Friday, November 09, 2007

Why Handwriting Matters

The explanation is akin to mastery of multiplication tables and operations on fractions, decimals, percents, and positive/negative numbers before taking algebra--if you spend all your time and energy thinking about how to do the computations, you'll never understand the algebra.

3 comments:

TurbineGuy said...

When our oldest started 6th grade she was doing horribly... almost failing.

It turns out that she had never completely mastered the multiplication tables. She knew enough skip counting, finger tricks, etc... to get by, but it had finally caught up.

We drilled her along with her two (then) third grade siblings with flashcards.

She is now a straight A 7th grade math student, thank you very much.

The military has the idea... they train you to mastery for critical simple tasks (clearing, reloading, etc...) so that during a crisis you can use your brainpower for things like staying alive and winning.

gbradley said...

Nice penmanship (politically incorrect term) is a talent that I wish I had.

KateGladstone said...

For more on how handwriting matters, and for how to repair yours if it needs a repair or at least a tune-up, visit the Handwriting Repair web-site at http://www.learn.to/handwrite