The rise of the keyboard, and smart technology, has seen the tradition of handwriting fall by the wayside in most modern classrooms.
A woman in Scottsdale, Arizona, continues to keep the art of cursive writing alive, however, more than 20 years after officially retiring from teaching.
Marilyn Harrer, 91, began teaching cursive writing in 1951; after teaching for some years, she officially retired in 1997.
“When I retired from full time teaching, my teacher friends said they always liked the way the children in my class wrote and so they wanted to know if I wouldn’t come back and work in their classrooms,” said Harrer, azfamily.com reported.
After her retirement, she began volunteering her cursive writing instruction services at Anasazi Elementary in north Scottsdale.
Like using a computer, handwriting is a whole-body exercise.
“We talk about how to sit, how to hold your paper, how to write at a slant, how you hold your pencil,” explained Harrer.
After so many years honing her handwriting craft and passing it on to her students, she’s garnered from them the title “Cursive Queen.”
Harrer has racked up a number of accomplishments from her cursive teaching, sending forth 35 students to carry home the state handwriting title in Arizona, with two others becoming national cursive champions.
“Well I just expect the best from all children, and they respond,” she said.
Meanwhile, when volunteers were barred from institutions to curb the spread of the CCP virus, it did not stop Harrer from carrying out her usual instruction.
“We didn’t let COVID stop us,” she said. “I would go over to my daughter’s house and eat a nice dinner, and my grandson Grant would film me teaching the lessons.”
While cursive teaching has long been excluded from the curriculum in many schools, Harrer has a passion to keep the tradition alive.
To support her mission, she began a pen pal project that matches seniors with students, with some success.
“This is our third year, and we now have a surplus of people who want to be pen pals,” she said. “And they really look forward to doing it.”
Harrer has a plan to continue teaching cursive for as long as she can manage it, adding that research has proven a link between cursive handwriting and brain activity.
The great actor-writer-director Orson Welles would have turned 106 today, May 6, 2021. I did a centennial piece on him six years ago. Thanks to the release of MANK last year, which offered a questionable treatment of Welles’s role in the writing of CITIZEN KANE, I’ve been eager to read Welles’s own account and wound […]
A conversation between William F. Buckley Jr., Paul Hollander and Ernest van den Haag that seems more relevant today than at the time it took place, in December of 1981.
Prepare for brain stimulation!
WARNING: If you’re a millennial, the following may cause severe headaches and confusion. If you’re a liberal, your brain might combust:
A book that should be read and re-read often. Especially on this day of Thanksgiving.
“To fail to experience gratitude when walking through the corridors of the Metropolitan Museum, when listening to the music of Bach or Beethoven, when exercising our freedom to speak, or … to give, or withhold, our assent, is to fail to recognize how much we have received from the great wellsprings of human talent and concern that gave us Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, our parents, our friends. We need a rebirth of gratitude for those who have cared for us, living and, mostly, dead. The high moments of our way of life are their gifts to us. We must remember them in our thoughts and in our prayers; and in our deeds.”
A brilliant mind speaking in a time period of human history that was civilized; a time when free speech was respected. Malcolm Muggeridge identified as a “man of the left” by the way.
There’s nothing quite as cheerful as the opening theme to The Mary Tyler Moore Show:
Watching this and listening to the music makes me so nostalgic for a time when we were more innocent. However that refrain, “you’re gonna make it after all,” reassures us, after all these years, that there are still brighter days ahead.
Flavia Masson 