One night, my mom was cooking chicken Alfredo for dinner. She asked me to sign my name on a permission slip for school.
Instead of signing my name in cursive, I printed it. She gave me with a suspicious look and said, “Don’t they teach you cursive handwriting in school? They need to start teaching you about writing in cursive.”
That wasn’t the first time my mom has complained about me not knowing cursive. She says I’m about to be grown, and she thinks my handwriting is unprofessional.
I wasn’t about to keep listening to her complain. So I started to wonder, why did they take cursive out of schools? And how is that affecting me?
The disappearance of cursive
Alicia Trescott, a site coordinator at Richmond Heights Secondary School, told me that a lot of schools in Ohio stopped teaching cursive in elementary school because of something called Common Core, starting in about 2010.
"It started as federal legislation, and states could adopt it if they wanted to," Ms. Trescott said. "It describes what students should know at the end of each grade level."
She said cursive writing wasn't included in those grade-by-grade standards.
Eventually, parents started complaining about how students couldn’t sign their name and couldn’t read other people’s cursive handwriting. So in 2019, the state of Ohio passed a law that added cursive back into the curriculum.
Teresa Fedor, a Democrat from Toledo, spoke in support of the law in 2018. She was a state representative at the time, and now she’s a state senator.
"It's just so sad that we are not teaching our children how to write cursive handwriting," Fedor said, addressing her fellow state representatives. "We've even heard grandparents who write letters to their grandchildren, and they didn't realize [their grandchildren] couldn't read the cursive writing."
What she said made me think: Some kids really don't understand what people are writing when they write in cursive. And that is sad.
My auntie loves writing in cursive on my birthday cards. I see the heart in what she writes and I know it’s a good message, but I don't know what she wrote. I just pretend I do.
A first try
So, one day I decided to give writing cursive a shot. My social studies teacher, Mr. Delgado, stayed after class and gave me a sheet showing the alphabet in cursive.
I got out my notebook and tried to write out some terms from the blackboard, like "supply and demand."
Mr. Delgado called me a natural. But I wasn’t happy with how my writing looked. You could see where I kept stopping and starting.
Having smoother writing is actually one of the reported benefits of learning cursive. One study found that people who know cursive also spell better. And they have an easier time remembering words and putting together sentences than people who only print.
That all makes sense to me. When you learn cursive, you have to spend extra time writing with a pen and paper. There’s no autocorrect to do the thinking for you.
Lost and found
I found out that since the state law restoring cursive instruction passed in 2019, my school has started teaching cursive again, starting in third grade.
I’m glad they started teaching it again. But learning about all the benefits, I’m mad that I didn’t get to learn cursive myself.
Here’s my advice. If your kid is not learning cursive in their elementary school, you can always start teaching it at home or advise the teachers to teach it.
When kids learn cursive, they can understand everyone else’s way of writing — and that’s important because we all need to understand each other.
Ameer Eatmon Jr. is an 11th grader at Richmond Heights Secondary School. He produced this story with Ideastream Public Media's Justin Glanville.
