My perspective is that there is an ever growing wealth of knowledge and skills and only so much time in the day. We see this conflict in some hardcore parents who sign their kids up for an entire childhood of studies.
I think it’s deeply important to have pride in your work and to do it carefully, patiently, methodically. I’m not sure this must be practiced with any specific skill.
I think doctors are an example of how this can be at odds with reality. Do they not take pride in their work, or do they have just so much to study that they cannot afford the expense?
I think it’s also important to identify that this discussion often conflates two things: cursive handwriting and legible printing. I believe schools still endeavour to teach kids to print legibly.
But at least have that debate in your head. Is this a skill I want to put time into improving?
And “nobody else cares” shouldn’t be a _major_ part of that argument.
Our school doesn’t teach them to print legibly. That’s my point. I’ve seen his homework and sometimes it borders on illegible.
I disagree. Nobody else caring is a strong indication the skill isn't that valuable. If nobody else cares and he can't see a reason to care himself then why would he decide it's a skill he wants to put time into improving?
Tbh it sounds like your son has considered the merits and decided it's not a skill worth working on. You just disagree.
This would translate to other more important tasks not getting done.
Hmmm didn't think about it that way. Definitely a more practical approach.
I honestly can't think of the last time I wrote anything down except my signature, and I doubt this trend is going to reverse.
But as many have stated, maybe I'm just a cranky old dad and things will work themselves out with things he's genuinely interested in. :-)
Writing is an invaluable tool for exercising our cognitive faculties. Extensive and diverse research has suggested links between writing and mental capacities in such domains as memory, critical thinking, creativity, verbal skills, and overall health.
Keep encouraging it.
If you want him to engage in an activity, you need to show that it has some value, any value at all.
Taking pride in pointless activity is, well, pointless.
Powerful argument for Sloyd Woodworking instruction coming back to schools:
https://rainfordrestorations.com/category/woodworking-techni...
>Students may never pick up a tool again, but they will forever have the knowledge of how to make and evaluate things with your hand and your eye and appreciate the labor of others
See my other post in this discussion for a link to Kate Gladstone's site and as well as SE Briem's list of calligraphy texts.
A touchstone for me on this is John Quincy Adams' translation of Wieland's Oberon:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/458794
which it is well worth finding a facsimile copy of.
Or see:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/21860485@N06/albums/7215764113...
One thing to try, would be to have the child write thank you notes.
The kids all have their own iPads in the classroom but they seem to be used very sparingly, mostly for extra drills occupying kids who finish their handwriting-heavy schoolwork early.
My problem was exacerbated because I sat next to a kid who was a great artist. He used to draw comic strips (at age 9-10) and the lettering looked professional (at least to my eyes). Yes if I had spent an enormous amount of time and effort I could have improved my handwriting but I don't think I'd ever be able to produce 1/5th the quality of what he did. My hand just wasn't (and isn't) that steady.
With other subjects you can spend a lot less time and improve quality a lot easier and faster. With something like code layout it's much easier to brute force tidiness in a way that just isn't possible with handwriting (or drawing).
You aren't alone, but I think this is terrible advice. You should figure out what you want to do and find the best way to do it. The best way will probably involve half-assing a lot of stuff, since you only have a finite amount of time/energy.
I had a teacher at school who used to say "if it's worth doing then it's worth doing properly", but he mainly said it about things that weren't worth doing.
Big life lesson for me was "if it's worth doing then it's worth doing poorly" Even if it's more worthwhile doing it a little better (and once done poorly you can work toward that if it makes sense).
> I distinguish four types. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.
I try to be clever and lazy in all things :-)
"Due to complexities in their manufacturing line, a popular toothpaste company would occasionally, accidentally, ship empty boxes to their customers.
Not only did the boxes cost money to ship, but when customers received the boxes they would often complain. Ultimately the toothpaste company began to lose customers who would seek out inventory for their stores from other, more reliable suppliers.
One day the factory gathered their top managers and creative minds and told them they would need to focus their efforts on solving the empty box problem.
After nearly six months and hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on research and ideation, the factory came up with what they thought was a fairly smart smart solution to their problem. They would add highly sensitive scales to the factory line.
Any time an empty box would reach the scale it would be weighed, the line would stop and a loud buzzer would sound, at which point a factory worker would need to walk over and remove the empty box. Problem solved, right?
Yet the company quickly ran into another issue: just a few months after rolling out the new scale system there were no empty boxes being reported. The scales weren't encountering any empty boxes at all.
Confused by the results, the factory manager traveled down to the factory from his city office to see what was going on. He noticed that by one of the supply lines, just a few feet before one of the new scales, someone had placed an inexpensive desk fan. The manager noticed that as boxes rolled down the line, empty ones would merely be blown off the belt by the desk fan.
When asked about the fan, an employee on the factory line standing nearby explained: "Oh that? We put it there when we got tired of hearing the buzzer ring."
There is a certain type of manager who is "hardworking", which in this case probably means something more along the lines of overzealous. The overzealous manager enters the organization and starts puting processes into place that assume a bunch of "hardworking" subordinates rather than average subordinates, which most of them are (by definition). When the subordinates don't meet expectations and the process fails, the manager blames subordinates for not working hard enough, so he drives them harder, which then causes issues with morale, retention, etc. damaging the organization.
So, the "hardowrking"/overzealous manager believes problems can be solved by working harder, rather than trying to craft a process that realistically works for the average employee. The "lazy" but intelligent manager finds a way to get just enough done to satisfy business goals. The hardworking manager gets a lot done in the short term, but burns out the team in the long term. The lazy manager keeps their division humming at an unexceptional but reliable pace and keeps the business printing money.
A giant bureaucracy like the military is more concerned about reliable, predictable, fool-proof plans and execution than brilliant and gallant leadership that could backfire in the wrong circumstances. So the quote is kind of about the priorities of a large organization.
Not sure if you're talking about the GK Chesterton quote, but https://qz.com/990130/in-defense-of-amateurs
Counterpoint to the the inner voice saying: It's not worth doing because it won't be great.
Woody Allen: "Showing up is 80 percent of life."
In hindsight it seems kind of obvious, but I was so used to the parental pressure to just do everything perfectly from my earlier years that it had never occurred to me to prioritize. Although I suppose it does still require you to have a mature sense of priorities, since skipping all assignments to party every day is obviously not healthy.
A famous man whose name I forget once said "Plans are useless, planning is indispensable," and I would like to paraphrase it as "notes are useless, note-taking is indispensable."
This is very, very true for me. I read, optimistically, 5% of my notes.
As a corollary, I’m unable to take notes if the notepad is too fancy. I get analysis paralysis from something like a moleskine, like something this nice deserves nicely formatted notes. Only cheapo gas station notpads work for me.
Given we are at software engineering forum where most of us likely use ticket tracking system which are basically fancy notes... I feel your statement is disingenuous.
I also found writing notes to be helpful for memorization, though I never really tested it against typing notes. Writing legibly was not a necessity, my notes were an unreadable mess.
Writing takes up all of my concentration, and I literally do not hear what the person is saying next while I'm writing down what they just said.
I’d like to counter with “perfect is the enemy of good”. Knowing when to half-ass something can be a skill in of itself.
> This would be a case where half-assing it did not.
Did not what? Did that woosh over my head?
> Knowing when half-assing something can be a skill in of itself.
Maybe you'd have more luck teaching him the latter if you focused on skills/work that are clearly useful. Or useful to him atleast even if you disagree that handwriting is outdated.
Take pride in your work and doing it well is a useful lesson (and unfortunately not something I'm great at personally) but if he doesn't see any value in that specific work he'll never even comprehend the difference between work done well and work half-assed, never mind strive for it. All he see's is you asking him to put more effort into a pointless activity.
I reckon this is one of the reasons that sports and arts are relatively successful at teaching kids life skills like discipline. It's easier for kids to see the immediate value of being good at those than other skills, so their more motivated and lessons stick.
I know my son especially will. Well, he IS obsessed with Soccer.
We purchased some material from Dianne Craft to help with his dysgraphia: https://diannecraft.org/dysgraphia-what-is-dysgraphia/
The exercises definitely helped.
You mean so they can work 60 hours for a mediocre salary with little upwards mobility that won't even let them buy a house anymore while sinking in student debt?
Knowing when work for the sake of work is a waste of your life is a very important skill now that you can't walk into a random company Monday morning and come out with a job
Then, wait a week, and take a test without reviewing anything.
My money, based on my experience, is on you better remembering the handwritten notes. I think this is because you cannot write as fast as you type, so you have to hear, think about what is important, and summarize when handwriting. When typing, you can get almost all the words someone says typed out. So you switch to "hear-to-type" mode without thinking.
So, I think it is important for learning to have that skill. I think it is better in the real world too, for some use cases. If I am in a meeting with a counterparty, I take hand written notes. I rarely look at the notes after. Why? I remember what we talked about.
I used to bring a computer and type out notes - and I still do if I need perfect information to reference later - but when I do that, my notes take the place of my memory.
It seems more efficient to handwrite my notes and have my memory be my memory instead.
Notes are an incredibly poor substitute for putting in the actual work of learning.
They are probably much better than your grandfather at both game and meta-game, because they are standing on the shoulders of slightly larger people. They are familiar with the conventions and input methods and community and thus have a base understanding that few older people do.
And I actually have zero issues with him playing video games. The sports ones involve building your team, trading players, etc. That's all pretty complex stuff.
I also had terrible handwriting despite tons of experience. Meanwhile I knew kids who wrote like typewriters from the 4th grade just due to natural talent.
I'm over 40 and I was never taught that- not at school and certainly not at home.
We were penalized for untidy work in school though. That was my early years in India.
This seems fairly contradictory to me. He's not choosing to do it, he's forced to learn some outdated skill. Let him excel in some useful skill, like mathematics.
All education is a crude attempt at telepathy and while repeated confrontation can transport the value you place upon a thing, it does not make it intrinsic. Also skills are filtered for right to exist every generation. Skills become value less is a normal and even healthy thing.
"do what your son wants' gets you children raised on an ipad with no education in the arts.
Your grandfathers advice might have been sane back in the day when you could only do one or two things and so quickly hit diminishing returns, but today it does not matter greatly.
More emotional argument. What do you call the person who does more than they get rewarded for (over a long time?): a sucker. And who wants to be a sucker?
On the other hand he had an incredible reputation and was admired as a leader across the world. Perhaps his attention to detail mattered even when it seemed like a waste.
Now that they're in high school, my daughter has excellent penmanship. My son... not so much. :) But! He can do it.
The same reason we don't wash clothes on a washboard in a river anymore?
Teaching how to make pretty smudges on dead trees to store and communicate information is in the exact same bucket, to me. It's a an utterly useless and wasteful anachronism, like mechanical watchmaking or praying. Given that we have limited time, energy, and budget to educate children, it is actively harmful to their future.
Additionally, there are many cases where it's possible to type and print something, but faster to just write it. Ex. writing the address on an envelope rather than making one in Word and trying to remember which way the envelopes go into the printer (which inexplicably is the opposite of the picture on the tray).
Writing is only faster if you don't know how to type, which is a useful skill that is relevant today and should be taught.
Envelopes and writing on them (and MS Word, for that matter) are more of the same last-century anachronisms. Why are we teaching new people paper-based skills at all? Paper is useless outside of visual art.
not even on a white board?
Handwriting was always my worst grade in elementary school and don't really know Palmer script any longer.
About 5 years ago I was inspired by a friend casually doing some amazing whiteboard art at work, and ended up trying a more calligraphic approach (not fancy gothic patterns, just that kind of intent/attention.) A lot slower, but a bunch of coworkers privately requested that I keep up the new approach...
Starting with grade 1 the kids wrote exclusively with fountain pens, and were marked early on on penmanship. Except in English, where they were allowed to write with pencils or biros so of course they did because it was a change, and the teachers didn't seem to care about penmanship at all.
Two decades later his writing with a fountain pen in any language is as clear as a bell, while anything else results in a scrawl. I don't believe it's because the tool is superior in some way, I think it's simply the attention to detail got wired in.
==
An amusing nerd side point: In grade 1 they learnt a letter a week, and from that were reading by xmas. To avoid confusing the kids, English was supposed to use "German letterforms" but really they are pretty much the same! Anyway the funny thing is that in English they start the first week with "A" (Apple, Ant), then "B" (Banana, Buffalo) and so on. German was taught in the alphabetic frequency order: "E" (Elefant), then "N" (Nase), "I" (Igel) and so on. Disappointingly, Christmas came before they got to ß as I was curious what they would do (no word starts with it).
You and I both have terrible handwriting. In my life, it hasn't been a hindrance to my work as a software engineer so maybe your son has a point. However, I do agree that doing things well has merit but maybe reframing it will get you farther along this goal. And lastly, maybe you can achieve the same goal through other means? Perhaps in playing an instrument or practicing some other skill. I think the value you want to teach your son is practicing something and doing it well. It doesn't need to be handwriting.
Then you insist that they do it well.
But that's not enough - you also insist that they have to want to do it well.
Which you also can't justify, other than very abstractly, by insisting that everything they do - including things they didn't choose themselves, don't care about, don't find useful and won't actually find useful - they should want to do well.
I'd be more worried for someone who didn't find that preposterous.
Personally I feel that people who associate poor handwriting with a lack of self respect or a lack of interest in their work are being too judgemental. It isn't really meaningful that their grandfather, who grew up in a time when handwriting was the only option when not seated at a desk, thought clear handwriting was a matter of respect. To put the extent of the fundamental cultural change in perspective, in a class I was teaching earlier today, there was an incident of many students asking others for pens to sign an attendance sheet with because even if they do handwrite their notes, it's with a digital pen. Even I hadn't carried or owned a regular pen in many years, having only about a year ago bought some and decided to keep them in places I might need them so I don't have to go digging in the handful of times a year that I might actually need one.
Then there's the other issue that comes with making anything a matter of respect, where, as a child I had ended up with a somewhat 'custom' writing style that was a mix of both cursive and print due to frequently moving between countries which taught things differently. It was easily legible while still being fast enough to take notes with, but because it wasn't the "respectable" style, I got plenty of grief from teachers at the school even though they too insisted that any assignment of actual value be typed up and the handwriting was only for classroom notes which would end up in the bin at the end of the year anyway.
It's fine if you want to try to encourage your child to improve the quality of their handwriting, but telling them that they need to do it for respect is, in my opinion, an outdated idea on par with the previously common ideas about how being a lefty needed to be 'corrected'. Wanting to teach them to take pride in their work is good too, but, pride in one's work comes from the quality of the work, of which the handwriting is an increasingly miniscule part. A doctor shows pride in their work by providing the most effective care for their patients, not by writing an especially legible note.
You only have a limited number of hours in life to devote to acquiring mastery, and there is a nearly unlimited number of subjects that are worth mastering.
Instead of trying to be good at everything you're doing, decide what you're going to be good at, what you're going to outsource and half-ass, and work towards being good at the former, while getting by/paying other people to do with the latter.
You need to take pride in something, but you're fooling yourself if you think you can do everything well - or that its a good investment of your time.
Maybe instead of forcing him to become an expert at a skill with incredibly poor return on investment, you should drive him towards becoming an expert at... Writing.
I will still take notes and write my thoughts out on paper. It somehow manages to provide me focus and shut out distractions. It’s also a space I can do a lot of free form thinking and tie things together.
Assists shouldn’t be given at an early age. I believe they are counter productive.
Another example. We never used calculators till 11th grade. All calculations had to be done by hand. I can still quickly approximate to know if numbers are in the ballpark.
Cursive handwriting was not optional, same for spelling. Teachers would flunk people and no, there are no repeats at that school. From 200 in kinder, only 70 finished HS
You are on the right side, find people who give a damn about education.
Also, I really enjoy watching a thought literally flow out of my body onto a page. There is something very disconnected about pressing keys on a keyboard to see the words appear on a screen -- sometimes I find myself in a state of flow on a computer where it all seems to 'click', but contrast that with handwriting and I can get right into flow the instant graphite or ink meets paper.
There is nothing redeeming about artisanal hand scripting other than writing annotations on objects to label them, and even then a label maker does a better job in every dimension. Typing is a fundamental skill in the modern world, and type written text is not just considerably more legible, it’s also indexable for search etc.
Having a sense of pride is often coupled with a sense of utility and purpose. Few people feel pride in useless exercises done for rote purposes and celebration of the way it was done in the past. Some certainly do, and god bless them. But I feel more pride in my code than artisanal scribbles, in my handiwork, in my learning, etc. Kids are no different. Maybe they feel pride in their Minecraft creations. Is a complex red stone build with intricate visual designs and creative use in game not more compelling and interesting than manipulating a wood stick to make glyphs? A lot of people think the things a kid takes pride in aren’t worth taking pride in, and instead try to make them take pride in something from their own childhood.
They are misidentifying a lack of interest in your interests with a lack of pride in their work.
A couple months ago I had to write about five sentences by hand, and it dawned on me that that single act was probably twice as much handwriting as I’d done the entire prior two years, not counting signatures and such.
It was a really weird thing to realize.
If you want your kid to practice high quality craftsmanship, to feel pride in a job well-done, let him choose another craft where the quality is inherently relevant, like woodworking or sewing (or calligraphy)!
.
A second angle. Imagine you are trying to learn to write code and someone insisted you use a difficult keyboard: each key is a different size, they're spaced out across the desk facing different directions. (Or, say, insisted you use punch cards). You'll surely have a harder time learning to code!
You can post anything online and get global feedback (at least in theory, people are silo-ing more everyday). You can see others get harsh feedback. There's youtube channels dedicated to tearing apart X Y and Z products for their flaws.
Unfortunately the internet returns most people to the mean or average, within a bell curve. There's some incredible knowledge online, but it's not enough to replace a critical university teacher leaning over your shoulder, or working under a master craftsman and enduring his continual destruction of your failed attempts. Standards are hard won.
Holding an internal standard and conscience has been subverted upvotes/downvotes and by the internet in general, in my view.
Hypotheticaly subtract internet points and approval seeking from the online world, and you'll see the idea of a individual standard re-emerge, I bet.
Cursive truly is an outdated skill. When the forms really matter, they say please print -- and they do that for legibility.
But my wife and I struggle to get anyone to agree with us. The teachers don’t seem to care (which my son is happy to relay to me).
Other parents say why bother, it’s an outdated skill (I actually disagree, even though my handwriting is often bad from lack of practice, when I do fill up forms by hand, I understand the importance of legibility).
But again, to me it is symptomatic of a larger issue where I feel that more and more, kids are not taught to have a sense or standard in the quality of their work and improve upon it, regardless of the particular skill.
I still remember my grandfather telling us, everything you do, you must strive to do it well. It was about having pride in your work.
Am I alone in this? Looking for a good counterpoint.