Is Cursive Writing a Dying Art?

It’s happening again: a topic catches my eye and suddenly I see it everywhere.  It’s as though it bursts on the scene, has its day in the spotlight and then disappears. This time around, it’s cursive writing or the lack thereof.  First, I saw this July B.C. comic:

Then, a friend mentioned how happy she was that her grandchild was learning cursive.  I’d heard that many schools had stopped teaching it, instead focusing on computer and keyboarding skills.  Another friend chimed in that her 21 year old daughter had learned it in grammar school too but had never been required to turn in a paper in cursive.  In fact, in both high school and college, assignments were turned in electronically. This mom noted that the messages written in her daughter’s high school yearbook had all been printed,  another sign that cursive is not the choice du jour.

That conversation brought to mind an earlier article I’d read about the death of handwriting. It told the story of a parent complaining that her son, a high school junior, could not read the homework assignments written on the blackboard by the teacher because, you guessed it, they were written in cursive. Five Reasons Kids Should Still Learn Cursive Writing suggests some good reasons why we shouldn’t let handwriting die, but here’s the one I like most:

“It’s good for our minds! Research suggests that printing letters and writing in cursive activate different parts of the brain. Learning cursive is good for children’s fine motor skills, and writing in longhand generally helps students retain more information and generate more ideas. Studies have also shown that kids who learn cursive rather than simply manuscript writing score better on reading and spelling tests, perhaps because the linked-up cursive forces writers to think of words as wholes instead of parts.”

This rationale prompted me to recall rewriting and organizing my class notes in college to prepare for exams, and now I know it was the act of writing that helped to cement the facts in my brain. 

Don’t Forget How to Write! was the next article I read, and I saw myself in the opening paragraph: “Trying to write a note by hand after years of typing on a physical keyboard or Smartphone screen can be discouraging. Often, the spastic result only vaguely resembles penmanship.” That’s me to a Tee.

I still send handwritten notes from time to time, despite the fact that my handwriting has deteriorated over the years. It was never very good, and I attribute that to my being moved into the third grade midyear of the second grade and missing the introduction to cursive writing. My mother worked with me nightly to practice my writing so I could catch up.  Though we both gave it our best shot, I never received more than lackluster grades in penmanship.

I wanted to be encouraged by the author’s premise that, “…getting your skills back up to a level that would make your grammar-school teachers proud isn’t difficult—it just takes the right tools and, of course, practice.”   As bad as my handwriting is, though, I find it hard to believe that practicing at this late date will change it. 

The most recent article I encountered was The Gift of a Heartfelt Letter, wherein the author poses the question, “Do you remember how you felt the last time you received a beautifully written letter from a loved one, a dear friend, or even a person with whom you had a falling out?” Well yes, I do remember. It brought a smile to my face, and that vivid memory may be just the nudge I need to start practicing.

A Winner!

I cannot recall ever winning anything, much less something of any value.  Imagine my surprise when I answered a trivia question on my company’s website and won a set of DVDs.  I regularly scan our internal Bank of America website to stay abreast of company and economic news, and I read a news item about our sponsoring the Ken Burns series, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History premiering on PBS September 14. The series “chronicles the lives of Theodore, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, three members of the most prominent and influential family in American politics. It is the first time in a major documentary television series that their individual stories have been interwoven into a single narrative.”

 

Off to the side of the news item was a trivia question about the Roosevelts, and employees were invited to submit answers.  Four winners are randomly selected daily from those who answer the question correctly. I knew I had the right answer, but figured it was a long shot that I’d be one of the four. Surprise! The very next day I got an email notifying me I was a winner.

 

And, you ask, “What bit of trivia did you pull out of your brain to win?” The answer is, the Rough Riders. As in the game of Jeopardy, can you guess the question? It was, “What volunteer militia group did Teddy Roosevelt lead during the Spanish American War?”

 

I am pretty sure I have to give my husband credit for that answer popping into my head. He is a big history buff, and since he retired, the Military channel and the History channel are always showing at our house. If he’s not watching something about WWII, he’s watching stories about the old West. In keeping with that interest, he occasionally drags me…I mean takes me…to the Booth Western Art Museum in Cartersville, Georgia.  I refer to it as the Cowboy Museum, and I may have picked up the Rough Rider tidbit on one of our recent visits when I stumbled across someone dressed up as Teddy Roosevelt, giving a lecture.

 

Historical facts aren’t always easy to find in my brain’s filing system, and I must admit that several of my file drawers regularly get stuck.  Fortunately, I can always turn to my husband, who has ready access to his well organized history file cabinet with drawers dedicated to WWII, WWI, the Viet Nam War, the Wild West, you name it. He relies on me, though, to pull open the drawer for dinner plans, play tickets, and travel plans, as he seems to have misplaced the key to that one.  I’d say we have a winning combination.

Mais Oui! Learning French...Again

Oui, I did take a year of French in high school, but haven’t retained a bit of it.  That may be a slight exaggeration; I’m still able to translate the occasional word or two, but that’s it.   The Spanish I learned stayed with me much longer, probably because I began taking it in grammar school in NYC, continued through high school and took four quarters in college. Even with all those years of study, it’s been decades since I’ve been able to carry on a conversation in Spanish. 

The idea of learning French started with my husband discovering Duolingo and trying to learn the language via online study before our summer trip to Normandy.  He wanted me to do it with him, but I just never could find the time, and he wasn’t all that successful in his attempt.  So, we made our second trip to France with just enough French between us to get by. 

Our Normandy traveling companions have visited Paris quite a few times and even dream of owning an apartment there or at least renting one for a month some day.  That prompted the idea of taking an immersion course in French in--where else--France! We girls discussed finding a program in a picturesque town outside of Paris and spending 2-4 weeks studying the language and wandering the town. For some reason, that’s a much more appealing learning path to me than Duolingo.  On our first trip to France a few years back for a bike and barge trip through Burgundy, I read an article about a woman living in Dijon and taking French courses at the local University of Burgundy, so I immediately offered up Dijon as an option. 

Upon our return home, I Googled courses around France and found quite a few interesting options. I’ve gotten pretty fired up about doing this someday, if my partner in crime is still up for it. The University of Burgundy, for example, offers four 20 hour weeks of lessons.  The rest of the time you spend wandering Dijon and using your newly learned French in markets, restaurants and shops.  Sounded like a plan, until I discovered I could do the same in Provence at the University of Aix-Marseille III  or in Nice at the University of Nice (Riviera).  All these choices give me plenty to dream about, although our practical husbands suggested we could likely find something similar in Quebec.  Maybe, maybe not!

Meanwhile, I read an article in the WSJ by Gabriel Wyner, author of Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It. Amazon bills it as “The ultimate rapid language-learning guide!” His premise is that connecting new words to images, like thinking of an actual cat when you learn that cat is le chat in French, is the key to rapid and permanent learning. So yes, that might be a less expensive way to learn French, but wouldn’t learning French in France be much more fun and memorable? Here’s what I think:

Four week language course: $2400. Round trip flight to Paris: $1600. Food and Wine: $500++.  The experience of learning French in a French town: Priceless.

To Be or Not to Be

That is the question. Or more accurately, the question is, “do today’s college students know who wrote that line and understand its context?”  Should they? Do they need to recognize a Shakespearean quote in a modern mystery novel to enjoy the story?  Or better yet, get the point in a line of dialogue?  Digging into the latest brouhaha about English curriculums makes me wonder. I learned of the most recent flare-up in this contentious debate when I read an excerpt from an interview with Christina Hoff Sommers in the WSJ’s Notable & Quotable: 

The Millennials have been cheated out of a serious education by their Baby Boomer teachers. Call it a generational swindle. Even the best and brightest among the 20-somethings have been shortchanged. Instead of great books, they wasted a lot of time with third-rate political tracts and courses with titles like "Women Writers of the Oklahoma Panhandle." Instead of spending their college years debating and challenging received ideas, they had to cope with speech codes and identity politics. College educated young women in the U.S. are arguably the most fortunate people in history; yet many of them have drunk deeply from the gender feminist Kool-Aid. Girls at Yale, Haverford and Swarthmore see themselves as oppressed. That is madness. And madness can only last so long.  

Nothing about Shakespeare, per se, but that excerpt reminded me of a rash of articles several years ago on the demise of courses teaching the great authors, so I set out to revisit those. This note from a 2007 study, The Vanishing Shakespeare, sums up the shift that caught my attention back then: 

At most universities, English majors were once required to study Shakespeare as one of the preeminent representatives of English lan­guage and literature. But today—on campuses public and private, large and small, east and west—he is required no more…English majors today find a mind-boggling array of courses that cen­ter on politics, sociology and popular culture—courses notable not be­cause they focus on great literature, but because they focus on everything but. English classes address a multiplicity of non-literary topics such as (in their own words): adoption (Yale University); AIDS (Princeton Uni­versity); animals, cannibals, and vegetables (Emory University); African cinema (University of Chicago); the conceptual black body (Mount Holy­oke College); diasporic ecological literature (Bates College); film noir (Columbia University); globalism (University of Virginia); Hollywood in the 1970s (American University); Baywatch (Northwestern University); Madonna (University of Pennsylvania); migration—forced and voluntary (Vassar); policing and prisons (Cornell University); queer mobility (Penn State University); radical vegetarian manifestos (University of Pennsyl­vania); rock and roll (University of California at San Diego); socialist and capitalist philosophies (Macalaster College); teen identity (Purdue University); Wild West shows and vaudeville (Swarthmore College); and Vietnam and Iraq (Bowdoin College). 

 Back then, Harvard was the only Ivy League university requiring its English majors to take a course in Shakespeare. By 2009, another article, The Decline of the English Department, noted that Harvard had changed its curriculum for undergrads, though English major requirements were not called out.

Consider the English department at Harvard University. It has now agreed to remove its survey of English literature for undergraduates, replacing it and much else with four new “affinity groups”—Arrivals, Poets, Diffusions, and Shakespeares. The first would examine outside influences on English literature; the second would look at whatever poets the given instructor would select; the third would study various writings (again, picked by the given instructor) resulting from the spread of English around the globe; and the final grouping would direct attention to Shakespeare and his contemporaries… the department’s director of undergraduate studies, told The Harvard Crimson…that“our approach was to start with a completely clean slate.” 

As do these authors, I continue to be dismayed by the dismantling of English curriculums. In the spirit of two sides to every argument, though, I feel compelled to note Slate Magazine’s rebuttal, Alas, Poor Shakespeare: 

Yet another conservative commentator is decrying English departments falling to “victimhood” studies. Too bad it’s not true.  Literature students have a brand new “classic” to study: the Political Correctness Killed Shakespeare article. 

Is this all “much ado about nothing?”   This former English teacher thinks not.

Chick-fil-A: More than a Sandwich

I recently had the great good fortune to attend my second Leadercast, a one-day event hosted annually by Chick-fil-A, live in Atlanta and broadcast to 800 host sites in over 25 countries. This year’s theme was Beyond You Leadership, in recognition that leaders have a much greater impact when they think more about the people they lead than they think of themselves, when they are mindful about how they lead. Unfortunately, it’s also true that leaders have a far-reaching impact when they think only of themselves, just not the impact followers want to experience.

The premise of Beyond You Leadership is that leadership is not measured by what one person is able to accomplish or the power she wields; it’s measured by the influence leaders have on their followers and what their followers are able do as a result of this influence.  We were asked to consider what we needed to do to be “leaders worth following?”  Was I surprised when I heard that two in five Americans rate their bosses as bad and that 90% of people surveyed believe there are not enough leaders?  Not a bit. Do I ever want to be known as one of those bad bosses? Certainly not.

“Being a leader worth following” seems a worthy goal.  Check out the nuggets I captured. I feel sure you’ll find at least one or two to be thought-provoking.

Andy Stanley

As a leader:

• Make as few decisions as possible—if you have power, but hand off the opportunity to make a decision, you’ve empowered someone just by saying “you decide”
  • Consider that as your organizational authority increases, your organizational IQ decreases…you know less and less about more and more 
  • Don’t’ confuse authority with competency
• Work for your team—ask “what can I do to help?”
  • Empty your cup—pour into others what you know, all you know; consider what you can do to fill their cups

Dr. Henry Cloud

• Leaders leave a wake – results and relationships
• The foundation of influence is trust: do your people “know” that you “understand” them?
• Opportunity comes when passion and what you’re good at come together in ways that influence
• You influence by giving up control and defining what your follower  is going to control; show followers that they have control over results

Simon Sinek

• You can’t measure leadership on a daily basis, just as you can’t measure the benefits of exercise daily
• Results and profits can be measured daily, so they get the focus
• Leadership is a choice
• We must be the leaders we wish we had

Every speaker was worth listening to, though not all had a takeaway for me personally.

• I was moved by Laura Schroff’s presentation. I recall reading her story in a magazine, and I’m considering getting her book An Invisible Thread. I’m betting that when you click on the link, you’ll remember the tale too.
• Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s laugh was infectious, and someone in the audience asked if it could be downloaded as a ring tone.
• Hearing Malcolm Gladwell was a treat, as I’ve read two of his books: Blink and The Tipping Point
  
  

I worked in Leadership Development earlier in my career, am passionate about the topic and have read too many to count books and articles on it. I’m fond of saying there’s nothing new under the sun about leadership, yet the opportunity to hear different perspectives always offers a chance to think just a bit differently. Before this event, I’d never heard of Simon Sinek, and he may have been, for me, the most inspirational speaker. His TED Talk on Start with Why is billed as the second most watched of all time. A day spent on leadership is always worthwhile, but hearing him was the icing on the cake.  And, yes, the Chick-fil-A sandwich for lunch was a nice touch.

It's All Walt Disney's Fault

Have you ever noticed how certain topics seem to take off and suddenly they’re everywhere? That seems to be the case right now on the subject of career advancement for women. Oh, it comes with many names.  At work these days, we’re seeing videos and material on Gender Diversity; last year it was Sheryl Sandburg’s book Lean In; a few months ago, it was a Ban Bossy campaign also promoted by Sheryl Sandburg.  

While they all touch on different elements of the topic, one theme that stands out is self-confidence.  The last article to come across my desk was The Confidence Gap. It’s point? “Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence.”  The article gives numerous examples of how we women hold ourselves back because we are not as self-confident as men.  Whereas a woman might not apply for a job because she feels she has only 60% of the skills required, a man would more often go for it.

We women also make the mistake of thinking that when we keep our head down and do exceptional work, someone will notice.  NOT!  This article and most of what I’ve read recently advises that we need to be more self-promoting, something that does not come naturally to us.  And, we don’t always have to be the ones who offer to take notes in meetings, the low-key, low-profile task that a man could do just as well. 

All of the recent press on this topic reminded me of a book I read in the 80’s called The Cinderella Complex, particularly when I read this segment in The Confidence Gap:

“We kept bumping up against a dark spot that we couldn’t quite identify, a force clearly holding them back. Why did the successful investment banker mention to us that she didn’t really deserve the big promotion she’d just got? What did it mean when the engineer who’d been a pioneer in her industry for decades told us offhandedly that she wasn’t sure she was really the best choice to run her firm’s new big project?”

The concept I remembered from The Cinderella Complex was exactly that. Somehow, we often fall prey to the notion that sooner or later everyone will figure out we’re not as good as they think we are—that we’ve just been lucky and really aren’t all that talented.  We really believe that about ourselves.  Oddly, when I googled the book, that was not the theme that was referenced.  Instead it was that we women were/are all waiting on Prince Charming to sweep us off our feet and take care of us.  Now, why didn’t I recall that point?  Could it be because I was the primary bread winner in my house in the 80’s and 90’s?  Perhaps.

The memory that made me laugh, though, was that I had a friend who always said, “It’s all Walt Disney’s fault; he told us we’d find Prince Charming.”  When I repeated that to a child I was babysitting one weekend, he replied, “But Aunt Kathy, your Prince Charming won’t come on horse; he’ll have to be in a taxi.”  Yes, out of the mouths of babes…