Cursive is back for SAT remodel

Some students taking the new SAT exam yesterday hated the experience of writing an essay within 25 minutes.

For starters, many high-school students today are uncomfortable writing by hand; some have forgotten how to write in cursive because they aren't required to use it in school. Keyboarding or printing by hand are often all that's asked of them. For somebody accustomed to typing, writing by hand can feel clumsy and cause muscle cramps, they say.

On top of that, some say the essay question they got was dull: Do you think we need more creativity in the world or not?

"It was really lame," said Allison Pfeiffer, 17, who was expecting something a bit more polemical. "It doesn't leave you the opportunity to argue with it. Like, 'No, I think we should all turn into robots!' "

The Nathan Hale High School junior was already flustered because she was the last person in the door at her testing site at Shoreline Community College. She had arrived early but 20 minutes before the start of the test, Pfeiffer discovered she didn't have her photo identification. Her mother had to race over from Seattle with the required ID.

An estimated 300,000 high-school students across the nation took the new SAT yesterday for the first time. The College Board revised the exam after being faced with the threat of major institutions dropping it as a requirement. The most sweeping change is a new writing section — 35 minutes of multiple-choice questions and the 25-minute essay.

The reverberations were felt yesterday on the third floor of the W Hotel in downtown Seattle, as well. More than 50 Puget Sound-area grade-school teachers were learning how to teach their students handwriting, a skill that some may have thought the computer keyboard rendered obsolete. Some elementary schools no longer teach cursive.

"They stopped training teachers how to teach handwriting in most colleges and universities about 25 years ago," said Jan Olsen, an occupational therapist who developed a handwriting curriculum a decade ago. "But instead of putting something reasonable in place, they just dropped it," she said.

Which explains the reaction of Pfeiffer's friend, Aubrey Jenkins, 16, a Roosevelt High School junior, when the exam's proctor told students to copy the instructions in cursive, not in print.

"We were all laughing," Jenkins said. "Most high-school students do not remember cursive. We learned it in fourth or fifth grade and have not been required to use it. This was definitely the hardest thing on the test!"

Olsen, whose new curriculum is called Handwriting Without Tears, says that the new SAT essay section is going to be difficult for test-takers who have grown overly dependent on computer software to catch grammar or spelling mistakes.

College admissions officers may use a student's score on the SAT writing section as a reality check when evaluating that same student's admissions application, which may include an essay massaged and polished by a writing coach.

Olsen said she worries most about how students from disadvantaged backgrounds will fare if schools continue to ignore instruction in handwriting.

"There are still jobs and incidents when handwriting is still the most efficient way of written communication," she said.

One teacher attending the Handwriting Without Tears workshop yesterday told the group that she knew of high-school students whose job applications were rejected simply because they were illegible.

Emily Knapton led the grade-school teachers through exercises on how to teach handwriting. At times it appeared to be a low-impact aerobics class.

As she stood on a chair, Knapton acted as if she were teaching children, and the teachers followed her lead. They wiggled into imaginary swimsuits. Then Knapton took them through "diver letters." Stand up! Get ready! Dive down! Come up! Swim over!"

Pretty soon the teachers had found a way to teach children how to make the letters p, r, n and m.

Teaching cursive begins with a "scoop and dump" exercise, learning the undercurve and overcurve, Knapton instructed. Letters are grouped by the way they are drawn. There are the "tow-truck" letters v, w, and o.

If the SAT's new writing section becomes established, the teaching of cursive may experience a revival. Pfeiffer and Jenkins both found it hard to write the essay within 25 minutes.

"That's just ridiculous," Pfeiffer fumed. "There's no point in your life where someone is going to say you have to write a full essay in 25 minutes with an introduction, body and conclusion on a topic you've not necessarily ever thought about before."

The Advanced Placement exams allow 40 minutes for test-takers to write an essay. "I can outline a wonderful paper in 25 minutes, but I can't write one," Pfeiffer said. "They're seeing how quick I am at printing my thoughts, how fast my hand can move."

Jenkins ran out of time and turned in an essay without a conclusion. She wrote it in print. Cursive had been long forgotten.

"It would have been terrible if we had to write the essay in cursive," Jenkins said.

Knapton warned that society will have to grapple with this lost skill: "As educators, therapists, parents, administrators and school districts, we have to develop a handwriting standard for what our expectations of these children are going to be."

Sanjay Bhatt: 206-464-3103 or sbhatt@seattletimes.com