It seems the lunatics are no longer running the asylum.

Curse that cursive and calligraphy while we’re at it. Let’s also include “the arts” since we know that is all subjective as well.

..you know, it took me throwing my back out the other day to notice how horrible everyone’s posture is in Cat and Girl. I’m going to try really hard to unnotice now, because it’s making me wince every panel

Ah, too true.

Word choice also ran away along time ago. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a student write “if… than…” instead of “if…. then….”.

Hmm, does this count as nostalgia or a rant?

Long division was the most painful part of my little fourth grade existence. But then I learned to suck it up and forget everything I learned.

My mother in law taught fourth grade. She’s got scraps of paper with long division on it all over the house. I think she actually enjoys it.

Elementary schools are increasingly teaching “number sense”, taht is an emphasis on logic, applying math to word problems, problem solving, and learning an intuitive feel for why math functions do what they do. This can only be a good thing. Powering through times-tables and long division just long enough to reach adulthood and use a calculator is fairly inane.

Oh, and I love the archaic “gaol”

@Jacob

Presumably it’s a reference to “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” by Oscar Wilde.

oh…. cursive is LONG gone.

Computer code is the last bastion of learning. Everyone can get through life without knowing about reading and writing and mathematics… we have software to deal with all that. But a computer simply won’t work unless you tell it exactly what it is that you want it to do.

‘Gaol’ isn’t archaic, it’s British.

It is both archaic AND British. Just ’cause the Brits still spell it like that doesn’t mean it’s not also the old way of doing it from an American perspective.

I trust myself to be able to reason my way to long division every time it’s needed.

yeah yeah outsmarting long division, I tried that when I was eight, it didn’t work

It pains me to look at script from the 18th century and then look at my own. At times I wish my teachers had focused on handwriting more than they did, which was essentially not at all. And math was always a fiend to me. I can think logically quite well, but when I see numbers, my mind seems to malfunction.
And since when is “gaol” archaic from an American perspective? Maybe it’s just personally, but I don’t remember it ever being an uncommon word to hear or use.

Oh, no! I hope they catch Cursive Script soon and lock it up forever. No lesson in school has ever been stupider than teaching children how to write in a deliberately less-legible fashion.

It’s not at all uncommon to hear “gaol.” We just spell it “jail.”

I write in cursive all the time. Don’t make the same mistakes I did, children…

@jacob: it’s an awesome development for those of us who think in words. for kids with reading disabilities but average number abilities (and there are a frig of a lot of them) it takes away the only thing they could feel good about. i love reading, but that’s me. not everything should have to pass through the literacy gateway, especially numbers. also: i can do long division. when i do it on the board, the kids look at me like i started tapping out messages in morse code.

@rocketbride: you make a great point, I have a dyslexic son, and he rocks on number crunching. But the number sense approach works well for him too. The real key is flexibility and individualized approaches. For all 30 kids in the class…

It strikes me that math is well caged in my mental gaol, but I’ll be damned if Spelling keep getting bailed out by their gullible senile Aunt BroweserSpellCheck. Just last week we were talked about Manifest Destiny and Historic Dates completely escaped me.

(But cursive writing is *faster*. You pick up the pen fewer times. Invaluable for taking notes and writing Christmas cards.)

I’m with Erika; cursive is an idea whose time has passed. I broke the cursive habit when I was 14 years old. My high school had an ROTC-like program sponsored by the local police, and they insisted everything be written in caps and small caps. In time, my class and I developed faster handwriting, as well as better observation and retention skills, simply by not trying to transcribe the teacher’s words verbatim.

When I am older I must remember not to make any ‘don’t they teach X in school any more’ remarks. I often hear about how they apparently don’t teach Latin any more, today I heard for the first time that they don’t teach life drawing either.

It’s this ongoing generational ‘my learning was better than yours’ battle. One generation says ‘I learned to manually change a typewriter ribbon and you didn’t’, the other says ‘I learned HTML and you didn’t’. Both probably redundant skills in 2024, when children will learn to operate computers by flicking their eyes.

Good grief. You can’t look at the work of one person and criticise an entire generation for failing to practise life drawing, you can only criticise that one person.

In middle school and junior high, our teachers constantly gave us dire warnings about how we’d better improve our cursive, because, they said, when we got to high school we would be expected to write all our papers in cursive.

Then I got to high school and never heard another word about it.

adults writing like children sickens me

I do not mind the loss of cursive.

@David. They teach life drawing at my school.

My school had neither Latin nor life drawing. Both my sons took Latin in high school, and the older one is now taking life drawing in college.

Don’t they teach prompt engineering in school any more?