“I prefer to write in cursive,” Halle said.
The two are proud members of the cursive club at Holmes Middle School in Virginia. Cursive has been on the rise for years. More than two dozen states now require cursive instructionp in schools since the 2010 Common Core standards missed the skill.
Kennerson, a multilingual teacher at Holmes, started the club at the middle school when students couldn’t read what she wrote on the board. They just stared blankly at her, she said.
“I realized they didn’t know how to write or read cursive,” Kenerson said. For a teacher who firmly believes that quotes deserve to be italicized and has a new one on her board every month, Kenerson wanted to give students a chance to understand the magic of italicized writing.
Hallie O’Brien writes during an after-school cursive club led by teacher Sherris Kenerson at Holmes Middle School in Alexandria, Virginia. (Anna Rose Leyden for NPR)
The club exploded in popularity this past winter with local news stations and The Washington Post crediting him with “keeping cursive alive.” Since then, Kennerson has been scratching her head trying to figure out why she’s gotten so much attention.
She has received fan mail from retirees and teachers (in italics, of course). She has heard from people in Idaho, Pennsylvania and Florida. She’s even had Zoom conversations with educators in Oklahoma and Maryland to explain how she runs the club.
“I’m stunned,” Kennerson said. “I’m just going along with the ride.”
She decided that cursive is a way to hold on to the past, and many people are not ready to let it go.
Kennerson’s after-school club is a local example of a statewide trend — cursive writing is making a comeback in many classrooms across the country. Teachers and lawmakers attribute the resurgence to nostalgia and some others evidence of educational benefits. But surprisingly, curves and sweeps are controversial among experts, and some argue that cursive adds no real value to students, especially in the age of artificial intelligence.
“I have seen no evidence that cursive confers any particular cognitive or learning benefit beyond that conferred by handprinting,” Mark Warshauer, professor of education at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in an email to NPR. He noted that the cognitive benefits of handwriting for young students in general are now well established.
Warschauer, who founded UC Irvine Digital Learning Labopposes teaching cursive in schools as a “waste of time and effort” when printed handwriting, voice-to-text applications and keyboards are readily available to students.
Much of the cursive debate centers around classroom time. Should educators spend precious minutes teaching another way to write on paper when technology is so ubiquitous?
Sean 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 increasingly using tablets and styluses to take notes.
“It means that as a country we probably need to help our students become multimodal,” Datchuk said. They should not only be able to write by hand using type, but also use cursive, type and interact with technology, he said.
However, technology is not the answer to everything for students, he said.
“One of the dirty secrets behind spell checking and AI is that you still have to be able to type to use them well,” Datchuk said.
He and a team of researchers compiled the known research on the teaching of cursive. Some studies used outdated technology such as inkwells and quill tips, so they were cut. Some of the others lacked details of how the instruction was carried out. With those caveats, Datchuk said, preliminary evidence suggests that cursive writing can improve spelling.
Datchuk said the “special sauce” for cursive is that students have to pay more attention to how the letters connect when they write.
Kenerson, the founder of the cursive club, said she has seen anecdotal evidence that cursive helps students with dyslexia. Sharon Quirk-Silva, the California assembly member who introduced the state’s cursive bill, said she’s also heard anecdotal evidence that cursive can be therapeutic for students with special needs.
From Quirk-Silva’s 2023 italic mandateshe said the reception from voters has been overwhelmingly positive.
Datchuk, a professor at the University of Iowa, said he gets a steady stream of emails from people asking about cursive, but his reason for learning the technique is personal — his 8-year-old Harry Potter-reading son still passes his grandmother’s birthday cards to his father to read.
“It brings to the fore the larger generational divide that probably happened not only to my sons, but to children and young adults in the United States who simply never received instruction in cursive,” said Datchuk, a former elementary school teacher.
Antonio Benavidez, an 11-year-old in Kennerson’s cursive club, exemplifies this divide. His father heard about the club and immediately sent Antonio.
Now he stuck out his tongue and stared intently at the nooses before him. He likes to exercise the curves and said his normally stretched press has improved.
“I was like, ‘Are you kidding me, what do I need this for?’ Benavidez remembers telling his father. But now, “Yeah, I like it,” he said.
When there is a moment of silence as the students repeat their i’s and t’s, Antonio whispers, “I love that sound.”
“The sound of a pencil when it’s quiet is just so beautiful,” he explained.
Steve Graham, a Regents professor at Arizona State University’s College of Innovation in Teaching and Learning, says that despite the media attention, cursive never really got anywhere. Graham, who has authored numerous books on writing, said he has been hearing about “the death of handwriting or the death of cursive” for about 50 years. At one point, his answers to reporters’ questions became “sarcastic,” he said.
“I’d say, ‘Well, hell, I didn’t hear it was buried,'” Graham said. “Can you tell me where? I would like to visit the grave.”
Graham is ambivalent about whether cursive or print is a more effective tool for students. He said he thinks the fixation on cursive is an adult phenomenon.
“I’m often amazed at how much attention it gets,” Graham said. With more studies, Graham said he thinks the differences in benefits between the two types of handwriting will be negligible. He said the more important thing is to take the time to teach children to write.
Back in Kennerson’s cursive club, 11-year-old Conrad Thompson said he was the only student in his history class who could read his teacher’s giant printout of the Declaration of Independence. It makes her proud.
“I hope one day me and my family can go see it in person,” Conrad said.
As for Sandy and Halle, the couple has no doubts about their newfound skills.
“Are you coming back next week?” Hallie asked Sandy about the after school club.
