Poor G

I don't know why, but g always gets picked on when people talk about handwriting. In the Mar/April edition of Good Magazine (what a minute, it's still January!), there is an article titled Stop Teaching Handwriting by Anne Trubek. She starts off lamenting how her third grade son spends much of his school day struggling to learn the letter g. Wow, now that is one tricky letter to master.

The Onion News (the news source with a twist) tells the story of a third grader who is anxiously waiting to learn the cursive letter g in her class. Her teacher states:

"Abigail has come up to my desk five times in the past three days asking when we would be learning G," teacher Ellen Honig said. "I told her we'd probably get to it sometime next week, but that I couldn't make any promises."

The young girl's anxiety caused by the letter g is only increased when her teacher adds:

"We should get to g very soon, but you never know," Honig said. "We could have a fire drill, or the multiplication-filmstrip series I ordered might finally come in."

Dr. Mel Levine reminds us that cursive writing can be a difficult task for a student. The inability to assign specific muscles at the right time during letter formation could be a contributing factor. What letter does he use in his explanation at workshops? You got it... the g! You see, the finger muscles responsible for rotation have to get fired up. As the letter changes direction, muscles responsible for descending strokes have to take over, then there's the loop combination and finally the opposite muscle action for ascending movement...now what word was I trying to spell? It's all a nightmare.

Can we possibly give everyone a buy when it comes to learning g, please? It might free us up to spend more time on MCAS prep.