Cursive and Other Secret Codes

The evolution of the modern classroom

There’s a lot of talk at school board meetings and online about “parental rights” and the “focus of education on academics,” instead of whatever culture war is currently being waged in the media, both of which are rallying cries for the right wing Moms for Liberty groups. Most of us are too busy parenting-while-living to give much thought to what happens in a classroom, especially since we all went through our own educations, so we know – more or less – what happens there.

I taught a 4^th grade class last week just because it was the same elementary school my kids attended and the nostalgia of it appealed to me. Somehow, the school got smaller, although I certainly haven’t changed size in the decade since they were there. The 4^th grade classroom was the same one my kids had, though seating options had changed – some were high desks in a semi-circle, some were low desks set in small groups, with chairs that ranged from traditional to circular stools. And instead of the overhead projector my kids were allowed to connect their iPads to so they could show their classmates the cool thing they’d programmed in Minecraft as they worked on their California Missions project (building an historically accurate Mission in Minecraft was one of the options in their cutting edge 1:1 iPad pilot program back then), there was a touchscreen smart board with student avatars that they swiped into the box with the lunch option they wanted (which consequently served as a useful way to take attendance).

First up for the fourth graders was finishing a language arts worksheet. One of the kids – a fidgety one who rolled their stool seat around while working through questions – was uncertain about what you would find in a Thesaurus. First, I had to actively stop my impulse to tell them the answer. Instead, we looked for a dictionary, but none was obvious, and no one could point us in the correct direction to find one. I resisted pulling my phone out of my back pocket to read the definition, and there was no mechanism to look the word up digitally that I could have the student do themselves. So I sent the kid with the question running down the hall to the library to ask to borrow a dictionary to bring back to class (which served a dual purpose of putting a little more activity into the need to move which the kid had exhibited on the stool). I had them look up “Thesaurus” and read the definition out loud to the rest of the class because I’m a big proponent of peer to peer learning, and then I repeated the definition so everyone could fill that box in, even if they hadn’t gotten there yet.

I was pleased to see that the kids knew how to use a dictionary, but wished they knew exactly where to find one in the classroom. My parents had a huge dictionary in our house, with indented tabs for each letter of the alphabet, and I remember spending hours just flipping through the giant tome looking at random words. Dictionaries and Encyclopedia sets are becoming obsolete with smart phones and digital technology, which is understandable given the evolving nature of language, and yet the skills that come with using them remain useful. I just alphabetized a stack of high school English papers, and found myself repeating parts of the alphabet to myself to put names in the correct order.

Then there was the cursive lesson, which, for fourth graders, consisted of three pages of tracing swooping lines of script. When a couple of other fidgety kids complained that cursive was boring, I told them something they didn’t seem to have heard before (which honestly surprised me, because it was the primary motive for my own kids to learn cursive). “You’re learning a secret decoder. A lot of schools don’t teach cursive, so there’s a whole bunch of people who won’t be able to decipher things like signatures and historical documents. You’ll be like a spy when you can read cursive.” The spy part got them, and the idea of doing something other people couldn’t do wasn’t bad either.

Math was straightforward, and apparently 4^th grade math is well within my skill set, and the kids were working on an interactive math program on chromebooks. When they needed to work out a problem longhand, they did so on a dry erase board and my tree-loving heart rejoiced.

At the end of the morning, I was left with the following observations about the kids, and about the way some things are being taught that is outside my own default experience:

1.     Kids learn differently than each other, and the best classrooms and teachers now are adjusting for those learning differences with desk/chair options and accommodations for vision, movement needs, and attention.

2.     Games are powerful tools for learning. Turning a cursive lesson into a secret language decoder, or making the alphabet musical are just the simplest. Minecraft has value as a tool for spacial awareness and for programming innovation, and animating a digital math lesson doesn’t take away from the long-hand solutions. Play is at the heart of imagination, and imagination leads to innovation, so there is definitely a purpose to putting games forward as learning tools.

3.     New technology is not necessarily better or worse for learning. There are some fantastic applications (like a beginning percussion lesson that was like a video game for young learners), and some limitations, so perhaps the best classrooms incorporate both digital and analog tech for teaching and learning.

4.     I grew up in an analog world, and yet I’m ready to whip my phone out to find the answers as fast as teens are. But working through the way to find an answer is maybe even more important than the answer itself. As parents, we might consider what we’re teaching when we use our phones to look something up, and make sure that we actually go through the steps of explaining our chosen sources if an analog resource isn’t available.

Our children’s classroom experiences look very different than our own. If you have the opportunity to volunteer in a classroom, or (like me) substitute teach one, you’ll discover all the ways your unconscious biases about education are challenged. As parents, our job is not to change the system – the system evolved into itself with the expert guidance of teachers and administrators while we were busy pursuing careers in other fields and living child-free lives. But when we have a chance to experience the system first-hand (not just through our child’s recounting of their day), we’re better equipped to support our kids with the kind of supplemental strategies (like the dictionary was that day) that will give them the biggest tool chest with which to go out and face an ever-changing, ever-evolving world.