The Curse of Cursive

I  just wrote my grandson a note, in the best handwriting I could muster.  Unfortunately, the note had to be read to him because, although he's in the third grade, he can not yet read cursive.  I think cursive is doomed to become an extinct form of communication.  Why teach a form that has no real practical application. It seems kind of sad, in a nostalgic sort of way. In truth, I had to take pains to write the little note, because I so rarely use handwriting any more myself, and I grew up with it.  When I went to school, in the first grade as we had no kindergarten, we learned to recognize block letters if we didn't already know them and how to print them.  When we learned to write, it was in cursive.  The teacher would have a student distribute pencils from a wooden pegboard studded with red Coca Cola pencils and we would practice drawing ovals and push and pull shapes.  I liked almost everything about school then but I thought this Palmer Method or whatever it was called was a waste of time.  I was never lucky enough to get a pencil with a sharp point and my hand would smudge the soft lead into the even softer lined paper that went with the exercise.  Besides, I wanted to write the way my mother did, or the way I thought she wrote.  Occasionally, my mother would take time out from her busy day of hard work to write to her mother or sisters.  It seems strange now, but that was the only way she had to communicate with them, though they lived not that far away.  My father would drive us for visits every other week, weather permitting, so probably most of her letter writing was done in the winter.   She would sit at the kitchen table with her stationery, ask us kids  not to interrupt her for a while, and write away.  I would watch her, and looking at the letter as she moved her pen across it, I used to think she wrote in a continuous stream, with no spacing between the words, and I couldn't wait to learn to write like that. At some point, I had to realize that she also wrote in separate words, and I felt disappointed. For most of my childhood, I had the feeling I never really knew what was going on, and that feeling  lingers even today.