Matthew Albright
Staff Writer
Published: Saturday, January 7, 2012 at 6:01 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, January 6, 2012 at 11:08 p.m.
While educators all over the country talk about beefing up technology in schools, one Louisiana teacher is trying to make sure an old-fashioned skill isn’t getting neglected — handwriting.
Kathy Simmons-O’Neal, a reading teacher in West Carrol Parish, is attending “Handwriting in the 21st Century? An Educational Summit” in Washington, D.C., where educators from across the country will discuss ways to implement handwriting instruction into the core standards that schools nationwide will soon need to adopt.
Some school systems are debating whether to eliminate handwriting instruction, but it is still taught in Terrebonne and Lafourche, and there has been no public discussion aimed at changing that.
At Thibodaux Elementary, for example, every child uses a laptop at school to play learning games and participate in virtual classroom activities, but students still have to learn to write. On Friday, kindergartner Luke Legendre practiced scrawling his name on dotted-line handwriting sheets.
The same is true in Terrebonne Parish. Elementary Assessment and Testing Supervisor Stacy Solet said learning to write well is a critical skill.
“All children need to learn how to write, in both print and cursive. It helps the flow of the thought process,” she said. “We want everybody to be able to read the Declaration of Independence, after all.”
Solet said that while the local public school system has been adding computer labs and encouraging students to spend more time there, teachers still require students to write the old-fashioned way.
“We are encouraging teachers to, say, have their students write their final drafts of an essay in cursive,” she said. “We’re not sure what’s going to come down with the common core standards about this, but it’s part of our curriculum.”
For her part, O’Neal is strongly against turning the focus away from pen and paper to a mouse and keyboard.
O’Neal has taught both special- and regular-education classes for 20 years. Over that time, she has noticed that students as high up as fifth grade have had “atrocious” handwriting.
“This is a problem all over the world,” said O’Neal, who is president of the Louisiana Reading Association and serves with the International Reading Association. “I just read an article about students in Greece having the same problem.”
That’s why O’Neal is attending the conference and pushing for handwriting’s inclusion in standard curricula.
Handwriting is important for several reasons, she said. First, in poor or rural areas, like her own parish, computers aren’t as common as they are elsewhere.
“I have children in my classroom who have never had access to computers and might not have them in the near future,” she said.
Second, research shows that the physical action of writing helps students absorb knowledge.
Finally, O’Neal argues that sometimes computers just aren’t sufficient.
“My husband who works for a major oil company,” she said. “When he’s out on a rig, he and his workers are often making notes on paper, and they just don’t have a place to do that on the computer. Even with computers, you still need to know how to write.”
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