The sight of my father’s or mother’s script on a small white envelope was what I anticipated right until mail call, after lunch, and what kept me going for the long afternoon hours afterward. I went to three different overnight camps, and hated each one more than the last, but even though camp and I didn’t get along-or, rather, because camp and I didn’t get along-I loved getting mail. I learned early in life to love camp mail, written longhand. But the camp offers an accommodation to the Internet age: if parents wish to send letters by e-mail, the counsellors will print them out and deliver them to the children in their bunks.Īlthough my wife takes advantage of this e-mail room service, zipping daily missives from her laptop at our kitchen island, I refuse. The camp is a back-in-time place, set on ninety unimproved rural acres in Western Massachusetts, with no televisions or computers for the campers, and a stern promise to confiscate mobile phones. Handwriting was my own little form of protest, because at our daughter’s camp most parents write by e-mail. I already had cursive on my mind, because summer was just barely over, and for the third year in a row I had written letters, by hand, to my eldest daughter, Rebekah, at sleepaway camp. Who would tell the cursive that it was no longer needed? You see, cursive isn’t being taught in my daughters’ school anymore, and hasn’t been for at least six years, as long as I’ve had children in the public schools. For me, a writer of strong fuddy-duddy credentials, the sad dramatic irony really was too much. The laminated papers with cursive-writing instructions, taped to every one of the tyke-size school desks with the sweeping attached arms, were sad and beautiful at once, in the special way of obsolete educational technology, like the Apple IIe, or the No.
When I got to my third grader’s classroom, I sat at her desk and noticed, taped to the top of the desk’s writing surface, a laminated strip of paper displaying the multiplication tables up to 9×9, the alphabet in print, and, with little arrows showing the strokes needed to make the letters, the alphabet in cursive. I have three daughters there, so I had to make the rounds to each of their homerooms. On a recent Tuesday night, I attended the parents’ open house at my daughters’ school, a Taft-era brick building in New Haven, Connecticut, which serves four hundred and fifty children, in grades kindergarten through eighth.