I learn from Book of Joe that 85% of SAT essays are written in print form rather than cursive:

penmanship experts are fighting, mostly without success, to stem the flight from handwriting in a generation accustomed to using keyboards or phones to generate most of its outgoing.

Between 8th and 9th grade, my mother sent me to summer school, where I took a class in typing and a class in “computers.” There were no computers in the class. Do I need to repeat that part? A computer class with no computers. It was a class on the subject of computers, not a class where we learned anything remotely practical like … how to use a computer. Other than some basic binary math, I learned nothing.

(Not true, actually. I learned nothing from the teacher or the texts, but I did learn why it’s important not to insult remedial-student thugs who are 5-years-older and have, let us say, higher time preference: they brought a pistol to school the next day, showed it to me, and claimed they were going to kill me after class. That was the first of only two times I’ve been directly threatened with a handgun, but it’s a story for another time).

I learned plenty from the typing class, namely, how to type. Specifically, I learned how to touch-type very fast while looking at what I was writing, rather than at the typewriter keys.

Once I knew how much better my writing was when I could do it quickly, I abandoned the agony of cursive and developed a fast chicken scratch for anything I had to submit “hand written.” Everything else I’ve done at a keyboard for the past 25 years.

Yes, we’ll teach our son penmanship. I have no idea if he’ll thank us or curse us for it.