PALMER METHOD? WHAT'S THAT?

While at my son's home the other day helping out while my daughter in law recovers from some surgery, I came across a school paper that my thirteen year old granddaughter was working on.  It appeared that in the age of most everything being written on a computer, children aren't being taught the basics of cursive. My granddaughter had more or less printed her name.  But it has hardly in any form that would have been acceptable when I was in school.  This granddaughter is a smart girl and gets good grades, so I don't think it's really her fault that when writing by hand, the old fashioned way, her writing is a mess.  She just hasn't been drilled in the fundamentals of the Palmer method or required by teachers to refine her handwriting.

In first and second grade, we had daily exercises in printing letters and words.  By third grade, cursive writing was introduced and everyone was expected to learn by the Palmer method.  Around the room, above the chalkboards and bulletin boards, were posted strips of green paper about 6 or 7 inches high to be used as guides when learning cursive.  These strips had three lines on them spaced evenly apart.  Following the guides around the room, from left to right, the guide showed how to make the curves and lines of cursive, how to make those curves and lines into letters and finally how to connect the letters together to form words.  The three lines on the paper guides indicated how tall lower and upper case letters should be. When letters like "o", "a" and "c" were written in lower case, they could reach no higher than the middle line of the guide.

We had lessons in cursive every day.  On lined paper similar to the guide around the room, we practiced loops, curves and circles until they were acceptable to the teacher.  Then, as a class, we moved on to connecting those loops, curves and circles into letters and words.  I don't think that I really enjoyed the learning process.  It was tedious and my teacher was exacting.

By the end of the third grade, I was proficient in cursive writing. I had to be since that's the way all written assignments in school were done.  It had to be more or less legible so that the teacher could easily read what was written when grading papers.  Penmanship was always a part of the grade on any assignment. I could have spelled every word correctly on a spelling test, but if the penmanship was lacking, my grade would be affected.

I know that today's kids start early on computer basics and keyboarding.  My granddaughter does pretty well at the keyboard. But are we raising an entire generation of children who's handwriting is barely legible all in the name of technology?