Local small business owner appears on Fox & Friends
posted by Brian Rodriguez on January 29th, 2009
Brian Rodriguez, who owns a local Web design and development firm, appeared on the Fox News morning show Fox & Friends today to speak out against a requirement to teach cursive writing in schools. Rodriguez, owner of Gator Works, says students would be better off becoming familiar with technology than working on penmanship. He got the appearance through a friend who lives in Nashville, Tenn., and books guests for talk shows. Fox & Friends wanted to do a segment on penmanship after a recent USA Today article about how Florida schools reinstated cursive writing lessons. “They were looking for a tech guy and a small business owner to talk about this,” he says. Rodriguez says he’s already gotten a lot of feedback from the appearance, including calls from people who called him “an elitist” because of his stance. See the video here.
Reprinted from The Baton Rouge Business Report “Daily Report” email from January 29, 2009.
Tags: Brian Rodriguez, Business Report, Cursive Writing, Fox & Friends, Fox News
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Kate Gladstone | January 30th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Defenders of cursive should note that even signatures don’t legally require cursive, and never have required it! (Don’t believe me on this one — ask your lawyer! Anyone telling you that signatures require cursive for legal validity has misrepresented the law of the land.)
An even more important thing that the idolators of cursive don’t want you to know or care about — research shows that the fastest and clearest handwriters avoid cursive. Highest-speed, highest-legibility handwriters tend to join only some letters — making the easiest joins, skipping the rest — and to use print-like shapes of letters whose printed and cursive shapes “disagree.”
Carole Roys | January 31st, 2009 at 5:47 pm
I’m one of those defenders of cursive Kate mentions above. I think Brian’s recommendation to eliminate cursive in schools is short sighted. There are those who don’t have computers, and children in those homes need a productive way to express themselves. Cursive seems more productive to me, it allows you to jot things down quicker. Removing cursive from the curriculum would further separate those who have, from those who have not.
Jess Planck | February 4th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Cursive is not the real problem, the emphasis on cursive is the problem. Basic handwriting should include cursive, but the emphasis on it for me was a horrible experience in those K-12 years.
So first I have the teacher in Phoenix, AZ who admonished me continuously for using the devil’s hand (left handed) then I suffered in Louisiana when my cursive wasn’t “pretty” enough. Luckily for me my parents and ONE concerned elementary teacher recognized the signs of dyslexia and kept me out of “special education”.
Cursive continued to thwart my education. When you get grades on essays based on the subjective quality of hand written letter forms instead of the language structure and content it sucks. Even in freaking college I had to discuss the issue with professors and have grades adjusted by argument.
So first, cursive is designed for a right-handed world and discriminates against the left-handed. Second, creating letter forms is an art, therefore subjective (I think it’s called… oh Typography!)
Teach it, YES! Force cursive, NO! I really think the interview was to vague on the subject.