Comment by atonse

You one-sidedly pick a skill for someone else, that they don't enjoy and don't find useful and that you can't reasonably justify as being useful.

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.

>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.

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.

In my opinion handwriting is as useless a skill as is possible. I never use my handwriting - ever. I likewise don’t churn butter, do arithmetic beyond what I can do in my head, or card yarn for my clothes.

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.

I don’t think you’re alone. And I appreciate your arguments. They’re valid, even if I disagree.

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.

It is a well-established fact that the mechanical act of handwriting notes is good for memorization. Perhaps it is meditative, perhaps we're just physical beings -- whatever it is, typewriting on a computer is not as good.

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."

No, that seems to be the prevailing viewpoint, which I find sad.

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.

> And it isn’t about him having that specific skill. But it’s about having a sense of pride in your work and not half-assing things.

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.

My son was in a school that taught English via immersion (they hired English teachers who couldn't even speak any German).

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).

I think there is something very different about handwriting than typing. Like, listen to a lecture and write notes on a pad, and then go to the lecture the next day and type them on a computer.

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.

> I still remember my grandfather telling us, everything you do, you must strive to do it well.

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.

I think your focus on kaligraphy is damaging to the lesson. You should pick something your son values, and teach him to drive it to perfection. Then watch him getting annoyed when you half-ass it in front of him.

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.

Handwriting is like drawing or music. Do you absolutely need it? No. But it is another mode of operation, that develops brain. Arguably, reading and writing/typing may become obsolete with next decade or two, thanks to voice interface enhanced by NN models.

There are other features about a piece of homework than how the handwriting appears. Is the content high quality? Did he learn? Did he do it efficiently? Did he enjoy doing it? Is it well-designed or beautiful in other ways? Etc. Your kid can feel pride about these other features of his work, some of which may be mutually exclusive with high quality handwriting! Selecting the handwriting as high priority is somewhat arbitrary on your part. I'd be concerned that you're overlooking other arguably more important signals of pride and joy in your kid's work by focusing on this one.

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)!

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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!

> Looking for a good counterpoint.

You only have a limited number of hours in life to devote to acquiring mastery, and there's 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.

>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'm over 40 and I was never taught that- not at school and certainly not at home.

>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.

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

I haven't seen the phrase 'critical thinking' in a long time. The concept of a standard has dropped, though kids are exposed to much more generalized criticism online than we were in school.

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.

Edit: Handwriting is super important. Typing on keyboards has an arbitrary mapping between action and outcome. Handwriting directly connects your muscles and mind together and gives permenancy to your handiwork that forces consideration. I keep a diary, by hand. I cross out mistakes and initial them. Best habit in my life, would not trade it for the world. Any serious thoughts I need to 'get out' or improve, go there.

I hated writing as a kid. I think part of the problem was that my thoughts were much faster than my pen, so I by default wrote as fast as I could. If I tried to write more legibly, my writing would still look poor compared to many others, and I'd have to slow to a fraction of the speed, so why bother? For instance, whenever I have to write my email address on a form (you know, it has to be perfectly legible or you won't receive your email), and half the letters still look like trash.

Counterpoint: Pareto principle. For 20% of effort you get 80% of results, so you are better of 1/5ing-assing 2 things for a total of less than half the effort and more than 50% more gains.

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?

Handwriting is one of the easiest methods by which you can practice fine motor skills and manual dexterity.

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.

I totally agree that children should be encouraged to write legibly, which means banning cursive.

I have recently seen some children work out things (mechanics, strategies, communication) to perfection in video games. They are incredibly perceptive critics of their own and other's performance.

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.

This is my own personal bias talking here but I think handwriting might be a poor subject to teach the wider lesson of taking pride in your work. My hand writing has always been terrible. It was a big deal 30 years ago (when I was at school) - it's not really been an issue since. But it's not whether it's outdated or not, it's just not something which easily improves with practice (at least, in my experience). Even when I spent a lot of time and energy trying to slowly draw individual letters the end result was still messy.

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).

Your son could have dysgraphia. My son (14, homeschooled) struggles with writing, and it was hard to not think of his poor writing as a result of him being lazy or not caring.

We purchased some material from Dianne Craft to help with his dysgraphia: https://diannecraft.org/dysgraphia-what-is-dysgraphia/

The exercises definitely helped.

My kids have gone to a Montessori school since pre-K and those schools teach handwriting. It's not done because of how much or little the student will use that handwriting later in life but more because, early on, it helps develop fine motor skills.

Now that they're in high school, my daughter has excellent penmanship. My son... not so much. :) But! He can do it.

Depends what profession you end up pursuing. If your son pursues computer science then likely never need to use handwriting ever again. As a 10+ year software engineer I've never needed to handwrite anything professionally, not once. Personally, still like to do the occasional handwritten card or letter for friends and family.

Calligraphy is an art form. The good thing about art is that you can't argue with it. Practice for the beauty!

Rather than argue about this, perhaps it may be better to see if you can get your son to be interested in practicing calligraphy, where the whole point of the exercise is to write in beautiful way. Otherwise, you're trying to win an argument about something that is often tangential to another goal.

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.

>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.

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.

45 here. I certainly didn't and don't appreciate the fact that I spent hours on Saturdays improving my cursive during early education because my writing was horrible unless I took too long to do it. I envy the younger generations.

I don't think it's a generational thing. I think it varies by family. Neither my parents nor grandparents really pushed that kind of message even though they were very focused on education. My family is Jewish-American and still have strong cultural memory of being deliberately excluded from opportunities despite effort. I absorbed it as a dual mandate to learn as much as possible and to play whatever game the schools needed you to play to get recognition.

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.

Pick something more impactful. It's hard to have a sense of pride for something that will be read once and promptly shredded. Maybe share examples of how having good penmanship has helped you?

I have a good hand and enjoy writing with the gel 0.5. Cursive was drilled into me as a child.

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.

By this logic, should not schools teach calligraphy?

Everything I do in my work (Software Engineering) is about just getting it done/ getting v1.0 over the line. Not my choice, but leadership don't seem to care about things being done well so long as they're done.

There’s plenty of scientific evidence that handwriting is good for you

https://redbooth.com/blog/handwriting-and-memory

Can you provide him with an example, such as a work notebook with notes taken during a meeting, or while thinking through a problem? Or a handwritten letter/card received from a close friend/partner.

By handwriting, do you mean cursive? Or just writing words on paper by hand?

Cursive truly is an outdated skill. When the forms really matter, they say please print -- and they do that for legibility.

Teachers don't care about handwriting anymore because handwriting is not part of standardized testing, and that is how schools and teachers are evaluated now.

learn him to draw? equal in some ways of creating w pen/paper. draw letters/fonts etc. lmk if u need help.

I went to the top private school in my country

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.