Twelve-year-old Sandi Chandee hopes to be a doctor one day, but she’s also become obsessed with a very different kind of memorization: writing pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis in flowing cursive across a whole line of paper. In Sherisse Kenerson’s after-school class, Sandi practices loops and joins until she can sign her name with a tiny heart above the i and imagine a perfect future autograph.
Sandi’s friend Halle O’Brien shares the enthusiasm. Both are members of the Holmes Middle School cursive club in Virginia, where students gather to trace letters, copy quotes from the board and trade tips for neater loops. The club grew out of a practical problem: Kenerson, a multilingual teacher who likes to post a new handwritten quotation each month, discovered that students couldn’t always read the script she used on the classroom board. Teaching cursive became a way to bridge that gap and to share what she calls the ‘‘magic’’ of connected handwriting.
The club’s popularity exploded this winter after local and national news coverage dubbed it ‘‘keeping cursive alive.’’ Kenerson, surprised by the attention, says she’s been fielding letters from retirees and teachers — many written in cursive — and has even held Zoom conversations with educators seeking tips on running a similar club. For her, cursive is a way to hold on to a style of writing that many adults still value.
Holmes Middle School is a microcosm of a broader trend: cursive instruction has been returning to classrooms across the country. More than two dozen states now require students to learn cursive after the 2010 Common Core standards left the skill out. Supporters point to nostalgia and to possible instructional benefits; critics ask whether schools should devote time to a manual skill when keyboards, speech-to-text tools and artificial intelligence are ubiquitous.
Some researchers are skeptical that cursive offers unique cognitive advantages. Mark Warschauer, a professor of education at UC Irvine, says the well-established benefits of handwriting are not clearly tied to cursive specifically. He argues that teaching cursive in school can be a ‘‘waste of time and effort’’ when printed handwriting, typing, and voice-to-text options are available and effective.
Other experts take a more balanced view. Shawn Datchuk, a special education professor at the University of Iowa, says students should be multi-modal: able to write in print, use cursive, type, and work with tablets and styluses. In his college classes he sees the mix of tools students use and believes instruction should reflect that reality. Datchuk and his research team reviewed studies on cursive and found the evidence mixed but promising in some areas. Preliminary findings suggest cursive might help with spelling because learning to join letters forces students to pay closer attention to letter forms and connections.
Anecdotes add another layer to the debate. Kenerson reports students with dyslexia who have benefitted from cursive practice. California assemblymember Sharon Quirk-Silva, who supported a 2023 mandate to teach cursive in the state, has heard similar stories and says reception to the policy has been largely positive.
Generational differences are part of what keeps the conversation alive. Datchuk recalls his own son asking him to read a grandmother’s birthday card because the child never learned cursive. For parents and older adults, the inability of younger generations to read handwritten notes can feel like a cultural loss.
Eleven-year-old Antonio Benavides, another club member, embodied that shift. Sent to the club by his father, he went from skeptical to delighted, focusing so intently on his loops that his print handwriting tightened up. He even treasures the quiet sound pencils make on paper: ‘‘The sound of a pencil when it’s silent is just so nice,’’ he said.
Scholars like Steve Graham at Arizona State University caution against overstating cursive’s comeback. Graham, who has followed handwriting research for decades, says declarations of cursive’s demise are cyclical; handwriting has continued in various forms and the real issue is that children learn to write in some form, not which form. He predicts that more rigorous studies will likely show little difference in overall learning outcomes between print and cursive, and that the key is simply dedicating time to handwriting instruction.
Back in Kenerson’s class, students take pride in small victories: Conrad Thompson, 11, is the only student in her history class who can read the teacher’s decorative Declaration of Independence handout, and she hopes to see the original document someday. Sandi and Halle already know they’ll be back to practice.
The debate over cursive is unlikely to end soon. Advocates see handwriting as a link to the past and a useful cognitive tool; skeptics emphasize limited classroom minutes and modern alternatives. For now, clubs like Kenerson’s offer students a choice: to learn another way of writing by hand and to enjoy the quiet, tactile pleasure of making letters flow.