"They can type 60 words per minute, text on cell phones in seconds and instant-message endlessly. What teens can't do well, it turns out, is write in old-fashioned cursive.
'I've forgotten how to write cursive,' said Alexis Miller, a sophomore at Los Altos High School.
'Cursive has a lot of unnecessary loops,' said her classmate David Kay. 'It seems to be really inefficient.'
Still taught in third grade and practiced in fourth, cursive then vanishes from state standards, a victim of the push to prepare students for state tests and make them computer literate.
'I think we're seeing the end of pen-and-paper writing, and that makes me sad,' said Amy Gibson, who teaches English at Fremont High in Sunnyvale. Like other teachers, she laments the loss of a medium that has expressed creativity and inspiration. Some say kids are losing the ability to read original sources of poetry and other writing."
