Published: October 12, 2009 05:14 pm      

Penmanship — 10/13/09

Lexington high school teacher bringing back cursive writing

Baby boomers surely can identify with the efforts of Lexington teacher Roger Guffey to improve the penmanship of his high school students. After all, most of us in our sixth decade — or older — went to elementary school at a time when we received grades for penmanship and some of us were praised for our beautiful cursive writing skills.

But times have changed. Instead of turning in papers written by hand, many of today’s school children — including those in the lower elementary grades — are turning in homework typed on a computer keyboard.

Guffey, who teaches at Lexington’s Lafayette High School, has launched a campaign to bring back cursive writing after noticing that most of his students printed most of the notes they took in class.

“They know how to do cursive writing, but they just don’t use it much,” Guffey said. “So, over time, their skills erode.”

Guffey recently held a cursive writing contest for pupils in his four studies-skills classes. His goal was to help them polish up. Top writers earned blue ribbons, and the winners got a new fountain pen.

Fifteen-year-old sophomore Seth Napier won the pen. Writing in cursive was something Napier said he’d rarely done since he learned it in the second grade.

Freshmen Deandre Means and Tray Chester said it wasn’t easy to write cursive after many years. “I hadn’t written in cursive in a long time,” the 14-year-old Chester said, “so it took a while.”

In an age when keyboarding is so common, we’re not so sure good penmanship holds quite the importance it once did, but it’s a skill that can come in handy when writing checks and signing your name. We may not use it like we used to do, but it’s a skill we all should possess.