The way of the dinosaur

My son Riley completed kindergarten this past year. He improved in many of the areas and his teachers did a great job. An area that he struggled in was penmanship; this is really no surprise as I have terrible penmanship. I once sent a thank you card to a volunteer who emailed me to thank me for the card, but asked if I would just send a 'thank you email' next time because he couldn't read my writing! After the conference in which we discussed Riley's penmanship with his teacher, I remarked to Tarina that I wasn't too worried about it because penmanship really isn't going to be around too much longer. She gave me kind of bewildered look and said that mastering penmanship is important, because if he can't write now, he will have a terrible time with cursive writing (what she used to teach when she taught 3rd grade). My reply was that cursive writing was certainly no longer a necessary skill, either (seriously, when is the last time you wrote in cursive?). After close to 10 years of marriage, she's become used to my debative thoughts!

And now this, from the author of iconoclast (someone much smarter than me): "aprat from the occasional holiday card, written mail has ceased to be a useful form of correspondence. Every technology, even one that has been around for millenia, such as written correspondence, will eventually be replaced by something that is more efficient" (143).