The state of Texas is bringing penmanship lessons back to elementary school classrooms, requiring students to learn how to write in cursive. While these lessons fell out of practice in recent years due to technological advances, making such skills seem unnecessary, Texas believes it’s important for youngsters to know how to write legibly.
- Cursive lessons will begin in second grade. According to the Texas Education Code, which was updated for the 2019-2020 school year, second-grade students will be taught to write in cursive, while third grade students will be required to “write complete words, thoughts, and answers legibly in cursive leaving appropriate spaces between words.”
- By fourth grade, their cursive skills should be on point. The Code declares that fourth grade students should have no trouble when asked to “write legibly in cursive to complete assignments.” Given that this was par for the course for decades, perhaps longer, this should be easy enough to accomplish.
- It’s been a long time in the making. According to WCNC, the State Board of Education has been working on bringing cursive back to classrooms since it changed the English Language Arts and Reading section of the standard education requirements back in 2017. However, it wasn’t put into practice until September 2019.
- Writing in cursive is like learning another language. At least according to Diane Schallert, a professor with the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. She believes these lessons can only strengthen a child’s education. “With language comprehension, there’s this reciprocity between producing and comprehending,” she told WCNC. “By seeing the letter being formed slowly at your control, you’re considering its sound-symbol correspondence.
