Prompt: What do you think is the most important thing for today’s kids to learn in school?

This is an interesting prompt.  My oldest is in college, my middle one is in his Junior year in high school and my youngest, well, we just pulled him out of public school and have made the choice to homeschool him.  So I have quite the opinion about this topic.  However, I will spare you all the verbiage and move on with the topic at hand.

I feel that one of the most important things that should be (but isn’t here in my school district) is handwriting.   When I was in elementary school, handwriting was one of subjects we had.  We were taught cursive writing.  It was brutal for a 7 year old dyslexic girl to learn, but I did.  Actually, I think that’s how we discovered that I was dyslexic.  My hand writing is crap, but you can read it as it’s a combo of printing and cursive.  It’s weird, but whatever.

If I leave notes for my boys, and I just write it like normal, they say that they can’t read it because they “don’t read cursive”.  What?  My mother still writes in cursive all the time as that’s what they were taught.  One of my Great Aunts had amazing and beautiful handwriting at 95 years old.  My boys, unable to read it.  That was heart-breaking for me.   I want to upset them or use a “secret language”, all I need to do is write a note in cursive and Bob’s your uncle.

I get that most of the communication in life is now done with computers and you can type just about everything.  But doesn’t it feel amazing to get a nice handwritten note?  Through snail mail?  It’s a dying art.  Persons who are able to write in beautiful calligraphy are a dying breed.  How have we gotten away from this?  It’s a shame.