I am a dinosaur

From an article yesterday's Washington Post:

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.

Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.

The part I find most staggering is not being able to read cursive writing. There's no arguing that typing, pardon me, "keyboarding," is fairly important, but there's a lot to be said for the physical production of words and thoughts. There are times at work when I get stuck on something that needs to be written and taking the literal, not figurative, approach often helps me break the mental impasse. One wonders what kind of Crayola printing I can expect to see from junior staff in another 10 years.

When I think back to the fifth year of primary school, when we were taught cursive writing, to use fountain pens, and to focusing on avoiding mistakes, I realize what an old fart I really am. Now I suppose it's more important that students have good content than that they can actually put something on paper quickly and legibly, if only in preparation for (whisper it) computer failure...