#common-core — Public Fediverse posts

The Funeral of Handwriting: What We Lose When the Hand Stops Moving

In 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative dropped cursive instruction from its recommended curriculum. The decision arrived without ceremony. No public debate, no period of mourning, no recognition that a cognitive practice stretching back to the Sumerian reed stylus was being retired from American education. Forty-one states adopted the standards. Cursive, along with its slower sibling manuscript handwriting, began its institutional death.

The loss registers first in the brain. Karin James, a cognitive neuroscientist at Indiana University, published research in 2012 demonstrating that children who practiced letter formation by hand showed activation in the left fusiform gyrus, the reading circuit of the brain, that children who typed the same letters did not. The hand, moving across the page, recruits neural networks that the keyboard bypasses entirely. Virginia Berninger’s longitudinal studies at the University of Washington reinforced this finding: children who wrote by hand produced more words, generated ideas faster, and composed more complete sentences than those who typed. The hand thinks its way through language.

The argument here has nothing to do with sentiment about fountain pens and wax seals. The motor act of forming letters creates a proprioceptive feedback loop that anchors memory and comprehension in ways that tapping a glass screen cannot replicate. A 2014 study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer, published in Psychological Science under the title “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard,” showed that students who took longhand notes outperformed laptop note-takers on conceptual questions, even when the laptop group had more recorded material. Speed worked against understanding. The hand’s slowness forced selection, compression, and interpretation in real time, while the keyboard encouraged transcription without cognition.

The cultural history tells a parallel story. In the nineteenth century, Platt Rogers Spencer developed the Spencerian method, a system of penmanship that became the standard American hand from the 1850s through the turn of the century. Spencer did not conceive of handwriting as a mechanical skill. He understood it as moral training. The discipline of forming graceful, consistent letterforms was a discipline of the self: patience, attention, proportion, restraint. When Austin Norman Palmer replaced Spencerian script with his own method around 1900, he stripped the moral philosophy but kept the premise that handwriting shaped character. Both men would have found the idea of abandoning handwriting instruction incomprehensible, the equivalent of canceling arithmetic because calculators exist.

The legal and institutional architecture of Western civilization was built on the handwritten document. Wills, contracts, treaties, confessions, correspondence, medical notes, field observations, laboratory records: for centuries, the handwritten text carried an evidentiary weight that print could not match. A signature functions as an assertion of identity and intention, a mark that forensic examiners can trace to a single human hand. The typed name carries no such specificity. As handwriting recedes from common practice, an entire system of authentication rooted in the irreducible individuality of the body recedes with it.

The counterargument writes itself: nobody needs cursive to function in a digital economy. Keyboards are faster. Screens are ubiquitous. Communication has moved to platforms where handwriting has no utility. All of this is true, and all of it misses the point. Efficiency has never been the right lens for evaluating a cognitive practice. Running is less efficient than driving; we do not therefore recommend the abolition of legs.

What is happening is a form of cognitive amputation performed in the name of convenience. The connection between the hand and the brain’s language centers, between the body and the act of composition, between the slow, resistant, physical work of making meaning and the frictionless digital surface that asks nothing of us but a tap, is being severed by policy and indifference. The children who will never learn cursive will still read and write. They will compose texts and emails and reports. What they will lack is the knowledge of what they are missing, which is the particular cruelty of amputation: the phantom limb aches, but only if you once had the limb.

A growing number of American states have passed legislation mandating cursive instruction, swimming against the Common Core current. Louisiana’s Act 300 in 2016 was among the earliest. These legislative acts respond to accumulating evidence that the hand’s retirement has consequences the brain cannot absorb on its own. The neuroscience keeps arriving, and it keeps pointing in the same direction: the hand and the mind developed together, over millennia, and separating them carries costs that no efficiency calculation can account for.

The funeral of handwriting is the funeral of a particular kind of thinking: slow, embodied, resistant to acceleration, irreducibly personal. Every word written by hand carries the tremor of the individual body, the pressure of the moment, the angle of fatigue or excitement or care. The keyboard produces uniform characters regardless of who strikes the keys. Uniformity offers comfort, and the comfort has a price measured in capacities we can no longer name.

Now I understand why #BananaRepublicans in #Tennessee and other #RedStates were so eager to end #CommonCore #education standards, despite marked improvements in standardized test scores measured by #PISA. (Gains were *historic* in Tennessee: https://www.tn.gov/former-governor-haslam/news/2013/11/7/tennessee-students-the-fastest-improving-in-the-nation.html).

Re-election of twice-impeached and 34-count felon #DonaldTrump *after* #AmericanCarnage 1.0 AND a #FailedCoupAttempt required a #MAGA base that could easily be bamboozled by #Trump #MATH.

Look! He lowered price of gas by 30,000%!

#Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville - who has been called the dumbest Senator in #UnitedStates #history - demonstrates why #CommonCore #math was (and still is) badly needed in ‘red states’, where the rates of mathematical, scientific, and garden variety illiteracy are higher those in developing countries. #Pentagon #trigon

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tommy-tuberville-trigon_n_67bfcee4e4b0c1f0afe36eee

Last week, students from the #hku #commoncore CCHU9080 course presented their group projects. The projects involved analyzing #museum #websites or #exhibits and assessing their effectiveness from the perspective of public education.

What's your favorite museum website? We'd love to hear!

上週，#hku #commoncore CCHU9080 課程的學生匯報了他們對#博物館 #網站 及#展品 的分析，並從公共教育的角度評估其有效性。 
您最喜歡的博物館網站是哪個？來告訴我們吧！ 

TIL you get in trouble in 4th grade when you do multiplication problems the way your parents did.

I really, really dislike #CommonCore

“The #MATH Myth” debunked on @Wikipedia. 👉 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Math_Myth

Here in #Tennessee , #PISA scores (National Report Card) rose at the fastest pace of any state ever after we won the ‘Race to the Top’ competition that was used to augment #STEMeducation and implement #CommonCore emphasis on language and conceptual #math. ✅

Then, #BananaRepublicans ‘pulled the rug out’ from under our students, and scores headed #South again.

#SaveAmerica from the #MAGA cult!

They really made a movie about #CommonCore in 2021 lol

#GodsNotDeadWeThePeople

@abbadon @Alan I know, because I’ve been sharing it for 5 years of #MassShootings nearly every day.

The #NRA is a #Russian asset, and the #GOP is in the pocket of the #GunLobby. So, can Americans add two and two? Or did they kill #CommonCore #MATH skills along with #BannedBooks ? 🤔

#mathed #commoncore https://mathvalues.squarespace.com/masterblog/attend-to-precision-why

"Attend to precision" is one of the 8 basic Mathematics Practices in the #CommonCore. Why? My latest "Devlin's Angle" post for the #MAA https://mathvalues.squarespace.com/masterblog/category/Devlin%27s+Angle

How many people with college degrees does it take to help a 7th grader with their math? The answer is 3. TOOK THREE OF US TO FIGURE OUT THE STUPID COMMON CORE. 😡😡👎🏻👎🏻AND THEN I HAD TO TEACH IT TO HIM!! 🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️🤦🏻‍♀️
#CommonCore

@Elishevacarl Adding HashTags:

#CommonCore #Trigonometry #MTBoS #ITeachMath

CC: @someonetellmetosleep @KarenCampe

The #MississippiMiracle has seen childhood literacy rates soar since having the 2nd lowest rate in the country in 2013! 📕👦 👉 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/kids-reading-scores-have-soared-in-mississippi-miracle

#CommonCore #Education

Skill in the absence of knowledge:

http://dianeravitch.net/2019/07/06/bob-shepherd-this-is-what-a-generation-of-standards-and-testing-has-done-to-ela-teaching/

#DaneRavitch
#Education
#CommonCore
#Standardized