In all my years of school, there was only one time I cried in class. It was the first week of first grade—Mrs. Scougie's room—and we were learning cursive. Q. I hated the letter. But it wasn't that I ...

PHOENIX – With eyebrows furrowed and fingers holding pencils in clawlike grips, third-graders at Lowell Elementary School in Mesa, Arizona, were tackling an assignment involving cursive writing.

Nearly 40 years later, the admonishments of my second-grade teacher at Thomas Jefferson Elementary in Anaheim still ring in my ears. “Messy! Messy!” I was a precocious 8-year-old, placed in a ...

On a recent Tuesday night, I attended the parents’ open house at my daughters’ school, a Taft-era brick building in New Haven, Connecticut, which serves four hundred and fifty children, in grades ...

The National Archives is brimming with historical documents written in cursive, including some that date back more than 200 years. But these texts can be difficult to read and understand—particularly ...

As of Independence Day, 2012, forty-five of the fifty United States have adopted the Common Core curriculum in their public elementary schools. Those states are now in the process of phasing out the ...

COMPTON, Calif.—In a classroom at Anderson Elementary on a recent Thursday, third-graders lined up to have their pencils sharpened to a crisp point before beginning a cursive lesson. The students put ...