“I prefer to write with insults,” said Halle.
The two are proud club members at Holmes Middle School in Virginia. Cursive has been on the rise for years now. In addition to Twelve states now require cursive instruction schools after the 2010 standard exceeded the ability.
Kenerson, a multilingual teacher at Holmes, started a middle school club where students could read his writing on the board. They just stared at him without saying anything.
“I saw that they couldn’t write or read by putting words together,” said Kenerson. For a teacher who firmly believes that citations deserve to be written in a loopy style, and has a new one on his board every month, Kenerson wanted to give students a chance to understand the magic of loopy writing.
Halle O’Brien writes during an after-school wrestling club, run by teacher Sherisse Kenerson, at Holmes Middle School in Alexandria, Va. (NPR’s Anna Rose Layden)
The club has been popular this past winter, with local news stations and Washington Post praising it as “keeping the curse alive.” Since then, Kenerson has been wracking his brain trying to figure out why it has attracted so much attention.
You’ve received fan mail from retirees and teachers (drafted, of course). He’s heard from people in Idaho, Pennsylvania and Florida. He’s even had Zoom calls with teachers in Oklahoma and Maryland to explain how he runs the club.
“I’m surprised,” Kenerson said. “I’m just walking.”
He decided that swearing is a way of holding on to the past, and most people are not ready to let it go.
Kenerson’s after-school club is a local example of a nationwide trend — handwriting is back in classrooms across the country. Educators and legislators are praising the resurgence of nostalgia and more evidence of educational benefits. But surprisingly, curves and cursive are controversial among experts, and some argue that cursive doesn’t add any real value to students, especially in this age of artificial intelligence.
“I have seen no evidence that cursive provides any cognitive or learning benefit over that provided by hand printing,” wrote Mark Warschauer, a professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, in an email to NPR. He noted that the cognitive benefits of young students writing by hand in general are already well established.
Warschauer, who founded UC Irvine Digital learning labopposes teaching cursive in schools as a “waste of time and effort” when handwriting, voice-to-text applications, and keyboards are easily accessible to students.
Most of the cursed debates occur during the classroom. Should teachers be spending precious minutes teaching an alternative to paper when technology is so prevalent?
Shawn Datchuk, a special education professor at the University of Iowa, said the answer shouldn’t be one or the other. In his college classroom, he sees students using tablets and a stylus to take notes.
“What that means is that as a country, we may need to help our students become more diverse,” Datchuk said. They not only need to write by hand using print, but also use cursive, type, and communication with technology, he said.
He said technology is not for all students.
“One of the dirty secrets behind spell check and artificial intelligence is that you still need to know how to spell to use those effectively,” Datchuk said.
He and a team of researchers compiled well-known studies on inclusive teaching. Some subjects used primitive technology such as ink fountains and quill tips, so they were cut. A few others were missing details on how the order was made. With those caveats, Datchuk said, preliminary evidence shows cursive writing can improve spelling.
Datchuk said the “special sauce” of combining words is that students have to pay close attention to how the letters connect when they write.
Kenerson, the founder of the cursive club, said he has seen anecdotal evidence that cursive helps students with dyslexia. Sharon Quirk-Silva, the California assembly member who introduced the district bill, said she has also heard evidence that cursive can be therapeutic for students with special needs.
From Quirk-Silva’s 2023 binding obligationhe said the reception of the voters was very good.
Datchuk, a professor at the University of Iowa, said he gets a lot of emails from people asking about cursive, but his reason for learning the method was personal — his 8-year-old son, who is reading Harry Potter, still passes his grandmother’s birthday cards to his father to read.
“That creates a huge generational divide that may have happened not only to my sons, but to children and young adults across the United States who have never been taught about profanity,” said Datchuk, a former elementary school teacher.
Antonio Benavides, an 11-year-old in Kenerson’s club, exemplifies that divide. His father heard about the group and immediately sent Antonio.
Now, he sticks out his tongue and stares at the loops in front of him. He enjoys practicing curves, and said his general printing skills have improved.
I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me, the curse club, why do I need that?'” Benavides remembers telling his father. But now, “Yes, I like it,” he said.
When there is a moment of silence as the students practice oi and t, Antonio whispers, “I like that sound.”
“The sound of a pencil when it’s quiet is very sweet,” he explained.
Steve Graham, Regents Professor at Arizona State University’s College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, argues that despite the media attention, cursive hasn’t really gone anywhere. Graham, who has written many books about writing, said that he had been hearing about “the death of handwriting or the death of the curse” for about 50 years. At one point, his answers to reporters’ questions were “good,” he said.
“I was like, ‘Well, I didn’t hear there was a burial,'” Graham said. “Can you tell me where? I would like to visit the grave.”
Graham is unsure whether cursive or print is a more effective tool for students. He said he thought corrections to cursive was something for adults.
“I’m often surprised at how much attention it gets,” Graham said. With more studies, Graham said he thinks the difference in benefits between the two types of handwriting won’t be significant. He said the important thing is to spend time teaching children to write.
Back in Kenerson’s cursive club, 11-year-old Conrad Thompson said he was the only student in his history class who couldn’t read his teacher’s printed copy of the Declaration of Independence. It makes him proud.
“I hope, one day, my family and I will see for ourselves,” said Conrad.
As for Sandi and Halle, the two have no doubts about their new talent.
“Will you be back next week?” Halle asked Sandi about the after school club.
