Illegible cursive writing turned in? Just drop it! By, Laurie Rheaume

    Many students today look at their messy and illegible cursive writing and sigh, feeling discouraged and like giving up, students like me. Why waste time teaching boring and hard cursive to children? They could learn other things instead that is more up to date in this twenty-first century world. A number of schools scratch out cursive from their material every year. Unfortunantley, it is still taught in many schools. Teachers should simply stop boring students by teaching cursive that they will likely never use. They could have more fun learning other things than attached letters.

    Cursive writing is already a challenge that many average seven to nine year olds have to go through, but it is even a bigger challenge for messy writers, that includes myself. I personally remember in elementary school when I had to do extra cursive practice other than free time, the many times the teacher took me to another table and held my small hand and did cursive letters with me. Or of course when I could not do a certain letter and was so upset that I could not do nice letters like the teacher did, I cried. One teacher even said " I can't believe a sweet little girl could write like that" while squinting at my letters. Cursive may seem easy to some, but for many it is a hard challenge to meet.

    The school year is packed with material to learn and understand. Cursive will take lots of time to teach, not to mention comprehend and be comfortable writing it. Cursive writing should be put aside and leave room to perfect other skills students need to improve. For example, math, many students struggle with this subject. Scratching out cursive writing could leave time to help students understand other things in school that students might need to spend extra time on.

     We are now at the twenty-first century, technology is rapidly getting better, faster and more used. Typing is something that is used by pretty much everyone today. Students should learn how to type properly, instead of learning boring attached letters that they will likely never use. Researchers stated, in the article Cursive vs. Writing in Elementary Schools, "Cursive is not required for academic success, children can get by in the real world without cursive." This proves that kids don't have to learn cursive nowadays to get by. Anne Trubeck, an author once said, "Touch typing is an example if cognitive automaticity, the ability to do things without conscious, attention or awareness. Automaticity takes a burden off our working memory, allowing us more space for high-order thinking." Anne Trubeck, obviously promotes the keyboard use and states why it is better. Students should stop learning things that are slowly going into extinction and start to learn things more adapted to this rapid technological advancing world.

    To conclude, cursive writing should be pushed aside and let room for better things. Cursive writing is simply an unecessary challenge that many students suffer through everyday. Students could be better in certain topics that they struggle in, if cursive disappeared from the school material. Typing will take over cursive in not long, why not put it aside right away and adapt ourselves to this changing world we live in.

Is Homework Worth It? By Thomas Canning

 In most, if not all schools, students are assigned homework. And you probably already know that the students don't like homework. Question is, is it actually worth it? In my opinion, I think that homework can be useless. Especially after a 6 hour school day. Teachers. Imagine this: you get home from school, the most horrid school day in a while. You're tired. You're exhausted. And you just want to go to bed. But you can't. You have hours of work to do. That's how students feel.

According to UVAToday, studies show that homework has little or no effect, but can also help to standardize grades. In my opinion, homework is a pain in the butt. But I also think that it can help us to memorize important elements that could show up in an exam or test. More statistics show that only 50% of parents think that homework is worthwhile. It might seem like a lot, but that means that the other half disagree with homework being worthwhile.

How ever, I do think that bringing technology to homework can make it more interesting for the student to work on. Take our school for an example. In the past three years that I've been here, we've been using more and more technology in our classes. Our school has done a very good job to introduce technology to students with online programs to remind them about upcoming events or homework to hand in.  

In conclusion, I think homework isn't really useful unless studying for an upcoming test or exam. Although I think that homework can sometimes be useless, I think there's a way for teachers to make it interesting. They just need to figure it out.