National handwriting contest keeping cursive alive

For Brady McDonough, learning cursive writing in school this school year has been a rite of passage of sorts.

The Scottsdale Anasazi Elementary School third grader aspires to be a professional football player or golfer. He believes cursive handwriting will be part of the job.

"I am going to need good handwriting to sign autographs," he said, as he carefully formed letters on a worksheet in class this week.

"I've really been working hard to learn cursive."

Brady and an estimated 4,000 Arizona kindergarten through eighth graders this month are working on entries for a national handwriting contest sponsored by an Ohio company that aims to keep the art of cursive writing alive. Anasazi students have won state and national awards in Zaner-Bloser's contest during the last two years.

Neither the Arizona College and Career Ready Standards, which are based on the Common Core State Standards Initiative, nor Arizona's previous academic standards have required that students learn cursive. The current standards mandate that kids master keyboarding and printing.

Many adults, including Arizona State University educational leadership professor Steve Graham, believe there is no need for students to learn anything else.

Graham and others say e-mails, text messages and documents created in systems like Microsoft Word are good substitutes for handwritten pages, And, he notes, printed and electronic signatures are acceptable in most places today.

But that philosophy is not acceptable to Marilyn Harrer, a retired teacher who works as tutor at Anasazi and has been teaching cursive writing to elementary school students since the 1960s. She learned penmanship herself as a child with materials from 125-year-old Zaner-Bloser.

Amy Coleman's third grade classroom at Anasazi could be a room from the 1960s, with student essays in cursive taped on walls around the room. Coleman gives all the credit to Harrer, who has been in her room teaching kids the proper size, shape, spacing and slant for their cursive letters since the first week of school.

Harrer acknowledged that legible cursive is not the easiest thing for students to master. Patience is the secret to her success, she said.

"I am very positive with the children," she said. "I tell them practice makes perfect. The more you do it, the better you get."

For inspiration, Harrer brings her own family's antique legal documents for students to study. One, an 1864 Ohio property deed that belonged to her grandparents, has equal amounts of cursive and typewritten text.

Anasazi Principal Jeff Quisberg said he puts strong emphasis on handwriting at his school. Kids need to be prepared for times when cell phones or computers are not available when its time to take notes or jot down an idea, he said.

Madison Hepner, an Anasazi fourth grader who was a handwriting contest national champion in 2013, concurs with that. She also said she finds cursive "faster and prettier" than printing.

"It's helps me write much faster -- learning it was a breeze," she said.

Zaner-Bloser marketing director Brad Onken takes those argument in favor of cursive a step further and points to a recent study out of Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles. The study showed that students who take handwritten notes -- instead of typing on a laptop during class -- focus more on key lecture topics and perform better on conceptual test questions.

Onken also said that adults who no longer write with the careful hand of an elementary school student should not worry about it.

"As people get older, their handwriting is more personalized," he said.

"The important thing is that children learn to write by hand in the early grades."

Contest results

Last year, 3,600 of the approximate 300,000 entrants in the Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest were from Arizona. The previous year, 2,610 of about 260,000 were from Arizona.

In the most recent contest, students from Anasazi Elementary in Scottsdale, Emmanuel Lutheran School in Tempe, Grace Community Christian School in Tempe, Pilgrim Lutheran School in Mesa and All Saints Catholic School in Sierra Vista won state awards.