Observing one of my sons holding a pen prompted me to ask, and it was only then that I found out that teaching handwriting, something I had taken for granted, was no longer done in many elementary schools. Fountain pens are certainly not essential to learning penmanship – they had stopped being used by the time I was learning – but as an adult, I did find that their use causes me to be more deliberate.
Some teachers still believe in importance of proper penmanship
Christian Mundorf, 18, a freshman at Valparaiso University, gets some strange glances when others notice he’s writing with a traditional fountain pen rather than today’s usual disposable ink pens.
“Writing and penmanship is much better using a fountain pen,” said Mundorf, who is from Saline, Mich., and studying to be a teacher in secondary education….
…A recent survey from school supplies company Really Good Stuff asked 612 kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers from 48 states whether they teach cursive in their classrooms and found 41 percent no longer incorporate cursive writing lessons into their curriculum.
But according to the same survey, teacher sentiment about this subject is changing in recent years. About two-thirds of all the teachers in the survey said they planned to teach cursive in the future, describing cursive writing as “important” or “very important” for students to learn. Also, about 70 percent of respondents said that “no longer teaching cursive would have long-term negative consequences.”…
fountain pen users 