College Students Don't Know How To Mail A Letter

Interesting article on the topic.

https://www.businessinsider.com/cur...ols-2017-3-2

On the flip side, my wife has had a cell phone for years but didn't know how to text until about 6 months ago. Motivation, need, desire...

I have a PO Box in a college town, so for years I've seen postal employees dealing with yet another new crop of millennials who have no clue how to address an envelope or parcel correctly.

Because of the expense. But this year in Washington State, the ballots will come with postage paid reply envelopes. Previously one had to either add postage to the envelope or place it in one of the ballot boxes that were made available in various places. One will still be able to use the ballot boxes to save the Country the postage cost. There are, AFAIK, no actual polling places to show up in person to vote.

I'm in my 40s and learned cursive in school. I cannot read most 19th-century cursive covers, though the writing looks beautiful. Am I the only one?

PHIL ---It is a learning thing ,read what you can and then read it again later in the day .As you do it more often
,then it becomes clearer as you go along .

Stamp collectors are a dying breed.
At my local stamp show I saw no one under 50 years of age attending except a couple of people trying to sell what they just inherited. (common mint US postage)

Within 50 years stamp collectors will be gone and stamps will only be found in museums.

When I was at school around 1951 we were not taught cursive but "joined up" writing instead <grin> Now I find it hard to remember when I last actually wrote a letter by hand - several years probably. With word processors and email it is not worth the cost and time to use "snail mail" When I occasionally buy pages of stamps written up by hand I always think of the time it must have taken and the care to get it right. Now days with all my page write ups on the PC it is so easy to change one how the old timers did it baffels me.

AQ

What about the alternate idea: "Older people do not know how to use a computer"

Good point Al. I admit that at least once a week I feel a guilty joy when a <35 year old comes to me for technology help.
Don

We rely on our kids to help navigate us thru this stuff.

Jack Kelley

The article about young people not knowing where to buy stamps is more than likely almost complete nonsense. News articles in this category of news -- shocking things you didn't know -- are nearly always based on a couple of random comments by a few people. There is no research behind the article. It's just made up on the basis of a few rather dim-witted young people who don't know what a post office is. Apparently. If those examples are even real.

As a former high school teacher (history) for nearly 50 years, I can promise you that not one single student I ever taught was unclear about where to buy postage stamps or how to address an envelope. What stories like this nonsense do is to fuel people's existing anxiety that things are getting worse, that young people are not being educated properly, that the world is going straight to hell. No, no, and no.

On the other hand, though, the claims about how students lack the knowledge of how to write cursive -- basic "handwriting," in other words -- is accurate. Many students in the 1990s, apparently, did not get taught handwriting by idiot teachers who just assumed everyone in the future would use keyboards. It's always a dangerous game to play when you guess what the future will be like, especially when you then make educational decisions based on those guesses -- which are typically wrong. In my experience, and the experience of dozens of other teachers, students lack of handwriting skills can hurt them significantly because they lack the ability to write quickly and clearly. Nearly all school work that isn't formal essays and projects, which means 90% of school writing, is done by hand. Having to print your writing is a time suck, and since these students never learned how to write clearly, often even their printing is pinched and unreadable. We had a strict rule -- if it's illegible, you get no credit. Over the years, I marked a lot of quizzes and test essays "unreadable: F". (After it was handed back, I did allow them to come in with their work and copy it over without changing anything, except the handwriting. for a new grade -- because I'm such a softie)

I was administering a standardized exam one time when the instructions I was reading said to the students, "Now you will write the following paragraph in your own handwriting [it was a security check]. You must write in cursive handwriting and must not print." You could have heard a pin drop after I read that statement. Most of the students went white in the face and said, "But I have no idea how to write in cursive." So I wrote the paragraph in cursive on the blackboard (sorry, "white" board) for them to try to copy. Probably a violation of the rules, but I could think of no other remedy. How sad when someone raised on a keyboard is without their keyboard. They're lost.