#and my parents fuckgin. GHOSTED ME LMAO

[unionizedwizard]

the first time i really experienced the "oh i am getting old huh" phenomenon, i was 21 & tutoring this lovely little 5th grader living down the street - i was helping with her homework and i noticed her handwriting. i went like "oh, they let you write in script at school now?" "what do you mean?" "well back in my day you would get in big, big trouble if you used anything else than cursive handwriting" "what's a "cursive"?". turns out she wasn't taught cursive at all!

which is wild because, like, not only were we not taught script at all, but teachers acted as though using script was some kind of nefarious deviant behavior. i had this friend in 4th grade who kept getting in HUGE trouble all the time because she wouldnt use cursive at all, like, they called her parents and threatened to have her expelled iirc. this was in the mid 2000's lmao

there was a classist element to it - i noticed that teachers were more likely to assume a student was smart and be more magnanimous in their grading if the student used cursive rather than script (which was considered childish, vulgar, and sometimes girly (derogatory)), used a fountain pen rather than ballpoint, and (sometimes, not always) black ink instead of blue (all other colors were generally banned for graded essays but i got away with using brown ink. i used a calligraphy fountain pen though which helped), though sometimes it was the opposite and black ink was banned with only blue ink allowed (go figure). often teachers would explain these rules to us, proudly even (?). the kind of "girly half-cursive/half-script" with curly letters & tiny hearts dotting the i's was also frowned upon and considered vulgar and a mark of stupidity

i'm glad this is changing at the very least but :( cursive is such a good tool tbh it has so much personality also & nothing is more appropriate for fountain pen use than cursive, so i'm sad this is seemingly disappearing...