My Hard Copy Blog

I heard something sad but not altogether shocking the other week: kids in certain schools aren't going to be learning penmanship anymore.  That's right folks, no cursive, no signature, no 10-points-off-when-you-confuse-cursive-J-with-cursive-F anymore.  It all ends here.

And yes, yes, sure, sure, who actually writes in the cursive they learned in the first grade right?  My own handwriting is this weird sort of mix of print and cursive, still very legible but lacking in all character.  But still.  I just can't wrap my head around the fact that we've become so completely reliant on computers that learning the beautiful, artistic, timeless skill of penmanship is deemed...expendable?  Really?  Really?!

At this point our fate is clear: We are on the knife edge and headed into a universe where the Nook and iPad rule the world, and no one knows how to write their own names to save their lives.

All of this made me think of my journal and how utterly lost I would be right now without it.  I journaled a lot in high school and those notebooks are in my bedroom on a shelf where I can pull them down and be transported back to 17 in seconds.  Once college rolled around my journaling (and introspection, really) stopped almost altogether and didn't pick up again until I began this blog.  Then P&P became my journal, but there are still things that never made it onto the web and had nowhere else to go.  So at nearly the start of January, I began another journal, a hard copy journal, and it is slowly changing everything.

It's not just that I'm getting to know myself again, or even just that the personal things I'm exploring in my journal are reacquainting my mind with parts of my heart it often forgets to think about.  It's the act of sitting down and writing.  It feels so much more personal and lets you spend so much more time sitting quietly somewhere (without your email to distract you) and spending time with yourself. Oh, and all those little notes and words crossed out and arrows pointing from one paragraph to another, and smiley faces or exclamations to emphasize entire pages?  Those are the real gems, the things you can't really put down in a Word doc, the stuff that, when you look back on it later, you'll be like "Ohmygod, I'm a lunatic!"

Priceless, really.

So to the schools who are thinking of getting rid of penmanship instruction (which, let's face it, is just the tip of the iceberg), please don't.  I know you're so incredibly underfunded and this seems like such a waste of time, but it really isn't.  It's a skill, a talent, and completely, completely worth it.