Russian handwriting in US classrooms in the computer age

[Patricia Chaput]

Response to:
"But for all written work I accept printed (печатные буквы) Russian. I send 4-6 students a year to Russia and I've never heard a complaint."

It seems to me very odd to accept (and thereby encourage) a form of writing that not even Russian children are taught.  Once Russian children enter школа they are taught cursive; печатные буквы are only for дошкольники and essentially for letter recognition (pre-reading).  

I also think we should be concerned about the possible smirking, that when students are not taught to write in the form that educated native adults command, then they are not themselves perceived as educated adults.  In a worst-case scenario, they will be seen as incompetent and perhaps incapable of learning anything very complicated, deprived of respect for the abilities they have.  Students who "signal" incompetence may never be offered challenges that they are perfectly capable of meeting, if their teachers or employers do not believe them capable.  We also have to consider that these students may be unaware of what they are signaling, since printing is acceptable in North America and increasingly common.  These students may not be complaining because they may be unaware of the impression they are conveying.  Or, if their friends tease them, they may simply accept it as teasing and believe it unimportant (if their native language experience is that printing is a non-issue!
 ).

For students who print in English, there is an easy compromise for Russian cursive.  Many Russians put breaks between letters when they write (picking up the pen and then starting a new letter without having every letter connected).  If students who are printers use the cursive shapes of the letters, but aren't required to connect all letters, they can produce a very legible and acceptable form of writing that looks like cursive and doesn't carry the negative associations of printing.  Since students have to acquire some form of writing, it is not much more trouble for them to learn the cursive shapes, and they will in fact be able to write faster. 

We used to have students begin with printing, then learn cursive, but years ago we cut out the printing stage and just have them learn cursive letter shapes.  It is my impression that they learn to write the cursive shapes more quickly, perhaps because the cursive shapes are in many cases easier to write, with fewer strokes.  Certainly their "printed cursive" is easier for me to read than the odd block letter shapes they used to come up with.  And since most printers do in fact connect letters, letting the pencil drag to the next letter, they tend to do the same with the "printed cursive" and end up producing cursive.

When we began with printing and moved to cursive, learning cursive seemed to some students to be a burden, but when we eliminated the printing stage and just started students with "printed cursive" the burden seemed to disappear.

As to the technology argument, we are far from living in a world in which the technology is always working, computers never crash, batteries never die, the printer is always working (and we have the right printer software), and we all have our electronic writing devices at hand and turned on--if we would even want that.  

Pat Chaput
Harvard University

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