Penmanship is dead.
Well, that’s what I wrote in a column almost 20 years ago, as Americans — particularly young Americans — used text messages and emails when they wrote.
And even when they took a pen in hand, they didn’t write longhand. SAT administrators reported 20 years ago that when students were forced to move a pen across a sheet of paper, 85 percent of them printed in block letters. Not in cursive.
Common Core laws passed in 2010 put the final nail in the cursive coffin by omitting penmanship from curriculum requirements for American schools. One by one, states dropped handwriting lessons, which take tons of teacher time that might be better used elsewhere.
Penmanship was dead.
And I said, hallelujah! Sing no sad songs, keen no dirges for cursive. Let’s bury it and move on.
As you might imagine, my handwriting is about as legible as a squiggle of slug spittle on the sidewalk. If I must write with a pen, I use block letters.
But my bad handwriting is not my fault. None of my faults are my fault. I blame others.
When it comes to handwriting, it happened like this:
By third grade I wasn’t bad at block printing, but on the day we started learning to write in cursive, I had better things to do. That’s because next to me sat Kenny Ellis, a carrot-topped, freckle-faced leprechaun who was a lot more fun than cursive promised to be.
With Kenny, you didn’t have to stay between the lines. In fact, with Kenny, there wasn’t a line in sight.
But Mrs. Mandel had other notions, and she called on me to go to the blackboard and demonstrate how to write the lower-case letter “m.” Oh, not because she trusted my ability to lead the class to any pinnacle of Palmer Method penmanship. No, not that at all. It was her way to get me to stop screwing around with Kenny and pay attention.
I slipped from my seat, glancing up at the big green display above the blackboard that showed the differences between block letters and cursive letters.
“Oh, it won’t help to look up there,” Mrs. Mandel said. And she was right, for she had covered up the green board. We were supposed to know these squiggles by now.
When I got to the blackboard, my tongue as dry as dusty chalk, I remembered that a block-letter “m” had two humps on it. I seemed to recall that one of the cursive letters also had two humps. I dutifully scrawled that letter on the board.
But in the evil scheme of Mr. Palmer’s maddening Method, a lower-case “m” has three humps. I had written a lower-case “n” instead.
The class laughed.
“Well,” Mrs. Mandel said, “it seems little Tommy has his own way of writing a lower-case ‘m’, doesn’t he?”
The class laughed louder.
“Class, is that how we write a lower case ‘m’?” Mrs. Mandel asked.
“No, Mrs. Mandel,” the class sang as one.
“Do all of us know how to write a lower-case ‘m’ in cursive?” she asked.
“Yes, Mrs. Mandel,” the class crooned.
Kenny sang, too, though I would have bet against him. I didn’t begrudge him his deceitful disloyalty. I would have sung in perfect pitch had it been he instead of me agonizing at the blackboard, red-faced beneath his copper hair.
“Well, who would like to come up and show Tommy how it’s done?” Mrs. Mandel asked.
The air bristled with hands, and Victoria Bertolini was chosen to show me the light. She grinned smugly at me, her teeth as straight as the lines between Palmer’s letters. I wanted to add a hump or two to her lip.
When I slumped back to my seat, I swore I would never learn to write by Palmer’s cursed cursive method. Ever. Oh, they could torture me, but I would hold my ground.
And I did. They tried to teach me, but I foxed them. Seventy years later, my penmanship is a glorious train wreck.
Oh, I can hear you disagree that my bad handwriting is Mrs. Mandel’s fault. “It couldn’t be that you and Kenny were just a couple of clowns, could it?” I can hear you say.
The world has so little sympathy for victims.
Well, go ahead and scoff, because vengeance is mine. The Palmer Method of Penmanship is dead, and I say good riddance. Let Mr. Palmer roll loops in his grave — as long as he stays between the lines.
Because penmanship is dead.
But hold on. Penmanship was dead, but now it seems it’s rising from the grave, because today state after state is adding penmanship to its curriculum again:
After bottoming out in 2010, cursive returned to 17 states by 2016.
By 2020, that number was 20.
And today, 23 states (including Illinois) require that students learn to write in longhand.
Five more states have laws in place to join that growing number.
But why?
Well, for one thing, they say, to maintain a link to the past. A child who knows cursive doesn’t have to ask Mom to interpret Grandma’s squiggles on the birthday card. And historical documents like the Declaration of Independence, or great-granddad’s letters home from the war, can start making more sense than a sheet of chicken scratches.
More importantly, new studies link penmanship to a higher level of electrical activity in a child’s brain. Handwriting requires active engagement with incoming information, leading to better retention and understanding of concepts.
And so, while penmanship may have been dead for a while, now it’s back—like an undead zombie seeking children’s brains.
Mrs. Mandel (who is really most sincerely dead by now) would cheer its return.
But I know how I feel about it.
And I’m pretty sure that Kenny would agree with me.
TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com
