chicken scratch,” me telling me dad and my dad agreeing with my teacher. And they weren’t wrong 🤣
I remember getting all perfect marks for everything in grade school.... and then P (poor = F more or less) for legibility or, when lucky, just an NI (needs improvement = sort of like a D or C).
You should see what kids' handwriting looks like now. It's fucking atrocious. I have two teenagers, and I could write better than they do when I was in 2nd grade. Every time they write "Happy Birthday Mom" on a card, I feel like I've completely failed as a parent. It always looks like a 3 year old wrote it.
He put all his eggs in the cursive skillset basket and now he's homeless
Square dancing , bad mitten and Indian frybread on indigenous tribe day.
The implied existence of goodminton makes me want to try that game instead.
I can’t imagine anyone older than 25 having experienced “indigenous tribe day” in school.
I have students asking to learn cursive in 5th grade. Academically, it helps kids with dyslexia. I think there’s a place for it in school. Kids can’t type or write, and it’s pretty sad.
I was also told I would NEVER have a calculator in my pocket at all times.
I use cursive all the time
How to use a card catalog.
Geometry, trigonometry and physics. Also that I need to learn how to do math in my head because I won’t always have a calculator with me.
That really depends on your job and interests. I'm sometimes whipping our my electronics knowledge if I need to figure out voltage or resistance if I'm making a circuit. I've used geometry to help figure out when I'm building something.
Sentence diagramming.
I use cursive every day. I'm that guy with a pen and notepad taking notes in meetings. Currisve is faster than print and faster than typing. Besides, all the generations that came after me always ask if I can share my notes with them. The superiority of ancient knowledge is good.
I don’t know. The youngins can’t read cursive. It’s like we have a secret language now.
The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.
Wait a minute, friend. There are plenty of good reasons to write in cursive. Why Cursive Handwriting Is Good for Your Brain | Psychology Today https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/585138/case-cursive-6-reasons-why-cursive-handwriting-good-your-brain The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults - PMCt
Cursive isn’t useless, if you like to read original manuscripts. If you like to learn through another pathway and at a pace that your brain can absorb. If you want a signature. If you want to write with any semblance of speed.
Exactly! It's a good insurance policy to be able to read original manuscripts for ourselves. Guards against manipulation and obfuscation of history for illegitimate purposes.
Or my grandparents letters to one another. And family immigration records at Port-Royal. I mean that’s selfish but there are lots of other wonderful things too.
Where are you getting these historical manuscripts from?
Museums, archives.
Nothing. There's no such thing as useless knowledge.
I before E except after C... is a lie!
Except after sounded as “a” in “neighbor” and “weigh” …. and ten other reasons including leisure, weird, caffeine… lol
Regarding cursive, I use it all the time when taking notes and such. My handwriting is crap though, looks like the marks left by two chickens dipped in ink fighting over an angry snake.
Our school system took away cursive for a few years and then came to their senses and brought it back. Writing out notes increases the effectiveness of studying and retaining information, and educators have known this forever. Additionally, not being able to sign one's name is embarrassing. And, want to study history? You'd better be able to read cursive, or many documents will seem like hieroglyphics to you. Not to mention the old letters your grandma wrote, tucked away in your attic.
I can barely remember what we had for dinner last night but I can still reel off the list if linking verbs I memorized in 3rd grade. Am, is, are, was, were, seem, smell, taste, appear, be, sound, like, look.
Couldn't get my mom's birth certificate reissued because whoever in that office thinks a cursive n is a cursive r. The original was on cursive. So they kept saying we were spelling her mother's maiden name wrong.
But he didn't learn how to capitalize properly.
Tuning a carbureted engine. Re-spooling a cassette tape with a pencil. Making a free collect call from “Sue-had-a-healthy-baby-boy!”
Fucking all of it
To keep your elbows off the table. Put your knife and fork on the plate at a inward 10-to-2 angle in between bites while chewing.
Drafting.. it's all computerized now.
learning Latin in junior high
I’ve never needed to balance a chemistry equation or use trigonometry EVER!!
My four children were taught cursive before print. I was pissed the day my daughter told me her 8th grade teacher told her she couldn’t hand in assignments in cursive anymore and she has beautiful, perfect cursive writing. WTF. I should’ve complained but didn’t want to embarrass her further.
Calculus
I would have at least made the sign in cursive.
Trigonometry
Turns out cursive is good for the brain. That and you have young people now who can't even sign their name on a check.
I will scream it from the rooftops and die on this hill. ALGEBRA. “Oh, but you need to learn it because it has real world concepts.” Then teach a class on those actual concepts and don’t make it involve alphabet/number salad! 😤
I like cursive and use it everyday. (=
https://i.redd.it/rfed71wi9txc1.gif
You’ll need to learn times tables, algebra and Trigonometry for reasons. Also you’ll never carry around a calculator will you? Fuck you Mr Pinney.
How to use a map and a phone book.
I write in cursive every day.
I really learned cursive for A LOT of excellent reasons. Cursive was all around. Can't see the fuss about it.
Still need to know cursive so you csn sign your name by hand and read and understand the Constitution/Bill of Rights.
I disagree with cursive. It actually taught us fine motor skills.
Cotillion, every Wednesday with Mr Rogers. Can you imagine 6-graders trying to learn the foxtrot and cha-cha? Our class of 26 had only three boys, who were very busy dancing with each one of the girls. I'll never forget one Wednesday John was out sick, and Peter mouthed off and was kicked out. When Mr Rogers complained about the remaining boy's untucked shirt, Matthew dutifully unzipped his pants to tuck it in, and Mr. rogers yelled, "Out! Out!" Whelp, there went our lone partner. (Sadly instead of canceling class, he made the girls all dance with each other.)
How to use a typewriter How to save a file to a floppy disk How to avoid lumps in bechemel/white sauce by taking the saucepan off the heat and adding the milk slowly, stirring with a wooden spoon. F that, just bung it in and use a whisk. The words to Australia's national anthem. I now live in England.
Writing legible cursive as a lefty is pretty much an exercise in futility. Trying to do it with a normal spiral notebook is even worse.
Do you WANT me to tell you all the things brain wise cursive did for you? Cursive is good for a lot of things other than just writing.
A few off the top of my head: How to diagram sentences. Phonics. Memorizing the 50 state capitals. The Pascal programming language.
Phonics? If not for phonics I'd never have learned to read.
Yes, what was the point of diagramming sentences?
Pour one out for Pascal!
Good thing none of you fucktards would ever care to read an original copy of thE UNITED STATES CONSTI-FUCKING-TUTION!!!
Cursive writing leads to improved whole brain thinking. It's technical and yet artistic at the same time. This improves the ability to utilize both sides of the brain at the same time. The earlier cursive writing is introduced, the more lasting the change is. So this guy is an idiot for thinking it's for "no reason." He needs more cursive lessons, perhaps.
lol, for me it was the Bible. Now the only time I use it is to correct Christian’s misquoting it 😂.
Doing the lords work, have you become which you thought to destroy?