This one, which I stumbled across from a google news search, comes from the ABC News channel in Chicago: “Should students be concerned with proper handwriting?” The answer, according to these folks, is yes.
A couple of interesting quotes here:
Some educators link the demise of penmanship to the rejection of repetitive drills as a teaching tool. Also, teachers are spending less time on handwriting and more time covering subjects like reading and math, which are measured by standardized tests.
Huh? So, we should have a return to reptitive drills? And by the way, my third grade son seems to still be doing some version of reptitive drills with handwriting.
They talk about the problems of the handwritten portion of the SAT and the fact that many finals still need to be done by hand, etc. I wonder how long that’s going to be the case, though– I’d be surprised if my son will have to do a writing test for the SAT by hand, for example.
And then there’s this:
While teachers who grade the SAT are told not to mark off for sloppy penmanship, research shows that handwriting can send a message.
“It’s hard when you look at some types of handwriting, to not read certain things into it,” says Dana Huff, an English teacher at the Weber School – who also grades essays for the SAT. “You know the big, bubbly handwriting, for instance, can sometimes lead a teacher to think, ‘Oh, Airhead.'”
“If your handwriting is barely legible, it makes them think that you are not really an organized person,” says 17-year-old Adam Levinson, “that you are writing too fast, and you are not thinking about it.”
Which, again, is why I type everything but a grocery list.
Gees, now besides racial, gender, and racial profiling we gotta worry about handwriting profiling too.
Did it ever occur to the SAT graders that illegible handwriting might just indicate underdeveloped fine motor skills (or left-handedness!)?
You wouldn’t believe how out of context that comment was taken.