There has been talk about if teaching students in elementary school cursive is important. Cursive writing isn't really used anymore besides for signatures and for a small portion on the SAT or Praxis exam. But other than that, there is few, if any, that use cursive when they write. When I was in elementary school, we had cursive handwriting books that we worked on for the majority of the year. We would have to go by the alphabet and learn how to do upper case cursive of a letter and the lower case cursive of a letter, which we would have to write a certain amount of times and circle the best that we did. After we got through the whole alphabet, we were given words that we had to copy and learn how to connect the letters. This took up a lot of the time that we had for writing around 2nd and 3rd grade, and then we were never really told to use it again.
Teachers now dislike having to teach cursive because they could use that time in order to be teaching other things about English. Because they know no one really uses cursive anymore, it seems a little tedious to teach them it now and waste that time. Although the teachers would rather skip the cursive lessons, they are still told they need to teach it. So they do.
In my opinion, it should be taught so that students should have an understanding of it, and able to write their name and a few simple words. But I don't believe it should take up so much of the year learning to write paragraphs in cursive, because it's not something the students are ever going to need again besides their name. And even now, many peoples' signatures are just a scribble that no one can read. When I took the SAT and there was a part that we needed to write in cursive, many of the other people in the room complained that they didn't remember how to do cursive. It seems to be a lost art for writing, and I believe it is something that people should learn how to do, but it shouldn't have as much time spent on it and really the bare essentials should be taught.
