With the prevalence of AI cheating, will schools start teaching cursive writing again?

[OrangeJuliusEvola]

Cursive is a good way to mog someone who's being supercilious. I like to pair it with a fountain pen. If someone is being particularly egregious, I attempt my version of Copperplate style cursive to make it even harder to read. It's pretty rare someone over the age of 30 will admit they can't read cursive.

 

[ZeCommissar]

I highly doubt it. Schools spent big money on getting their students laptops, tablets, and other crap. The people who run the school system are turbo jews and will not back down from this.

Also, what would stop a student from just having an AI write out some essay and copy it? That would still be cheating.

Sure it's far harder to write a whole essay by hand instead of clicking copy and paste, but it would still save far more time compared to researching and writing a proper essay.

 

[Betonhaus]

Also, what would stop a student from just having an AI write out some essay and copy it? That would still be cheating.

even if they're just copying it, it forces them to look at the essay word by word and they may actually retain something as opposed to sending a printout they never read once.

 

[Mario Piss]

I do not care if your squiggle shit is "fancy and proper", either make it legible to read in good handwritten letters or fuck off back to the 1700s where everyone can "read" your dead gay writing.
Average cursive writing:

Modern handwriting:

Good no bullshit handwriting:

 

[Betonhaus]

at least it's not Russian cursive

 

[Peanut Butter in Peril]

Learned cursive in 2nd grade if I remember correctly. Don't use it much besides signatures these days. It has how ever marked my normal handwriting with the tendecy to connect letters like cursive does. My brother called my handwriting "fruity".

 

[Chi]

First thing I did when cursive was no longer mandatory was immediately teaching myself block letters since teachers never understood wtf I was writing, it was easier and faster to write as well. Cursive doesn't fix shit handwriting, I'm not sure how cursive would stop AI cheating either, you can just copy that shit into paper anyways.

 

[Otterly]

I’ve just sat through a work meeting encouraging me to use generative AI to write all my emails and documents.
(With the caveat that AI also hallucinates and can’t deal with scientific terminology so I’ll need need to check it all anyway and re write, but massive timesaver guys yeah! .)
Return to quill and oak gall ink on parchment, say I
We had to write all our exams out longhand under time pressure at uni. I didn’t ever do a non written assignment apart from one random multi choice thing that was machine read one time. All school essays were hand written. If your handwriting was shit they just gave you a worse mark and mocked you.
It’s the combination of doing exams at home or modular type work plus AI that’s the problem. Bring back proper exams in and cut the bullshit group work/modulr stuff.

 

[Neodanthril]

I doubt it. They have a hard enough time teaching black people how to read much less write. Schools are just going to get shittier and less valuable and the divide between absolute brain dead retards in the moderately competent who can appear more intelligent than they really are on various tests is going to increase

 

[YHWH's Strongest Soldier]

Many young kids lack the fine motor skills to write legible cursive. It won't be making a comeback outside of calligraphy autists who go through Spencerian textbooks. Maybe some Asian or Slav moms will see it as a symbol of good upbringing and beat it into their kids. I also don't see how it addresses the AI issue in any possible way.

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

As a leftie I rebelled against cursive in 2nd grade by studying a font from a kids' magazine and developed my own handwriting style that I retain to this day, which allowed me to write without worrying about ink smears. Several teachers were shocked at how neat and clean it looked, impressed enough that I was off the hook (they were really hard on kids who tried to sloppify their handwriting into an indecipherable mess).

 

[skykiii]

I learned cursive and we had computers at my school.

Same here. Mine was a public school. This would've been about the mid-1990s when Windows 3.1 was still a thing.

 

[Slap47]

Perhaps in High School you could get away with this, but a personalized college level essay not written in the generic slop style of an AI is going to look distinct.

Go on Twitter and you will be able to tell right away which stuff is written by normal people and what is mass produced by an Indian who wants his 200 dollars a month.

 

[WULULULULU]

I was surprised when I found out US doesnt teach cursive.
Cursive writing is useful for writing fast. It would be difficult for me to have interrupts for every letter.

Cursive is also good for making your own signatures.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

I read of some highly prestigious writing school from the 1800s that was so esteemed that passing would basically get you a job as a secretary or such, back when writing actually mattered. It was more or less about moving the movement from you wrist to your arm, meaning you could write without ever tiring out.

 

[YHWH's Strongest Soldier]

I read of some highly prestigious writing school from the 1800s that was so esteemed that passing would basically get you a job as a secretary or such, back when writing actually mattered. It was more or less about moving the movement from you wrist to your arm, meaning you could write without ever tiring out.

Sounds familiar to instructions in Spencer's textbooks. Forearm and whole-arm movement is key to proper penmanship and should be explained in detail before any type of practice is done. Forcing students to blindly copy rows of text is pointless without explaining the theory behind good writing. It's not shocking that so many children fail to learn cursive if nobody explains it properly to them.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

Sounds familiar to instructions in Spencer's textbooks. Forearm and whole-arm movement is key to proper penmanship and should be explained in detail before any type of practice is done. Forcing students to blindly copy rows of text is pointless without explaining the theory behind good writing. It's not shocking that so many children fail to learn cursive if nobody explains it properly to them.

Well, I also read a PhD study that no matter how fucked up you hold the pencil, it's not actually gonna tire you out or leave you worse off than any other way of holding it - if you don't squeeze it tightly and write in a poor manner. If you do it all "shut-in porcelain doll fair maiden" style with a feather, in a fucked up way, it shouldn't technically be worse than any other. That said, I've always wanted to have decent handwriting but it really just comes from doing it often enough.

Either way, penmanship is one of those things that is so intensely human that even if an AI could.. idk, invent the perfect signature for you, unless you actually learn it yourself, what's the point? It may be superior but it won't be yours. We paid people money to create culture with money made from our actual value-generating jobs. It went wrong when we started paying them more than minimum wage. Should've left art to the autistic.

 

[Spob]

Right now, at the vast majority of schools, if you're an elementary schooler who's learning addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, etc., you are NOT using a calculator. Your questions will mainly look like "what is 584 + 678 / 3", and using a calculator would defeat the point as it'll give you all the answers.

However, by the time you reach middle and high school, they'll start letting you use calculators for SOME questions. Your teacher might allow calculators for some units but not others, and there might be calculator and non-calculator portions of the same exam. But by then the questions will be rigorous enough for calculators not to be able to give you the full answer straight away, as you might in elementary school.

You'll never be asked a question like "what is sqrt(11)" or "what is ln(2)" on a math exam. If you get a calculation involving one of those irrational constants on a non-calculator assignment, they'll just tell you to leave it in simplest terms. Even before calculators were widespread, if they wanted exact values, they'd give you a table of logarithms, roots, trigonometric function values, etc.

I suspect English assignments would be dealt with similarly in response to LLMs. Easy to BS your way through HW, but you're on your own in an exam room, stripped of any tools, and that's where your knowledge would really count. So basically English might be taught more like a math or science class.

 

[gildersleeve]

If I had the tech we have now back when I was in school. I would just have my 3D printer write my essays for me with a custom font based on my handwriting with randomly selected swapped characters to make it look like it's handwritten. So I don't think forcing handwritten papers is a viable tactic against AI in schools.

 

[Betonhaus]

If I had the tech we have now back when I was in school. I would just have my 3D printer write my essays for me with a custom font based on my handwriting with randomly selected swapped characters to make it look like it's handwritten. So I don't think forcing handwritten papers is a viable tactic against AI in schools.

If you knew how to program your 3D printer to do that then you're probably smarter then the average kid cheating with AI. Are you even able to dor that right now? Like how long would it take for you to make your bamboo hold a pen and write in the exact same hand as your writing?