How sad. Many schools stop teaching cursive writing after it was dropped from Common Core standard in 2010 – Obama was the President. Common core was a set of educational standards and testing English and math between kindergarten and 12th grade.

When I receive any hand written correspondence that is printed from an adult – it is an insult. In my opinion, common core was the start of the “dumbing down of America” and social promotions became the norm in the educational system. Plain and simple!

11.12.2022

Are there teachers and administrators who will read this and change their approach to teaching elementary children? (…)

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One of my students just finished book 12A of a primer series which moves from first to fifth grade. This seems not remarkable until you discover he’s 19 (years old).

He’s not progressed in reading for 12 years, when his handwriting became codified in his brain. No one discovered his backwards and upside down writing disrupted his reading tracking, destroying fluency. (…) He was writing more than a third of the 26 letters backwards and upside down, so he was completely lost at sea.

It took us eight hours to retrain his writing. He’s strong in his kinesthetic/spatial brain. (…) It has taken many more hours of intensive instruction to undo the bad habits created by the confusion.

He claims the best day of his life was when he started karate. (…) Karate helped him cope with this debilitating confusion created by the lack of proper directional handwriting instruction.

Schools no longer teach handwriting. Fully 40% of our boys and 30% of our girls will never read fluently, because their spatial/kinesthetic brain is stronger than the language side. (…)

In 30 years in the classroom, both public and private, I only encountered one truly dyslexic child. I was able to teach him to read by giving him the road map of proper directional handwriting. I always had at least one child labeled dyslexic in my classroom. With the one exception, they weren’t. They just needed to be taught.

I offered my simple but not easy handwriting curriculum to the administrators and teachers of every school where I taught, but they objected that it was too much work. Are there teachers and administrators who will read this and change their approach to teaching elementary children? (…)

Shelley Rubinstein/Harper, TX

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If I were young people, I would take a course in hand writing in order to be able to compete in the world. Is common core considered a part of socialism to keep people “dumb”?

kommonsentsjane