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Raemon comments on Rational toy buying - Less Wrong
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Wouldn't say an utter waste of time. Cursive capital letters get used in higher math occasionally, e.g. for families of sets. If you don't remember how to write them, you end up having to re-learn them sooner or later. Being able to write a perfect cursive G on a chalkboard is the mark of a great professor.
Waste of time for most people, though.
Edit: soooo many people are taking this as a serious argument in favor of learning cursive (and getting massive karma for poking holes in it)! That'll teach me to make frivolous comments.
Here I thought being a great professor was about educating students effectively, not chalkboard tricks.
If I'm trying to evaluate professors, it's a lot easier to see how well they write "G" than how well they educate.
Well, first of all, being a great professor has nothing to do with educating students effectively, it's all about research. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different argument.
But to take your argument at face value, chalkboard tricks can help you be an effective teacher. I think a professor teaching math without writing anything at all (and without slide shows or other visual aids) would be less than 50% as effective as normal, even if everything else was perfect, and I've seen teachers whose boardwork is sufficiently terrible that they may as well not write anything. Writing on a blackboard requires quite a few "chalkboard tricks", though a cursive G probably wouldn't be one of the more common ones. It is important, however, to cultivate a handwriting in which "z" and "2", "t" and "+", "w" and omega, "l" and "1", etc. are easily distinguishable.
Chalkboard tricks do not a great professor make. But I would expect that the correlation is quite high, considering the potential benefits.
Anyone who needs to learn to write a cursive G can spend a week learning it in their higher math class, rather than spending two years of their life in elementary school.
I've only taken a half-dozen college-level math courses but I don't think I've seen any cursive letters yet. If we were going to teach kids cursive in case they one day take higher-level math, we should also be sure to teach them the Greek letters because those are used all the time. Of course the vast majority of people don't need to, don't want to, and won't ever take higher level math, so I'd say that teaching kids cursive is an utter waste of time. The time spent teaching cursive could be put to so much better use (e.g., more time devoted to science instruction), and while it's a bit awkward to learn to write new letters at a later age, I much prefer it to the endless cursive drills.