If you can easily sign your name consider yourself lucky. Script writing is a thing of the past.

My education in cursive writing began in first grade with Mrs. Christine Bell who wore a bell-shaped pin on her shoulder, and was therefore trustworthy.

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Cat, rat, bat

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During writing practice Mrs. Bell repeated two things: “Amy, write with the other hand,” and “stop chewing your pencil,” which resembled a teething stick for a German Shepherd.

I was at the tail end of left-handed shaming, and being a plain public school pupil, my southpaw was never whacked with an incentivizing ruler. This was a good thing for my hand and my behind, because I would have retaliated and Mr. Russell had a hockey stick and it wasn’t for the men’s league.

Aiming to please, and wanting to earn Mrs. Bell’s favor (and maybe a piece of candy), I became right handed.

Slowly. Mrs. Bell encouraged me quietly, day after day, and whether one can articulate it or not, kindness is what matters most in teachers.

Each week, Mrs. Bell gave out prizes for a tidy desk and unmasticated pencils. If you earned 10 stickers you became a very big deal.

You and another big deal pal were excused from reading. You’d hang a left, walk down the hall by yourselves, past the big kids in fifth grade and descend the creepy industrial stairwell to the cafeteria. Then, as if that wasn’t enough of an incentive to quit pencil punking, and clean your desk, you got to carry the Rosebud Dairy plastic bin with half-pint cartons of warm milk, and ziplock bags of cookies and dried out carrot sticks. Muy importante.

I only heard of the voyage; my sky of scholarly compliance was devoid of stars, smiley faces or well done stickers. I never earned the snack retrieval honor. My desk was a black hole of papers and a cache of chewed pencils.

Every Friday I missed recess to clean it out, but I didn’t care much; there is only so much foursquare a first grader can take.

I don’t remember why I chewed my pencils. Even then it was a mystery, because after PE, my favorite time of the day was writing practice.

Nothing brought more joy to my budding nerdom than a sheet of clean paper with the dotted boundary line and instructions to copy: cat, rat and bat five times each. For minutes the room was blanketed in the sound of concentration, pencils scratching and erasers creating perfection. I liked the repetition. I liked the curves and lines, and I liked it because I was good at it.

Well, to be honest, most of us were good at it because we didn’t have a choice. The alphabet was taught and written one way. Mrs. Bell had zero qualms pointing out errors, expecting perfection and giving explicit instructions on how to properly erase mistakes.

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The Palmer Method 2.0

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Most adults had beautiful cursive writing, being graduates from the Palmer Method, but no one rivaled my uncle, Jerry Fobare. A plumber by choice and trade, my Uncle Jerry worked with heavy materials creating massively muscled fingers. But, hand that guy a pen and his words floated over the page with the grace of a gliding swan.

Previous generations learned penmanship when your word was your bond and signing your name meant something. Then comes Gen Z, to whom we owe a massive apology to for dropping penmanship from the curriculum.

“If Gen Z takes over the world,” jokes comedian Karen Morgan, “it’ll be easy to get it back; we’re just going to write our battle plans in cursive, on a piece of paper.”

And, as any Gen Z’er would say, “facts.”

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A,B,C

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About 10 years ago I realized my students couldn’t write their own signature. I started spending 5 minutes a week teaching the cursive alphabet, providing them with ample opportunity to remind me how stupid it was, because they had, like, phones and could e-sign and who cared about this old writing stuff anyway.

Accustomed to push back from screenagers, I soldiered on. By mid-October most of them could write their first name, and by the end of the year, they could jot down their John Hancock with flair.

Cursive writing walked the plank to make time for digital learning, but it may be worth reconsidering. There is more to cursive writing than learning which way the loop goes in a capital G.

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Eat your veggies

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Research from fancy places like Princeton, Harvard and the University of Washington say cursive writing engages both hemispheres of the brain, which promotes cognitive development, increases concentration, improves fine motor skills, memory and historical document recognition.

Something magical happens in the deep recess of the hippocampus when you write down new information: you learn it.

So, while kids may grumble about it, cursive is the Brussels sprouts of handwriting — no one wants it, but it’s good for you. In an increasingly fast world, why not give students a moment to slow down and concentrate?

Education needs to reflect technology, and I am all for interactive apps, gamified learning, AI-powered tutors and virtual classrooms. We should have time to incorporate a rote skill like penmanship that develops the mind and lasts a lifetime.

Afterall, it was not too long ago that paper and a pencil was the new technology, replacing a quill, an ink well and a loopy lettered document some people can’t read.