My cursive keeps getting worse, but our granddaughter in the fourth grade is trying to help me with it.
Cursive is not a word that I have used very often during my long life, so it took a minute for it to sink in when Allie told me a while back that I really needed to work on my cursive.
That is the term she and apparently most other elementary school kids use now for what folks my age used to call handwriting or penmanship.
It is the next step up in school from learning to print your letters. I got to thinking that I must have skipped that grade, because I don’t recall any of my teachers ever talking about cursive.
But then I remembered that the only kid I grew up with who was allowed to skip a grade was a girl named Beth who lived down the street from me.
We talked about it years later when I saw her at a football game back in our hometown. She said she regretted skipping the grade because she lost touch with kids her own age and never fit in with the older ones in the grade she skipped to.
I told her that was the main reason I never skipped a grade. She said she always thought it was my poor penmanship and terrible grades in math. Skipping a grade made her sort of a smart aleck.
Anyway, I assured Allie that they did teach cursive when I was in school but that we just had different names for it like longhand. Teachers would say, “I don’t want you to print today. Do this paper in longhand.”
That seemed to confuse her, so I told her that there are different terms in handwriting just as there are in math like long division and short division.
She reminded me that her parents have emphasized to her that she should never let me help her with math homework or even discuss anything related to math with me.
All of this came up one day when she was watching me do hand-written thank-you notes to some ladies who had done something nice for me.
I wanted to send them emails, but Regina said that would be tacky and socially unacceptable.
My handwriting was decent enough to read at one time but has deteriorated into an indecipherable, scribbling mixture of printed letters and a smattering of cursive, as Allie calls it.
Working for decades in journalism and taking notes at warp speed has been a factor in destroying my penmanship.
It’s certainly not my parents’ fault that my handwriting is so bad. My dad wrote letters and Christmas cards with a real fountain pen. He kept a bottle of ink on the table to refill the pen.
He would wave his hand around before he started writing like an athlete warming up for an event. I still look back at some of his letters and admire the flowing, oversized, perfect script.
My mother’s writing was not nearly as impressive or ornate, but it was easy to read. We still use the dessert recipes that she wrote on index cards and brown paper bags.
Allie is trying to re-teach me cursive, but we have a long way to go. I have noticed that one of us writes the letter O and the letter E clockwise, and the other makes them counter clockwise. I’m not sure which one of us is doing them backwards.
She says it is hard to tell how many “points” there are in my M’s and N’s. I told her we called them humps, and she rolled her eyes.
For the ladies who got the thank-you notes and couldn’t read them, there is a sentence in there expressing appreciation for your kindness and another apologizing for the condition of my cursive.
NOTE: Reflections will take a few weeks off while Jerry works on his cursive and will return in 2021. Contact him at pierce@nsula.edu.REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES