Fold your hands child, you write like a peasant

An article in today's Boston Globe talks about the lost and dying art of "penmanship".

http://www.boston.com/news/education/k_12/articles/2009/01/19/cursive_foiled_again/

"Cursive, foiled again" is a great title for this piece, particularly as it conjures up images of Rocky and Bullwinkle-style villains with plume-tailed calligraphy pens, ink dripping out of the bottoms....

I am caught somewhere in the middle of this argument. Habit and training mean that I do most of my work planning, list making, coup scheming on paper before committing my ideas to Outlook, or Word, or Constant Contact. I learned to write an essay by hand before undertaking that critical last step of TYPING IT OUT. I doodle while on the phone or enduring boring seminars rather than create fractals, and I'm a little bit suspicious of the StoryWeaver software my 6 year old is asking for.

Speaking of my 6 year old, it has become quite clear that "penmanship" is not her forte. She contorts and exorcises her letters and numbers, even after years of colourful, wax and ink encouragements. Her words have no spaces between them - just one, long, run on sentence with intermittent capitals, irregular sizing, and the odd backwards 3. However, it doesn't matter to me. I fret more about her burgeoning keyboarding skills and about how she will learn to navigate a smartphone, a laptop, a Kindle - especially since I can't currently afford any of these things.

Not to say mechanics aren't important. How am I supposed to create memorable scrapbooks (I AM NOT A SCRAPBOOKER - FYI) of her early works of genius if I don't have the handwritten proof that she once was that little, with little hands grasping long pencils, chubby markers, technicolour crayons. There's nothing like seeing the word "Mum" printed by the hand of a 6 year old. "Dad" is good too, I guess, except that it frequently ends up as " Bab", "Dab", or "Bad.".