Time to do a little dance, because cursive is on its way out:

Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail, instant messages and other electronic communication, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades.

For as long as I can remember I've been a practical guy when it comes to learning. Even when I was in kindergarten the teachers had a devil of a time getting me to outline my coloring books. "Why?" I'd ask, "they've already got outlines!" It was such a colossal waste of time.

Cursive writing was another teeth-grinding exercise in redundancy. I already knew how to write. If the way I was doing it was right in the first grade but wrong in the third, why the hell did you teach me the first way at all? The books I was reading certainly weren't in cursive, they were in print, something I'd already been taught. I watched secretaries on TV type things for crying out loud. They printed things, they didn't "cursive" them.

I very rapidly decided that, like math (when was the last time you did long division on paper?), cursive classes were just another mind-numbingly boring and unnecessary thing grownups forced children to do because that's what their grownups had forced them to do. To me, grade school wasn't about learning, it was about various kinds of revenge.

I know there are parents out there smiling condescendingly saying "oh you just wait mister, you'll see." I mean, look at this:

Parents who pride themselves on their penmanship often bemoan their children's cursive ... Many adults pine for a return to the Palmer Method or even its fancier predecessor, Spencerian.

"Cursive was so character-defining when I was in school," says Amy Greene, whose 9-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son prefer keyboards to cursive in their Palo Alto classrooms. "The way you wrote something was considered part of your inner being, your core, your worth. ... Now it's considered an anachronism."

Pardon me while I polish up your rose-colored glasses, I truely am sorry the world is changing right before your very eyes. Cursive was an anachronism thirty-five years ago, probably more. It's losing ground, dying out, not because kids are lazy (it takes real balls for someone born between 1946 and 1960 to say that), or because the teachers just don't take the time. It's dying out because it's inferior to the new way of doing things. I know, I know, it's such a damned shame anyway, isn't it? Such a shame that we're losing one of the very cornerstones of classic public education...

You know, that what you write is less important than the way it is put on the page.

And before you try some snappy comeback about "what good is what you write if people can't read it?" I want you to please explain to me how this is easier to read than this.