Call me Boomer or Old Fashioned but

I'm a boomer myself, but heck no to the diagraming of sentences. lol  My strong skill was math, not language.

I think there shouldn't be a one-size fits all approach to education. Students are individuals with different abilities and different styles of learning.

Being able to read cursive is useful. Being able to write cursive -is useful to some but not all. I never learnt and manage just fine. My kids did learn but only one of them uses it regularly - the other two have dysgraphia and prefer typing.

Rote memorisation can be a useful skill but not everyone's brain is able to memorise that way. Understanding the material is most important - formulas can be looked up, so can lines of poetry, and calculators are on everyone's phone.

Diagramming sentences - I actually taught all three of my kids this (I homeschooled them all for part of their education). One loved it because they understood how the words went together in a diagram (but had the hardest time with naming the actual parts of speech), one hated it because they didn't see the point since they wrote well anyway (and then found it useful when learning a foreign language - in that they knew the parts of speech and how they worked and could apply that), and one needed an alternate method of diagramming to grasp any of it but learnt enough to get by. Again two of mine have dysgraphia.

As for learning to read with memorisation of sight words - again, that works well for some kids. Phonics works well for other kids. A mix is probably best for most kids. One of mine learnt to read at school using sight words. One of mine I taught to read using phonics and limited sight words. One of mine was taught using phonics and limited sight words at school, did pull out learning for extra phonics help even into 4th grade, and ended up learning to read silently yet continues to struggle with reading out loud. Phonics and phonemes simply never did click nor did sounding words out. ALL three are strong readers who love to read.

I learned cursive. Even so, have a hard time reading documents written 100 years ago. Cursive has changed. Even when I was a kid, my mom would complain about how we weren’t learning proper penmanship and our cursive was “ugly”. 😂 She has that beautiful flowing cursive. Today, my writing is a combination of cursive and print. It is true, it is an art that is slowly changing/dying. And like my mom, I think my boys handwriting is awful. 😂

I have such mixed feelings on some of this stuff. Our elementary curriculum is too advanced these days. No one has time to teach cursive except to accelerated learners.

Kids have to learn technical skills that we never did. We’re expected to make every one of them ready for college. If there isn’t enough time and we start adding more stuff to the curriculum, the first thing that always gets cut is the arts. And you know what we do in music class? A fair amount of rote memorization, and looking for patterns and learning rules for expression (like grammar). That’s in addition to the SEL skills and history/geography embedded in many lessons. Is it worth getting rid of all that to make room for cursive?

I think that education should be left to educators!!!

We sent our daughter to private school partly for these reasons. She learned cursive in Grade 1. Multiplication tables, Latin, French, public speaking, were all taught. She is currently pursuing a bilingual (English & French) degree in Chemical Engineering. She credits her university success and chosen career path to her traditional education.

I think those can be some of a set of various tools. I think too many people were left behind in school because they weren't able to learn the "right way". There are multiple ways to learn something. I hope that there are more options now. Although with ever more required of teachers and fewer resources, I don't know how they manage.

Yep, I agree.  Everyone should kmow their times tables by heart.  Diagraming sentences?…if it leads to better grammar, then I’m all for it.  I crings every time I hear someone say ‘I seen…’ or double negatives…my boomer background says that person is under-educated.

I agree with you about having mixed feelings. My kid did have a stint with cursive in 3rd grade so she kind of uses it, kind of not. In spite of being a truly amazing artist, her hybrid handwriting is horrific, LOL. I also agree that they need to know how to function in a computer literate society. The more I think about it, the more I think that kids should be required to be in school longer, either more days in a year or more years in total, simply because there is so much more that they need to know now and there just aren’t enough hours in a day or days in a year to teach it.

I think having a strong foundation in the arts helps all students to be more creative and to think in more abstract ways in all their other subjects. Kids really do suffer when those programs are cut.

I believe that learning to be able to quickly and accurately memorize things in my early school years helped me a LOT in high school and college, as did learning how to take good notes. I aced so many history classes all the way up through college art history (which was HARD) because I had the capacity to take great notes and memorize critical information from those notes. Manually writing things down really helps to cement information in my brain. As a side point, writing in cursive is much faster which makes it better for taking notes on the fly during lectures in class. 

Agree to disagree.

I don’t think any of the things you listed are an essential part of a modern education.

We had to memorize a lot of stuff when I was in school. I don’t remember any of that anymore. I do remember the things I *learned* and understood on a deeper level.

Cursive - whatever. I learned it. My handwriting is a hybrid mishmash now. I don’t think it’s a great value.

Diagramming sentences - understanding grammar and parts of speech is important. I think there are multiple routes to learning them. Most people I know actually learned English grammar the best when they took foreign languages.

If kids are not taught cursive, how do they/will they sign their names on legal documents?

Print. Dd was never taught due to her disabilities and prints her name.

Ds is allowed to put an X and he cant even write his name.

DD needed her passport renewed, but had to go in person since her first one was when she was a minor, and she’s 19 now. The post office employee handed back her printed signature and said it had to be in cursive. I thought he was joking, but he was serious. She only took a week or two of cursive in third grade, and hadn’t used it since. I had to write her name out on a scrap piece of paper, and then she tried her best to copy it on the document. Seemed silly to me since she never signs her name that way, but she needed her passport.