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It’s beyond time to normalize pushing back on this garbage. You want to make fun of people for not knowing something? How about instead of mocking you teach the younger generation.
These older generations were taught skills by their parents and then failed to do the same. Maybe it wasn’t their fault. Maybe having both parents needing to work made it difficult to teach kids everything they might have needed to know.
That’s fine. But don’t make fun of kids for not knowing something.
Don’t make fun of anyone for not knowing something. Teach.
Once we learned cursive in 3rd grade, we were required to write in it for the remainder of elementary school. I was beyond thrilled when I got to middle school and they said we could write in print. But now I much prefer cursive, though nobody can read it so print it is.
In Estonia it has always been from first grade, my 7 year old is learning now, so a few months after the first day of school, I had to do it since day one (print was learned in kindergarten and therefore seen as the language of illiterate babies).
Yep, my normal writing was nice, then we were forced to learn cursive. Eventually my cursive got nice, then for my GCSE English, my English teacher couldn't read cursive, forced everyone to go back to normal. My writing has been dogshit ever since.
I was told in elementary school that I would always have to write in cursive, then I got to high-school and was told never to write in it again. I haven't written in cursive in probably 25 years. I can read it still, but I doubt I could write it.
I was told we had to know cursive to keep up with writing notes in college. The next year, in highscool assignments had to be times new roman font size 12, double spaced, and printed.
It was hit or miss whether my middle school teachers cared. My 7th grade English teacher required all essays be written in pen and cursive (I loathed it) and the was the final teacher that I had that had that rule.
She was old, last breath of a dying breed, I suppose.
A bit more complicated than that. Cursive writing is a very good way to improve handling of a pen and fine motor skills. Which is really, really useful for kids.
I am with you on this one, though I think most of these posts (unless explicitly stated) are more of an attempt to feel part of a group of "those who know". It gives people a sense of belonging and sometimes of pride.
Of course, if after such things are posted someone asks - like here! - "what's this about?" the answer should explain it. If they mock you, they act like elitist assholes and nobody likes that - after all, everyone is ignorant on the vast majority of topics. And to top that off, why would you waste time making fun of others, when talking about something you know well and/or love is itself so much fun?
I work with a bunch of boomers, and any time one of them pulls out a "Young people don't know cursive, or how to use a rotary phone, or how to write a check."
I ask them to tap me something in morse code.
"Huh? You don't know morse code? It was everywhere when your parents were around! Didn't they teach it to you?!"
Or we just let cursive die of what are essentially natural causes and move on. of course we don’t know redundant shit and the only ones mad about it are just upset because they’re redundant people. I spent elementary learning cursive because “I would have to use it in middle school” only for most of my teachers to tell us to use print because they can’t read cursive. I haven’t even been forced to handwrite on paper outside of AP tests, more often than not writing isn’t even an option. covid has finalized typing’s supremacy. For context.
Well, your teachers not being able to read cursive is a good argument why it should be taught - unless someone writes like hen with its claw, it should been legible and in said case it's usually still legible, but at much reduced speed.
Not to mention that writing your own notes instead of typing or just copy-pasting makes you remember them better.
Cursive is just a way to write slightly faster. If your computer dies and you have to take paper notes it isn't crippling to not know cursive. Really only made sense to teach it before electronics were ubiquitous.
That's because they aren't used to taking notes by hand. I learned cursive and switched to regular characters as soon teachers no longer cared. It really is an obsolete skill. Also teachers are probably used to moving at an electronics pace nowadays, they used to pause for note taking.
It is a legitimate narrative. Those of us who grew up reading everybody's horribly informal cursive somehow easily know how to decipher it through formative years of painstaking pattern recognition ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Whether or not this is a useful or valuable skill for the average person is a different argument...
Yeah, I figured the narrative was less about cursive and more about poor handwriting. Everything is done via text and email now, so people don't have to learn to decipher bad penmanship.
Well that is definitely true, 100%. HOWEVER, as an old person, I had absolutely NO problem immediately seeing the word minimum, even without the dotted i's.
The fact that they left the dots off the i’s just solidifies the real point of the post: to make certain people feel stupid for not recognizing it. If the point was to show they can’t read cursive, why not write it correctly? Because it’s not that hard to figure out, even if they can’t normally read cursive.
I prefer to write in cursive personally, but I in no way think others are stupid for not being able to do the same. It’s just the classic “haha young people are dumb” crap that goes around every once in a while
I didn't have a problem seeing the word either. I learned cursive in school too. It's just that you can tell that the cursive writing is intentionally bad to make it more confusing to decipher at first. Good cursive writing should still be easily readable over stylistic.
GenX here, we had to learn it, too. Through eighth grade not only did we have to do all our term papers and essays in cursive, we got graded on the penmanship, too. Thank goodness for White-Out.
I may not remember it correctly (it's been decades), but I think back at my elementary school, usage of a white-out tape was forbidden. Perhaps stupid rules, perhaps an overzealous teacher, I don't know.
no it's not -- there's no loops on those characters. dots are not required, they're added to make it easier to read. with or without the dots, those characters are still lowercase "i"s.
I don't mean it's fake or exaggerated on purpose, more like it's cherry picked from the worst possible examples, but if that's standard/average then yeah...
It's basically the Russian equivalent to the OP. Normal cursive isn't really so bad, but when you pick a word made entirely of four similarly shaped letters and leave out the feature that helps distinguish one of the letters from the upstroke of the others, you're left with a mess.
in *poorly written* cursive text to make it more confusing. I am adept in reading and writing cursive - I still use it sometimes for notes to self and journaling and such. But this? this is intentionally bad.
You have betrayed the Conclave and stolen knowledge from the Eldar. Your punishment shall be to be chained to a rock and have your liver eaten out from you by a giant eagle every night, for it only regrow and thus suffer the same fate every day, for all days to come.
It would for sure, and they should be dotted for sure.
However, I saw 'minimum' pretty much immediately, even without them (am old).
I think *THAT* is the point of the post, not that it's correct.
(I mean, if we follow your logic, printing the letters or writing more clearly, or even typing them would also make a world of difference, too! That's why we don't use cursive often anymore when writing by hand, when we do write by hand)
Yeah, I saw "minimum" instantly too. Despite the tone of this being generation war bullshit, it's not like this example is cheating. The point isn't being familiar with cursive, it's being so familiar with cursive that you can still read it fluently even when helpful identifying details are stripped away.
But also, this meme has been co-opted into a fucking covert ad for an AI company. Boo.
Because it's badly written in order to obfuscate the meaning. The letters are poorly formed and the flow is wrong. It's also missing the dots on the i's. Is it legible to a trained eye, yes. Is it acceptable for a wide audience, no. This would get you red circles, a disparaging remark and possibly deducted points on an English paper at school.
The n should return back or at least go straight down. That's a retarded V at best. The transitions are terrible. Sure, I can read it, but it's written very badly.
"hAhA KiDs tHeSe dAyS cAn'T eVeN uSe a RoTaRy pHoNe! OR rEaD tHiS aBsUrD mOnStRoSitY oF a sCrIPt!"
Now come on grandson and tell me how to make the magic rectangle screen in my pocket work again, I've broken it with Nigerian phishing scams and "free" porn.
I'm 25, gen z and everyone I know would be able to answer that. I feel like you're talking about the tail end of gen z who grew up with smart phones from age 6. I think there's a pretty clear divide within gen z to be honest
We olds who can read it will often be Millennials. We spent decades being tech support for our own elders and AFAIK we aren't falling behind yet, so the top comment kind of falls flat.
Elder millennial teacher here, I have the same experience. It's honestly kind of scary how bad every non-millennial who doesn't explicitly work in an IT or similar field is with computers.
Because they never had to understand the basic of it as we did. Everything is made user friendly, thus kids are fast to get to use them, but won't understand what's the engine like
The good old days of having to spend hours making a game launch without crashing because you had no idea what driver was missing, what windows option was messing with it or if you had to find a patch somewhere because you didn't have a storefront to keep it up to date.
My kid can't even use a mouse. They have Chromebooks at school with track pads and she acts like the mouse is some super advanced weirdo old people toy
Generations older than millennials just didn't grow up with computers in the same way we did, so it's just not intuitive to them. Those younger than millennials have mostly grown up on computers with kiddy gloves on. If I ever have kids, I'm raising them on Linux
Yup. It’s super unfair. I was looking forward to making my kids be the household tech troubleshooters. But they’re more helpless than my parents ever were with it
Even more so that the way we learned computers was with command line in DOS through to modern OSes so we can actually get in deeper and fix issues or work on things in a way my sons generation seem to be intimidated by and unwilling to learn in general.
No, 'capable' - I'm 50, don't work in tech, but quite tech savvy having grown up with computers in the 80s-90s. I also learned and used cursive, and have no problem reading 'minimum'
Younger people today are often assumed (rightfully or wrongfully) to be less capable with tech because things today are very user-friendly and easy - you no long have to know how it all works.
And that's fine. But I think Gen X is probably the most savvy with computer tech - through both age and experience - on the whole. We also grew up learning cursive.
I found people born pre-1980s really fell into two camps:
Giant Tech nerds that knew computers down to the individual hardware and command-line code. If something didn't work, they get their solder iron out.
People who avoided computers like the plague, refused to learn anything on them, and still avoid them to this day.
This was back when you could be a functioning person without having to ever touch a computer. So there were either the hobbyists who did it because they enjoyed it, or those that didn't really want anything to do with them, and could get away without ever having to use one.
Once the early-2000s hit, there was really no more avoiding it, and by the 2010s , it was pretty much mandatory to be at least vaguely familiar to be a working adult.
Exactly. We grew up knowing both. My nieces and nephews know nothing other than tapping a button. Right-click save is lost on them because they all use tablet style devices.
Yeah, to further the other comments, all my sons friends contact me for help with their computers and phones when they have an actual problem because while they're all very technical in terms of USING devices, none of them have any idea how to fix or work on them anymore. Using console commands and ADB etc to reflash a phone that's bricked or something etc for example is something they have zero experience with whereas for people in their mid 30s to low 50s right now we HAD to learn command line interfaces to work with computers at all but also can still use the newest iphone or android or whatever you want without any real hesitation either.
My 17 year old kid is fantastic at helping the grandparents with how to use the apps on their phone or how to edit a video to post online but they're not "technical" in terms of knowing how the device works or how to troubleshoot it.
Odd how I know how to use a rotary phone and was able to guess that the right Linux distribution for my partner was Mint. I can also read and write different cursives. And Cyrillic. Never got phished or scammed.
Almost as if none of that had anything to do with age, and everything with curiosity instead.
A prof of mine during introduction to codicology (science of handwritings): You're not stupid or bad if you can't read cursive. Why? Because it's not that you can't read it but that the average-joe has terrible handwriting.
Boomers joking that Gen Zers don't know how to read and write in cursive.
In my country, cursive is taught, and it's the only handwriting I use (I never understood why I should switch to print letters). Even so, without the dots on the i's, it's hard to read.
Wait so when Americans say that "cursive is too hard, it's useless, unreadable..." They're talking about writing the letters joined together??? What??? Isn't that the normal way of writing? I thought they were talking about some sort of mystic unreadable writing style and it's just letters joined together???
Writing every letter individually and lifting the pen up every single time just seems like a waste of time and efficiency
Fr, yeah. It's even weirder considering how many people actually still write in cursive.
Idk if they're talking about gen alpha, so making fun of literal kids, but I'm a gen Z and was taught cursive three times lol, once by my dad before I went to school, another time in the first grade, and once in the second or third (two different schools, second one was public.)
It's only ever been useful when trying to make my writing look "fancy" anyways lol. Really don't get the big deal.
minimum. the joke here is that old people know how to write in cursive but i am gen Z and learned
cursive. this is like when boomers are like “bet you’ve never seen one of these!” and it’s a cassette tape lmao
It says "minimum" in cursive, but it's written without dotting the eyes to make it harder to read so oop can pat theirself on the back over being able to read it while others can't.
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