Strollerderby
Neatness Doesn’t Count, Kids, When it Comes to Handwriting
In school I always got good grades except in two places: gym, and handwriting. Ugh, handwriting. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write neatly, but who had the time? It was legible, and I always felt that legible was good enough. I had quite enough to think about without devoting my life to penmanship.
Turns out that I was just ahead of my time: a new study reveals that kids who spend a lot of time on neatness in handwriting often sacrifice what could be better grades.
About 200 English kids were studied, and it was found that kids often missed out on the task at hand by focusing on their handwriting, whereas kids who didn’t appear to care as much about neatness tended to get better grades.
Finally, vindicated.
This couldn’t come at a better time, really: my 2nd grader has been a bit worried about her handwriting, as only certain kids are going to be able to go on and learn cursive come January, and those certain kids will be the ones who pass some sort of neatness test in handwriting. Now obviously, this makes a bit of sense since kids who actually have trouble forming the letters in printing will be really lost in cursive. But overall, I think that as long as kids write relatively legibly, that’s what should be important. And my 6th grader’s writing has undergone several transformations over the past few years as he delights in expressing himself through the way he writes.
So my 3rd grade teacher, the one who gave me nothing but C’s in Handwriting, can suck it.
Photo: lovetoknow.com
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5 Comments
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amI’m ambidextrous but I write with my left hand. They had to truck in a special teacher from another school to [attempt] to teach me how to write because there weren’t any lefties in my elementary school! Now my handwriting is a lovely mix of cursive and print, and totally me.
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amPingback from Piecea.Com » Neatness Doesn't Count, Kids, When it Comes to Handwriting
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amTo see how to get fast, clear handwriting without obsessing over “perfect cursive” letter-formations, visit http://www.learn.to/handwrite and especially the “handwriting rebels” page on that site.
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amWho cares about handwriting…as long as it’s legible? My 3rd grader has OK penmanship, my own is very haphazard. Imagine grading someone on how well they draw a dinosaur…I don’t see a lot of difference.
Anonymous commented on Jan 01 70 at 12:00 amRight on! I got D’s in handwriting all through grade school. D’s.
I also got a full-ride college scholarship.
Suck it handwriting! Bring me my keyboard!
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