In this age of the keyboard, some people seem to think handwriting lessons are _

Do American children still learn handwriting in school? In this age of the keyboard, some people seem to think handwriting lessons are on the way out.
    We asked the literacy professor Steve Graham at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He told us that he has been hearing about the death of handwriting for the past fifteen years. He said: "If the results of a survey we had published this year are accurate, it is being taught by about ninety percent of teachers in grades one to three."
    Ninety percent of teachers also say they are required to teach handwriting. But studies have yet to answer the question of how well they are teaching it. Professor Graham said: "One study published this year found that about three out of every four teachers say they are not prepared to teach handwriting.
    And then when you look at how it’s taught, you have some teachers who are teaching handwriting by providing instruction for ten, fifteen minutes a day, and then other teachers who basically teach it for sixty to seventy minutes a day--which really for handwriting is pretty much death."
    Many adults remember learning that way--by copying letters over and over again. Today’s thinking is that short periods of practice are better. Many experts also think handwriting should not be taught by itself. Instead, they say it should be used as a way to get students to express ideas. After all, that is why we write.
    Handwriting involves two skills. One is legibility, which means forming the letters so they can be read. The other is fluency--writing without having to think about it. Experts say fluency continues to develop up until high school.
    But not everyone masters these skills. Teachers commonly report that about one-fourth of their kids have poor handwriting. Some people might think handwriting is not important anymore because of computers and voice recognition programs.
    But Steve Graham at Vanderbilt said: "Word processing is rarely done in elementary school, especially in the early years. Even with high school teachers, we find that less than fifty percent of assignments are done via word processing or with word processing. And, in fact, if we added in taking notes and doing tests in class, most of the writing done in school is done by hand."