Why do we still teach cursive handwriting?

By Mack D. Male · April 30, 2007 at 11:55pm

I’m generally pretty happy whenever I get the opportunity to show off my Tablet PC, especially when my audience has never seen one before. It happened again Friday afternoon, and the expected “oohs” and “ahhs” filled the room. Usually I fold up my tablet so that the keyboard is hidden, and then I encourage onlookers to try writing in OneNote. Most people very quickly write “hello” or their name in block letters. On Friday however, someone wrote a sentence in cursive handwriting. I remarked that I simply can’t do cursive handwriting anymore, which led to a pretty interesting discussion.

Essentially we wondered aloud why cursive handwriting is still taught in elementary school. I remember learning it in grade three or so, but I simply can’t do it now. If I try, I really have to concentrate, and I just don’t remember what some of the letters are supposed to look like. The only thing I write in cursive these days is my name. The rest of the time I am either on the computer, or scribbling in my messy “print-writing” (where it’s mostly printing with a few letters connected). Why would anyone use cursive handwriting in this digital age? And if the answer to that is “pretty much no one,” then why do we still teach it?

The entry on Wikipedia provides just two reasons:

Cursive is easier and faster once mastered. There is no need to constantly pick up the pencil point and put it down again.
Cursive may be especially useful for certain students with learning disabilities such as dysgraphia because it has fewer letters that are mirror images of one another, such as the printed b and d, and so may be easier for students who are prone to mixing them up. In some schools, students with such learning challenges are taught cursive before print.

I think the first point is pretty much negated by typing, and the second point is only relevant for a relatively small number of individuals. I suppose another reason not mentioned on Wikipedia would be that cursive handwriting looks nice. My Mom’s handwriting, for example, is quite simply beautiful.

When you think about it, teaching cursive handwriting is really stupid. You generally can’t submit any assignments in junior high, high school, or post-secondary unless they are typed on a computer. What’s the point of learning it then?

Furthermore, I seem to recall that handwriting lessons took quite a bit of class time. Isn’t there something more useful we could be teaching children in place of handwriting?

Education is about grading – and that sucks

By Mack D. Male · January 12, 2007 at 3:41pm

It is no secret that I have a lot of issues with our education system. I think there are lots of things that could be done better, especially fixing this:

“All through school, from kindergarten up, you were taught that mistakes are a bad thing. You were downgraded for the mistakes that you made.

It is perfectly apparent from what [schools] do in examinations where errors are identified, [that] education is not about learning. It is about grading. Because if they were interested in learning, they would give you the same examination back a week later, to see if you had corrected your mistakes. But they’re not interested in that, they’re interested in giving you a grade.

So it is impressed on you, mistakes are a bad thing. [Ed: And learning by making mistakes is a bad thing.]”

– Russell Ackoff Talk, ISSS Cancun 2005, 49th Meeting

Experience should confirm that some of the most important lessons you learn in life come after making a mistake. Too bad the education system doesn’t feel the same way.

Note that in the above quote he doesn’t mention teachers, just schools. I know there are a lot of teachers who would rather help students learn than simply assign them a grade, but their jobs depend on assigning marks. And unfortunately, I think too many teachers put this fact (that they need to produce good test scores) ahead of the educational well-being of their students. For more on this, you should definitely read the first chapter of the wonderful Freakonomics.

Read: Nivi

A Lesson From 2006

By Mack D. Male · December 28, 2006 at 6:00pm

Looking back I’d say I learned a lot in the last year. I guess that’s not surprising, as the saying “you learn something new every day” is usually pretty accurate. With business plan competitions, conferences, and of course school, I had lots of opportunities to learn new things this year. Instead of making a big list of the things I learned however, I’m going to share with you just one lesson:

I learned that running a business requires balance.

Of course you have to balance the business with friends, family, etc. That’s not what I am talking about though. When you are starting a business, you wear a lot of different hats. Sometimes you wear the programmer hat, sometimes the accountant hat, and other times the salesman hat. What I learned this year is that you need to find a balance between all the different hats! It sounds like common sense, but when you’re in the middle of things, it doesn’t come naturally.

I don’t know why, but for the longest time I figured that if we got the code for Podcast Spot done, everything else would fall into place. I focused only on the programmer hat, and ignored the rest. VenturePrize was the turning point for me. Before the competition, I pretty much focused on the programmer hat. During the competition, I ignored the programmer hat altogether. And now, I am doing my best to find balance.

It was an important lesson for me to learn, that’s for sure. To see what other people learned this year, check out Ben Yoskovitz’s excellent group writing project.

Read: Instigator Blog

Boring podcasts are not the answer!

By Mack D. Male · December 12, 2006 at 8:37pm

Another day, another educator fighting podcasting because she fears students will not attend class. Liz Dreesen is a general surgeon lecturing at the University of North Carolina, and her students have asked her to podcast her anatomy lectures. She doesn’t want to do it:

I want the medical students also to learn the importance of presence, to attend our anatomy lectures, to see us in the flesh and not podcast, so they can begin to be doctors, not just technicians and knowers-of-facts.

She makes a really good argument about medicine being a “contact sport” that requires physical presence. So what to do about the attendance problem?

Podcasting consultant Leesa Barnes says the answer is to make the podcasts “boring as heck”:

In other words, make the video podcast so boring that students will use it as a backup and not as a replacement. That’s the way to provide convenience for students without sacrificing class attendance.

Sorry Leesa, but I think that advice is just plain dumb. Lectures are boring enough as it is.

I don’t know about you, but when I shell out hundreds of dollars to attend a technology conference, I do so because of the people I will meet, not the content being discussed. Sometimes the content is boring, sometimes it’s interesting, but the interaction with other people is always worth paying for.

Sadly, the same cannot be said of shelling out hundreds of dollars for a university lecture. I do it because I am required to in order to get that piece of paper that says I graduated. Things could be different though. In my six years of post secondary experience, I have learned that more often than not, lectures are simply boring and don’t allow for much interaction. This needs to change.

The answer to the attendance problem then, is to provide for interaction in the lectures. I don’t mean reading lecture notes and then allowing students to ask questions at the end, but real interaction. The same kind of interaction I pay for at the technology conferences. And of course, podcast it all. Make the podcasts as interesting as possible, so that students who watch them later can’t help but wish they were there.

With all that interaction going on, there will be less time to get the boring but required information across. So record it ahead of time, and make the podcasts (boring information + class interaction) an integral part of the course. If they are considered required material, they won’t be seen as replacements for class. Tell students to watch the podcast and then come to class and discuss it.

For the most part I think the way our education system works is, for lack of a better adjective, crappy. Podcasts and other emerging technologies might enable us to make some positive changes, but only if we use them correctly.

Read: Podonomics

Podcasting University Lectures

By Mack D. Male · September 5, 2006 at 5:50pm

BlogMatrix has a post up today about podcasting university lectures – particularly appropriate since I start classes again for the Fall semester bright and early tomorrow morning. While I fully intend to go to at least the first week of classes, all bets are off after that. And no, it’s not because I am lazy, or going shopping or anything like that, I simply have a business to run. Sometimes business and school conflict, and you need to make a decision – which is more important, this meeting, or a lecture? Most times, for better or for worse, I choose the meeting.

I wouldn’t miss anything though if the lecture was being recorded and made available as a podcast.

While the BlogMatrix post is more a point-form plan for how to implement such a thing, and how it would work, it touches on a few important points that deserve to be highlighted.

Podcasting a lecture is for the students in attendance too!
Of course there will be people like me who skip the lecture to do something else and simply want to listen to the podcast later. More importantly though, podcasting a lecture is useful for the students in attendance, as BlogMatrix points out: “students, instead of taking notes (or only notes), would record the time of a particular interesting or salient comment”. That would be incredibly useful. This point needs to be made very clear to the decision makers in a University, as they will most certainly protest the idea initially, citing fears that no one will go to class. I think such fears are baseless – there is value in attending the lecture, such as being able to participate in the conversation.

(As an aside, if the lecture contains no interaction and is just the professor standing at the front talking, then I’d be GLAD if podcasting it made attendance drop to zero. It’s ridiculous that students pay $500 for something like that, because you know most of the fees go to paying the professor anyway. It’s examples like this that show just how antiquated and bureaucratic the university system can be.)

The Wisdom of Crowds
Or in this case, the wisdom of students in the class. Let’s assume students can bookmark parts of the lecture – perhaps the most important or interesting parts. As noted in the BlogMatrix post, this is powerful stuff: “Collecting all these bookmarks across all students (and potentially across time) will provide collective intelligence/data mining/insight into what is really import in the lecture”. The ability to tag lectures and specific segments would further this collective wisdom.

Is security really an issue?
I don’t think so. The University doesn’t want people getting the lectures for free – I understand that. But how is making an MP3 file available any different than having some random person walk in off the street, sit in the class for an hour with a recorder, and put it online later? Especially in a lecture with 400+ students, I am surprised this doesn’t happen more actually. As long as sensitive or personal information is not included in the podcast, I don’t see security being much of an issue. I do agree with BlogMatrix though: “I don’t believe it’s the place of the vendor (i.e. me) to dictate requirements to a client”. If a university really wanted to integrate security, it shouldn’t be that difficult, as all universities have pretty extensive systems in place already.

Now, let’s look at this from the perspective of Podcast Spot (if you want a test account, email me). Could our technology support such a thing? With a few tweaks here and there, I believe so. We’ve got all the basics covered (like tags and comments), as well as a few of the more interesting requirements (such as random access). And there’s a bunch more features on the way too (such as improved methods of working with segments). It’s not going to happen (because I better graduate in April) but it sure would be cool to see Podcast Spot being used in my school. Maybe I’ll see it as an alumni

I think podcasting will catch on in schools and other similar institutions, but it will take time. People inside the education world need to grok the benefits of podcasting, and still more have to lose their fear of the technology. When that happens, I think everyone will benefit.

Read: BlogMatrix

Gates on High School Education

By Mack D. Male · October 27, 2005 at 11:39pm

Many of my friends are in, or have graduated from, the Faculty of Education. I guess that means that whether or not they become teachers, they have some interest in education, and indeed a vested interest in seeing education move forward. Yet I have often said that I don’t think the way we do things is right. I have wondered aloud to these friends that perhaps a move back to the old “master and apprentice” way of learning would be more appropriate! Today I came across these remarks from Bill Gates made back in February:

When we looked at the millions of students that our high schools are not preparing for higher education – and we looked at the damaging impact that has on their lives – we came to a painful conclusion:

America’s high schools are obsolete.

By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.

By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.

I’d say that’s a fair assessment. Almost since day one of my University career, I have thought there must be a better way to do this. After the first two years of University, Grade 11 and Grade 12 largely seemed like a waste of time. Or maybe not a waste of time, but an inefficient use of time. Maybe I’m just cynical, I don’t know. I know there are teachers who care, but there’s often not enough resources. And some of the things that students need, they don’t have the opportunity to obtain.

I don’t really have a suggestion for alternatives though either – I simply haven’t given it enough thought. I do know however, that I want my kids to have the best education possible. There’s so much that we could be doing in high schools that we aren’t.

Read: Bill & Melinda Gates