“I prefer to write in cursive,” Halle said.
The couple are proud members of the cursive club at Holmes Middle School in Virginia. Cursive has been on the rise for years. More than two dozen states now require cursive instructionnorth in schools after the 2010 Common Core Standards skipped the skill.
Kenerson, a multilingual teacher at Holmes, founded the high school club when students couldn’t read what she wrote on the board. They just looked at her blankly, she said.
“I realized they didn’t know how to write or read cursive,” Kenerson said. For an educator who firmly believes that quotes deserve to be written in cursive and has a new one on her board every month, Kenerson wanted to give students the opportunity to understand the magic of cursive writing.
Halle O’Brien writes during the after-school cursive club, hosted by teacher Sherisse Kenerson, at Holmes Middle School in Alexandria, Virginia. (Anna Rose Layden for NPR)
The club exploded in popularity last winter, with local news stations and the Washington Post giving him credit for “keeping cursive alive.” Since then, Kenerson has been racking his brain trying to figure out why he has attracted so much attention.
He’s received fan letters from retirees and teachers (written in italics, of course). He’s heard from people in Idaho, Pennsylvania and Florida. He’s even held Zoom calls with educators in Oklahoma and Maryland to explain how he runs the club.
“I’m flabbergasted,” Kenerson said. “I just follow the path.”
He decided that cursive is a way of holding on to the past and many people are unwilling to let it go.
Kenerson’s after-school club is a local example of a nationwide trend: Cursive writing has returned to many classrooms across the country. Teachers and legislators attribute the resurgence to nostalgia and some evidence of educational benefits. But surprisingly, curves and dips are controversial among experts, with some arguing that cursive adds no real value for students, especially in the age of artificial intelligence.
“I have seen no evidence that cursive provides any particular cognitive or learning benefit beyond that provided by hand printing,” Mark Warschauer, an education professor at the University of California, Irvine, wrote in an email to NPR. He noted that the cognitive benefits of young students writing by hand in general are already well established.
Warschauer, who founded UC Irvine Digital Learning Labopposes teaching cursive in schools because of the “waste of time and effort” when students can easily access print writing, speech-to-text apps, and keyboards.
Much of the debate about cursive centers on time spent in the classroom. Should educators spend precious minutes teaching another way to write on paper when technology is so prevalent?
Shawn Datchuk, a special education professor at the University of Iowa, said the answer doesn’t have to be one or the other. In his college classroom, he sees students increasingly using tablets and a stylus to take notes.
“What that means is that as a country, we probably need to help our students be multimodal,” Datchuk said. They must not only be able to handwrite in print, but also use cursive, type and interact with technology, he said.
However, technology is not a solution for students, he said.
“One of the dirty secrets behind spell check and artificial intelligence is that you still need to be able to spell to be able to use them well,” Datchuk said.
He and a team of researchers compiled the known studies on cursive teaching. Some studios used outdated technology, such as inkwells and pen tips, so they were cut. Some others were missing details on how the instruction was implemented. With those caveats, Datchuk said, preliminary evidence shows that cursive writing could improve spelling.
Datchuk said the “special sauce” of cursive is that students have to pay more attention to how letters connect when they write.
Kenerson, founder of the cursive club, said she has seen anecdotal evidence that cursive helps students with dyslexia. Sharon Quirk-Silva, a California Assembly member who introduced the state’s cursive bill, said she has also heard anecdotal evidence that cursive can be therapeutic for students with special needs.
From 2023 by Quirk-Silva mandate in italicsHe said the reception from voters has been overwhelmingly positive.
Datchuk, a professor at the University of Iowa, said he receives a constant stream of emails from people asking about cursive, but his reason for studying the technique was personal: His 8-year-old son, who is reading Harry Potter, still passes his grandmother’s birthday cards to his father to read.
“That brings up the broader generational divide that probably occurred not only with my children, but with children and young adults across the United States who were never taught cursive,” said Datchuk, a former elementary school teacher.
Antonio Benavides, an 11-year-old in Kenerson’s cursive club, is an example of that divide. His father found out about the club and immediately sent Antonio.
Now, he sticks out his tongue and stares at the curls in front of him. He likes to practice his curves and said his normally extensive handwriting has improved.
“I said, ‘Are you kidding me, cursive? Why do I need that?'” Benavides recalled telling his father. But now, “Yes, I like it,” he said.
When there is a moment of silence as the students practice their i’s and t’s, Antonio whispers, “I love that sound.”
“The sound of a pencil when it’s quiet is so nice,” he explained.
Steve Graham, Regents Professor at Arizona State University’s College of Teaching and Learning Innovation, so despite the media attention, cursive never went anywhere. Graham, the author of numerous books on writing, said he has been hearing about the “death of handwriting or the death of cursive” for about 50 years. At one point, his answers to reporters’ questions became “sarcastic,” he said.
“I was like, ‘Well, damn, I didn’t hear it was buried,’” Graham said. “Can you tell me where? I would like to visit the grave.”
Graham is ambivalent about whether cursive or print is a more effective tool for students. He said he believes the fixation on cursive is an adult phenomenon.
“I’m often surprised by the amount of attention it gets,” Graham said. With further study, Graham said he believes the differences in benefits between the two types of writing will be negligible. He said the most important thing is to spend time teaching children to write.
Back at Kenerson’s cursive club, Conrad Thompson, 11, said she is the only student in her history class who can read her teacher’s enormous printout of the Declaration of Independence. It makes her proud.
“Hopefully, one day my family and I will be able to go see it in person,” Conrad said.
As for Sandi and Halle, the couple has no doubts about their new ability.
“Will you be back next week?” Halle asked Sandi about the after-school club.
