There’s a program called Arrowsmith that has a summer program called the Cognitive Intensive Program. It’s basically 3-4 hours a day of speed reading analog clock for 7 weeks. You start out at 2 handed and work up to 8 handed.
Changed my son’s life. He was a completely different student afterwards, for the better.
It still worked for my son and my friend’s two children.
I have no affiliation with the program at all. I talk about it because it worked for us.
I latched onto it because I know the type of things that I have struggled with my entire life, but just learned a lot of coping mechanisms. I’m also very self aware. I pay a lot of attention to how my own brain works because of the need to develop those coping mechanisms. When I saw the full program, everything made perfect sense to me and I absolutely believe that it would have helped me when I was younger.
Had I been able to tolerate working half days for 7 weeks, I would have participated in the program myself.
Needless to say this trips my crank/cult smell meter.
I found out about it from one of my neighbors who has two children with dysgraphia who did the full time program for 3 years each. He tells everybody about it.
I toured that location when my son was going into 3rd grade and we ended up sending doing just the summer program after 7th grade. What I saw on the tour would have helped me when I was a kid and my sons brain seems to work just like mine.
Interesting, for me it is the opposite. With a digital clock I need to do a division/comparison to know how much part of the day/hour has already passed. With an analog clock I can read a proportion directly.
What? They are the same thing.
I'm the wrong person to ask this about, since I prefer digital time, so time is just a number to me. But Technology Connections made a video atleast talking about it,[1] so hopefully that get part of the point across. To him and plenty of other analogue-first people, time is a progress bar, or a chart, or something along those lines, and that's the natural way to perceive time, and converting it to a number is meaningless beyond expressing it as digital time.
The only reason we have analog clocks is because digital ones were much harder to build. That time is of course over for good. It was a compromise imposed by limited technology.
If you care about handwritten your receiver cares they got your letter at all not that it's cursive or not.
Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
Anyone using paper + pen? Writing a letter or thank you note?
You know, stuff only people who grew up before the internet was popular still do.
I'll write in (not great) cursive for myself, but for other people? Writing in block or print is basically an accessibility feature. Even if my cursive was perfect, plenty of people would not be able to read it.
There was a class signifier aspect to it as well. Poor kids couldn't spend as much time practicing and perfecting penmanship. In a world where much got done through handwritten personal letters, good penmanship would make an impression similar to having properly tailored formal attire vs a tattered coat.
My grandma went to public school but grew up in an era where that sort of thinking was widespread, so she got extra tutoring. She learned to write freehand with a ruler flat baseline and machine like consistency in each letter. You could recognize a card or mail from her instantly just by the addressing on the envelope.
I wasn't taught that strictly but I did spend years of elementary school with those Red Chief notebooks copying letters page after page much to the frustration of my young ADHD brain.
I doubt I could properly write cursive today. I barely ever hand write notes anymore, so there's no real point.
I'm confused. How do you write if not in cursive? Do you just write in block capitals? With each letter on its own? Do you just not hand write anymore?
>>Cursive is an outdated skill for when it was the fastest way to get words written to paper.
But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
Block capitals? no. It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.
I rarely handwrite now. The last time I really did was in college.
> But....It still is? Without using some kind of machine of course.
But of course this is HN where most people are technical. We all have some sort of machine at our disposal otherwise we'd not be writing back and forth to one another.
There are a million ways to articulate a glyph, from thick to thin, clear to murky, big, small, harsh, soft, whatever. Some people still use typewriters or typeset a printing press. Others use spray paint or marker.
End of the day for me it's just about communication and expression and aesthetic and clarity (or sometimes intentional LACK of visual clarity in honor of a style), not technique or medium. I dunno.
I do think every bozo should be able to pick up a pen and make his mark, and I think humans should practice the art of crafting a sentence and turning a phrase, but I really don't focus on the how, and more on the what, the message.
Even the Zodiac Killer had a unique and bizarre style with his handwriting and cipher LOL can you imagine if it was just bog-standard 5th grade cursive?
I write with mix of cursive and sorta print letters. The sorta print letters are more readable, actually.
Based on what teachers said, kids use cursive while they are forced to and switch to sorta print when they can. But everyone invents their own "font", so it is a challenge to decipher them.
Of course to be pedantic, modern pens are machines too.
On a white board or diagram, block letters seem like the most legible choice.
Everything else is typed.
More than that, I would be curious to see research that controls for proficiency at writing/typing. My theory is that if more kids were taught to properly touch type from an early age, the alleged differences between writing/typing would be far less dramatic. I was taught since kindergarten and there's no doubt in my mind that I absorb and understand information better through typing than writing. I'm also much, much, much faster. Brief Googling suggests I'm at least 10x faster than the average WPM for handwriting
Instead, here we are talking about how cursive should actually still be taught.
Longcamp et al. (2005) – PubMed or Elsevier (Acta Psychologica)
Smoker et al. (2009) – Human Factors and Ergonomics Society proceedings
Umejima et al. (2021) – Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience (open access)
Ito et al. (2020) – HCII conference proceedings (Springer CCIS)
I basically had to teach myself all over again. Not much fun.
I maybe give you the stars, but all the others demand a "Citation needed".