On Wed, 5 Feb 2003 01:06:50 -0500 (EST), Thomas Mueller wrote: <snip>
> I imagine Chinese, Japanese or Korean must be monstrously difficult to learn for > somebody accustomed to an alphabetical language such as English. I hate to > think what it must be like to read less-than-neat handwriting. Sometimes I > can't even read handwriting in English! The reason why you can't even read handwriting in English nowadays is that the public schools have stopped teaching penmanship. When I was in the third grade I was attending a public school in Stoughton, Massachusetts, a small town about 18 miles from Boston. It was one of the last of the public school systems in the US where penmanship was still being taught according to the established classical standards. That was in 1950. We had a special teacher who would visit each classroom in the elementary school for one hour each day to teach penmanship. We were not taught penmanship by using one of those then new-fangled fountain pens. We were taught penmanship by using a steel quill pen which we would have to burnish with a gauze cloth each time before dipping it into a bottle of ink. Our penmanship instructor was a most demanding perfectionist when it came to forming lettering in conformity with the standards. None of us children liked her because she was so nitpicking. When I became an adult my parents told me that the liberal and progressive educators of the times when I was in the third grade in Stoughton were condemning the school system there as being hopelessly old-fashioned and out of touch with modern theories of education which emphasized the alleged need of letting the student express his individuality and do his own thing and develop his own style of doing things. Also my parents told me that they do not agree with the notions of the modern liberal and progressive educators. They told me that they most highly approved of the methods and ways I was taught and they were greatly impressed with the handwriting skills I had learned when I was in the third grade. After completing the third grade in Stoughton I moved with my family to Norfolk, Virginia, where my father had been given a new assignment. Throughout the rest of my schooling I never again received another class in penmanship. Also I never again ever saw a steel quill pen until I applied for a civil service job in 1963. It was the first civilian job I had ever applied for. In order to get the job I was told that I would have to pass a series of civil service tests. One of the most important tests was one designed to test my handwriting skills. The job title I was applying for was that of Cartographic Technician for the US Geological Survey. For making maps extremely good handwriting skills are required. The test standards required that I use a steel quill pen. I was told that the test evaluators were very nitpicking perfectionists and that for this reason many people fail the handwriting test. They advised me to practice for the test first, which I did for about three days. They told me that I would have to copy all of the characters "perfectly", just as my third grade penmanship instructor always would insist of me. As I was taking the test for the record I thought of my third grade penmanship instructor whom I used to despise so much for her most nitpicking insistence for my conformity with the standards. As I was forming the letters with my steel quill pen I felt as though I was a child in school again and I felt a presence of her looking over my shoulder and speaking to me about how important it is to copy all of the characters so perfectly. Sometimes it seemed as though I could even feel her gentle guiding grasp upon my hand. A couple of days after I submitted my handwriting sample and the other tests, the evaluators informed me that I can have the job because I had performed good enough for doing government work. If only I could have performed good enough to do the kind of work that she does, I might have even been able to get a job as a guiding angel. Sam Heywood -- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser: http://browser.arachne.cz/
