A cursive on all their heads

Good riddance:

As Daria Caruso's high school seniors watched the 1959 Alfred Hitchcock film "North by Northwest" in an advanced English class, one scene, in particular, puzzled them. On the screen was a paper note, a message handwritten in cursive script.

The message was pivotal to the plot, but, for many of the students, it might as well have been written in a foreign language.

"They couldn't read the message," said Caruso, a teacher at West Hartford's Conard High School. "I had to back up the (film) and read it to them."

Relying more and more on e-mail, blogs, Web sites, instant messaging and other electronic forms of communication, students at all levels are forgetting the fine art of handwriting, educators say. Cursive script, the graceful looping style that connects one letter to another, might be going the way of the inkwell and the fountain pen.

When students do write by hand, many resort to printing, educators say.

"It's true. Unfortunately, a lot of schools are not spending enough time on handwriting," said Priscilla Mullins of Zaner-Bloser Educational Publishers, an Ohio-based firm that produces classroom materials for handwriting, spelling, grammar and related subjects.

Mullins, a former teacher, said handwriting lessons are being squeezed out of the curriculum as teachers focus on mathematics, reading and other subjects that are emphasized on standardized tests.

"It's pretty alarming," she said. "Those (penmanship) skills have just gotten lost."

Excellent. I have a long-held grudge against good penmanship in all its forms.

It was not always thus. In kindergarten and then in the first grade I had quite neat handwriting. Alas, that all came to an end due to the overzealous efforts of my teacher, no doubt blinded by dogmatic adherence to ridiculous union rules, or, as she would have it, decency and good taste.

Every day we practiced spelling, vocabulary, and penmanship, writing neat columns of words in our Big Chief tablets. In addition to my already confessed competence at the latter, I excelled at the first two, and quickly became bored. Alas, I responded by assigning myself some extra words to practice, and this threat to the status quo was not to be tolerated.

Every Friday our teacher would inspect the contents of our desks, looking for contraband, especially of a kind that would rot and stink over the weekend. What she found in my desk was deemed to be far more corrupt than a carton of spoiled milk. She called my mom, and mass pandemonium resulted.

Was my handwriting poor? No. Had I not followed the approved format, using double columns and skipped lines? Of course I had. Were the words mispelled? Well, yes, some were, but that wasn't the problem, and I felt I did quite well considering I'd never encountered these words in a book before. No, it was my independence, the threat I posed to the Man and his system that had to crushed at once.

Oh, sure, they claimed that my list of words, including 'shit', 'fuck', 'piss', 'asshole', and related terms, were inappropriate for someone of my age, and always inappropriate for school, but who's going to believe that?

The only punishment I recall from Mom was deferred; my masterpiece was filed in my baby book for later revelation to any woman dumb enough to marry me or children unfortunate enough to be fathered by me. The humiliation and disapproval, however, were immediate, and I never again tried very hard at spelling or penmanship.

The latter in particular suffered a precipitous decline, and I didn't really ever try to write cursive well. My initial barely adequate efforts declined so far by high school that one teacher, after returning every paper but mine, wrote "Duzler Wxhode" on the board and invited any unregistered student by that name to claim his paper. The nickname Duzler (DOOZ-ler) followed me until graduation, and I never wrote anything but my signature in cursive again, displaying both my sensitivity to criticism and inability to learn the appropriate lesson.

Alas, nearly ten years later I was forced to write the "I am not a cheater" verbage on the LSAT in cursive, a process that required reinvention from my hazy memories. I think I wrote about 25% of the letters backwards, but at least it took me two minutes more than the alotted time.

Fuck, I'm still pissed off about the shit those assholes put me through.