Monday, 20 February 2012

Who has the neatest handwriting?

The plural of anecdote is not 'data', so treat this post as totally non-scientific. From the 'kids today' file comes an observation about the quality of handwriting being taught in todays schools. Having gone through about 30 scoresheets after each round of the ACT Championship I can see a clear difference in handwriting ability based on the age of the authors. Contrary to the claims that kids today aren't as polite/smart/neater as previous generations, the neatest handwriting is mainly by the junior players in the tournament. Those still at school seem to present both legible and intelligible scoresheets, with those submitted by the older generations diminishing in quality. In fact the quality seems to get worse as the participants get older, leading me to assume that despite the claimed death of handwriting skills due to the prevalence of keyboards and texting, today's education system is doing a far better job of teaching children how to write, than it did in my day, and in the days of my parents.

4 comments:

Shaun Press said...

Postscript: However the neatest schoresheets of all are those handed in by Paul Dunn, but this may be due to the fact that he spends a huge amount of time entering other peoples games for Ozbase, and therefore he sympathises with anyone else performing a similar task.

Andrew McKechnie said...

I like this one - good on the juniors!

Andrew McKechnie said...

I like this one - good on the juniors!

Andrew McKechnie said...

I like this one - good on the juniors!