Halfway through third grade, Oscar's cursive handwriting was reasonably tidy, well-formed, and compact. I put away the handwriting workbooks and told him he was done with handwriting as a separate subject; all he needed to do from now on was try to write legibly and smoothly whenever he had a writing assignment, and his handwriting would get better and better without special handwriting practice.
But he resisted writing in cursive, and unless I explicitly ordered him to he would tend to print. So when we began the school year and he started displaying comparatively atrocious handwriting, I made a mental note to pick up some fourth-grade handwriting practice books. Clearly he needed to re-learn some skills.
Today, though, prompted by a fairly stressful day in which Hannah's Ben and my Oscar reacted off one another in ever-increasing mood swings, and after a post-schooling cup of tea venting and self-analyzing session in which Hannah and I wondered aloud to each other if we'd done the right thing by each other's children, we both took a closer look at some of the writing Oscar had produced over the last few weeks.
We noticed a pattern.
Some pieces: fairly neat writing with well-formed letters, (usually printing but sometimes cursive), correct spelling or reasonable guesses, thoughtful composition.
Other pieces: scrawly writing, unreasonable guesses at spelling, careless sentences ("Yep, I think so" as the third of an assigned three-sentence summary).
Good writing, good spelling, and good composition went together. Bad writing, bad spelling, and bad composition also went together.
Diagnosis: Not a handwriting problem. A sometimes-I-go-too-fast problem. Developing under my radar.
Clearly it's ME who needed to re-learn some skills, namely (a) setting clear standards and (b) following up by checking and correcting.
I brought the subject up in the car on the way home, stressing that I wasn't angry but that I thought the two of us had fallen into some bad habits. We talked about it and he agreed that he had been trying to get his work done and over with quickly. The "Yep I think so" sentence? "I wrote that in bed," he admitted. "I just wanted to go to sleep." I promised I would tell him exactly how I wanted a piece finished: in cursive or printing, with careful spelling attempts or with checked and corrected spelling, and ask detailed questions, and explain the purpose of each assignment. He promised he would be more careful and try to meet the standards I set, and also asked if I would get him a handwriting practice book so he could get faster at writing in cursive, a request I agreed to fulfill.
It was one of those days where somebody learned a lot. It seems to have been me, mostly.
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