WOODBURY — A teenage boy stands on the lawn of the girl whom he’s about to ask to prom. He holds his homemade sign in his hand that reads, “Will you go to prom with me?”
As he watches her front door open, the only two words that are racing through his head are “yes” or “no.” Unfortunately for him, the seven words that leave her mouth as she is squinting at the sign is, “yeah … I can’t read what that says.”
Now the teenage boy knows two things: His handwriting is terrible and he has no date for prom.
“Penmanship, I’d say over my seven years and even more years in education,” says science teacher Joshua Kornblut, “has increasingly gotten worse every year.”
Teachers at Nonnewaug High School can agree that handwriting has become one of the weaker abilities among students.
English teacher Benjamin Guerette says, “Some [handwriting assignments] are really sloppy, and then there’s always like one or two that are completely illegible.”
Some teachers even need their students to come back in after a written assignment.
“My own handwriting is so poor that I am accustomed to poor handwriting and can often decode it,” says history teacher Michael Sturges, “though there have been times this year where I needed to ask the student for help [to read their writing].”
While this applies to essays and English classes, it also happens in math.
“For math, sometimes students will write too big for the given workspace or start writing in the middle of the vertical space because they may not be able to anticipate how much algebra they may need to do to solve the problem,” says math teacher Shannon Belanger. “It’s hard to tell if overall handwriting has become more difficult to read because as teachers we get used to reading students’ writing.”
The cause for this can be the lack of handwritten assignments and the increase in online assignments over the past couple years.
“I think a huge cause of it is just how much we rely on technology,” says Kornblut. “Students are doing less and less handwritten assignments.”
One teacher argues that this issue may not be such a big deal.
“We are our own audience for our own handwriting most of the time,” says Sturges. “As long as your writing is legible to you, you should be OK.”
Another argument that appeared was if cursive handwriting has become obsolete.
“Cursive is a little outdated and it’s not something we necessarily use anymore,” says Kornblut. “I definitely think kids at least need to learn how to sign their name and at the bare minimum understand what the cursive letters are, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a skill where you need to be able to write fluently in cursive.”
Some may be in favor of it since they still write that way.
”I like it because just selfishly, I like writing in cursive,” says Guerette. “I think I write more quickly and I think it’s neater, but I think it isn’t a crucially needed thing.”
