• ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    You mean the one that starts with “congrefs” because the long s was a thing at the time and the letter f had a different meaning?

    How much time should we spend teaching school children about 200 year old antiquated orthography?

    • PeleSpirit@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I didn’t realize that such an easy thing to teach would meet such controversy, lol. Why wouldn’t you teach such an easy thing to learn?

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Because it’s a waste of time, and a lot of people were taught in a way that wasn’t the easy, quick way you seem to think it was.

        The way they taught me was to write the alphabet in a new script over and over for about an hour a day twice a week for several years. If you had poor handwriting you had to do it more, and you could fail lessons based purely on “didn’t shape your cursive S correctly”.

        Then you leave elementary school and teachers immediately switch to saying they won’t accept assignments in cursive, and then in highschool and college they won’t even accept handwritten.

        Slide rules are also easy to learn, but we don’t teach them because there’s no point to it.

        • PeleSpirit@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It sounds like you had horrible teachers? We learned it alongside print and that was it. It wasn’t a big deal at all.

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Welcome to why so many people hate it. You’re taught it, it’s an awful experience, and then you never use it again.

            We may as well teach slide rules and abaci.

            • PeleSpirit@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              It’s not awful for everyone though. That’s like deciding not to teach history to all schools because a few classes had really bad teachers.

              • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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                1 year ago

                Skipping, of course, that cursive is a technical skill and not cultural knowledge.

                Cursive lacks technical value, and if there’s a pointless technical skill that most teachers seem incapable of teaching maybe the answer is to cut it from the curriculum.

                  • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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                    1 year ago

                    That article repeatedly conflates writing by hand and cursive. Those aren’t the same thing in all places.
                    If you read the study, they also get those results from just drawing.

                    The ability to write by hand is one thing, but learning a second more complicated script that can’t be used in many contexts? Why would you want to keep that?
                    Why do we need two alphabets, one of which can’t be used on official paperwork?