Recently I letterpress printed a business card designed by a calligrapher. As I was treadling away, printing her beautiful script, I lamented my own handwriting. While my signature isn’t as bad as the one on the left (for the man who will be the next US Secretary of the Treasury, and that signature will be on our paper money), it’s pretty illegible. And I noticed as I wrote out holiday cards how tired my hand got, even on a short note.
In 5th grade, a new girl at my school really impressed me with her beautiful handwriting. She explained her previous school had required learning to write that way. So I was interested in this article in the Wall Street Journal with the subtitle “Cursive Goes the Way of ‘See Spot Run’ In Many Classrooms, Delighting Students.” In part it says The common core state standards, a set of math and English goals agreed upon by 45 states and now being implemented, sends cursive the way of the quill pen, while requiring instead that students be proficient in keyboarding by fourth grade. It also says that “Jacob Lew assures me that he is going to work to make at least one letter legible in order not to debase our currency,” President Obama said this month when announcing Mr. Lew’s nomination.”