WRITING IN SCHOOLS.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVI, Issue 43090, 9 May 1907, Page 4

WRITING IN SCHOOLS.

At a meeting of the South Canterbury Teachers’ Institute: an interesting discussion took place on “Writing.” Amongst objections urged to the upright style was the dislike of it, by business men, probably because they were traintd to write with a slope themselves, though one such objector had been himself trained in the vertical writing. A common objection is the tendency of the writing to. “fall backwards,” and a reply to this was that it also tends to “fall forward.” A critic of the specimens of Waimate writing, which originally converted the teachers, asserted that the writing was really poor penmanship, because it was evidently done with the pen held wrongly. One teacher said it was difficult to get good work in upright writing, because the teachers had been trained to write with a slope, and everything they put on the blackboard was writt-pi” a: slope. Some speakers advocated giving the pen to infants, whilst, others condemned this idea. Several recommended practice in speech writing to-, sixth standard, and it was remarked that country children got through their examinations quicker than town children because they had more writing to do. to fill up time while the teacher was attending to other classes. It, was claimed on the one hand that Hawke’s Bay schools produce the best writing with the vertical style, and on the other that Taranaki schools excel with a sloping style. It was admitted that the crowded syllabus leave® less time than formerly for the cultivation of writing, and that pupils fall off in their penmanship on going to the high schools, because (rood writing is not made a point to there, and it. was from high schools that the commercial world was chiefly recruited with boys whose writing was the subject of complaints. A 1 vote was taken at the dose of the discussion, when seven teachers voted for the absolutely vertical and sixteen for a. slight slope of twenty degrees. It was also resolved to ask. the Board of Education, subject to the approval of the inspectors, to add the Vere Foster medium slope series to the list of authorised copy-books.