Please Print

There's a crisis in our schools and it has nothing to do with Obama's speech.

Schools are not teaching handwriting. I was thrilled to see this issue raised by the New York Times this week.

When I was in elementary school, the rumor was that our principal had earned his master's degree in Handwriting. That's how serious handwriting class was at Central Elementary. We learned technique for print and cursive and did a lot of copy work from the black board to practice. In middle school, I learned keyboarding, a skill I later developed by copious use of AOL messenger when I entered college. LOL. As a result, I can print legibly, make beautiful, loopy script on invitations or when signing my name, and I can type really, really fast. When I need to take notes on paper, I can actually read them later. My handwriting is not always the neatest, but without too much effort, I can write pretty quickly.

In the last kindergarten room where I taught there was no time built into the lesson for handwriting instruction. Students were not encouraged to form their letters in any particular manner. As a result, students invented their own methods. As long as their letters approximately matched the print on the phonics cards, it was acceptable. The problem is that many students did not develop efficient or clear methods of letter formation. This was fine as long as they were only writing a word or a short sentence. But enter second grade when they suddenly needed to be able to write paragraphs, and getting anything down was a painstaking process for about half the kids. It's a little hard to get kids to think about the ideas in their writing when they are still struggling over the mechanics. For instance, it's a lot more efficient to form print letters top to bottom, but many students, unless instructed otherwise, will start at the bottom line. Everybody eventually develops their own, unique style of handwriting, but learning one method first helps this to happen faster.

Handwriting, like phonics, is one of those critical, building-block skills. Handwriting and phonics are not writing and reading, but without those skills, children will fail to write and read competently. (Unless they figure it out for themselves in spite of poor instruction by the teacher, which, in my opinion, is how about half of all kids learn anything at all in school.)

Handwriting should be taught in an explicit and systematic manner. This means, I show you exactly how it should be done, give you a procedure for doing it, guide you as you try it out, and then provide lots of practice until it becomes automatic. You could do this in 10-20 minutes a day, and should definitely occur in Kindergarten through Third Grade classrooms.

I've had luck with Handwriting Without Tears for students who really need a lot of support.

Otherwise, I think it doesn't really matter which font you teach, as long as it's consistent across the grades.

No matter how common computers get, there will always be a need to print.