Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott for May 19, 2024

Should’ve told him that earlier.

Sounds like a simple substitution cipher.

That would probably seem like an encrypted code to a lot of kids today.

When did they stop teaching cursive?

Wait a minute Hammie, you’re gonna have Zoe help you break the code??? You’re in for a lot of embarassing situations she’ll tell you to do..

Yesterday a coded message on his teeth, today a coded message in his lunchbox, what’s tomorrow? A girl likes him?

Our son is teaching his daughters (ages 11 & 9) cursive. Very cool.

I heard in some school they are bringing cursive back!

Who remembers when they taught Latin is school? Or Typing class?!

I think kids should learn cursive. I learned handwriting in the fourth grade. It was hard, but when you’re older and you need to sign forms in both printing and signature what are you going to do?

Like in M*A*S*H once, Col. Flagg was dictating a message to Radar. The ending was, “‘Marsi dotes & Do Sidotes & I’ll be Home for Christmas’ signed your loving son, Queen Victoria.’”

And for a couple of really BIG encoded messages, Hammie could tackle the original documents of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

My sister writes birthday notes to her grandkids and somebody who knows how to read cursive has to read it to them.

When I started the 1st grade in 1959 the teacher wrote our names on the black board and then gave us colored chalk to trace over our names to get us used to doing it.

How I miss the good old days of hands on teaching when all a teacher did was teach.

\\//_

My doctor sent me a Christmas Card to thank me for plants I give her in spring. It took me 30 minutes to figure out what was written on the card!! Good thing she does stuff on a computer, hate to see what it would be like to decipher a prescription! LOL! And I know cursive and I’m glad it is dying. Most is unreadable.

Times have changed, Wanda. It’s time to change with them.

I’m in the minority as an old guy who doesn’t care about cursive. Yes, kids won’t be able to read it. But probably nobody in this comment section can read the Elizabethan Secretary Hand. And you don’t have to, since the stuff that was written in that hand is in books, printed in text. I CAN read the Constitution in the original cursive (with some difficulty, it’s not exactly the same), but I HAVE read it printed in a book.

I also wonder why Mom would write Hammie a note in cursive at all. You’d think she would know he can’t read it. I think they taught it to me in the 3rd grade.

We were taught cursive and how to tell time with an analog clock. We did arithmetic in our heads too. No calculators, no cell phones. Was it better? IDK.

Maybe there’s an app. for that?

The granddaughters are learned cursive in school. One is in 7th and one is in 9th grade next year. They don’t use it much, but they learned it. Of course with the art of hand writing letters on deaths door, it is only natural that the language of writing and reading cursive will die as well.

Latin typing

I’ll bet it was a note to his teacher that she obviously never got. Should have pinned it on his shirt.

I remember typing class but Latin? Uhhh, no.

“You’re so cool! Hey, I have a Secret Agent Mom who curses!” ☺

At the least they could teach the kids to hold the pen / pencil / paintbrush / stylus correctly! just two fingers and the thumb. You don’t grip it like a club and move everything from the shoulder down to from letters. That goes for printing as well.

Wanda, it’s times like this when you just nod and play along. You can tell him the truth on the way to college when you’re dropping him off.

why were you cursing at him? what did he do?

As for cursive, I fear the ease of modern communication is making cursive and the art of writing personal letters fall by the wayside. Does anyone know of any authors who still write out their manuscripts in longhand?

The only time I use cursive now is when I sign my name. (Even then, it never looks exactly the same way twice.)

Zoe can still help, even if it’s only cursive.

3 yrs of Shorthand.

Tomato tomahto.

I took typing because the classes were always full of pretty girls. That got me nowhere but the typing experience helped tremendously throughout my life.

I knew cursive in 2nd grade due to transferring from a 2nd/3rd grade class in another city, so I was ahead of my classmates. I still think simple cursive is more efficient and aesthetic.

Sometimes I write a note and even I don’t know what it says.

As a joke, we used to say “I can play dominoes better than you can” to poke fun at the Latin services!

The first year that the kids without cursive hit my friend’s high school English class, she wrote her name on the board the first day of school and found the kids could not read it.

You get a famous person’s autograph and you can’t read the darn t hing

No, kids shouldn’t learn cursive. They also don’t need to know how to harness a team or spin yarn, for the same reason.

I grew up learning cursive :-)