When I first read about the May who was deterred from writing by a authority figure telling him that his handwriting has terrible, I thought, that's absurd. Handwriting has nothing to do with the quality of what is said.
Then I thought back to my experiences in elementary school. I was always complimented on my handwriting. I can remember asking my mother to buy me those workbooks that has the three lines and you have to trace the letters printed in the lines and then write them free hand. I loved doing those activities because I knew that I was good at them and that I would get more positive reinforcement after completion. This is what started my love for writing.
That said, I was told in third grade that I had a speech impediment; that I couldn't speak correctly. This news made me want to avoid talking, and marks that time when I stopped verbally voluntarily participating in class. I didn't want to speak incorrectly and get chastised for it.
So maybe it is not so absurd that the May abhorred writing so much, with his awful handwriting being the starting point. It's amazing really how much influence such comments can have on our development. It took me years to get over the belief that "I can't speak right" and actually participate in classes, and it is something that still affects me today.
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3 comments:
So, how can we transfer your observation to improving our own classroom someday? Should find a nicer way to tell kids they need to practice more on their handwriting or their “s” sounds? For me, when someone told me I was doing something wrong, I usually worked harder to fix it. I hated when a teacher or coach would dance around the truth and not be straight up with me. I would also always need specific ways to improve and not just a hanging critical comment. For example, my tennis coach would always say that my second serve was not good enough to play singles. Well, this comment made me self-conscious of my second serve and got my confidence down. Instead, he should have said, “you have a great first serve (compliment) but need to work a little harder at getting your second serve down (criticism) and to do so, practice it this way (specific step toward improvement). My boss at Tussey Mountain always tells us to compliment, criticize, then compliment again. If you start right in on the criticism, their confidence will be down and will be more likely to give up faster.
Soooo, my point is, as teachers, it is critical that we give positive feedback to improve the outcome and not just negative criticism that will give a child a stigma throughout their life.
Yeah I agree with Kelsi that positive feedback really is the best policy for any type of learning environment. We do not, as future educators, want to derail our own students. Even though I'll be focusing on high school students does not mean handwriting seizes to exist.
People are still learning to write. I have a Shakespeare class this semester and he told us about a quiz we were having the other day. We had to take home an article and come up with the main thesis of the article. He sent us an email making sure we, "Gave him a good solid paragraph that was legible." No one relies on hand writing anymore in college. . .seems to be diminishing at a slow pace. Needless to say more than 80% of the class just typed the response. This, in relation to handwriting, made me think of how more of an importance there should be place upon it. It teaches us to write down our thoughts before we say them. This could work as practice and how we formulate what we want to say before we say it. We can analyze how we think and what we do right and wrong. It's just another option for someone who might want to use it!
Whenever I think about handwriting I immediately think of my brother. My younger brother Eddie has always struggled with handwriting. Teachers take off points constantly for his illegible print- and having proofread countless papers of his I can attest to the horror that is his writing. When reading his writing it immediately puts a negative connotation to his words. Having to struggle to decipher every word makes the reading, not to mention grading, process all the more difficult, and a lot less enjoyable. Therefore, I tend to think very highly of handwriting. Teachers used to stress the importance of handwriting constantly when I was in grade school and I took pride, like Meg, in my neat print. Even though just as one is not supposed to judge a book by its cover, one should not judge a work by its print, it does make a difference- hence the trend to type instead of print work today as noticed by Cortney. Therefore, I think it is important that handwriting continue to be taught in schools to help students continue to practice their print. However, in a world increasingly reliant on technology, the need for legible print is decreasing. As long as one can type correctly it doesn't really matter if their handwriting is subpar- so how important is it really? I guess that's up to the writer to decide.
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