As our culture moves away from cursive writing and becomes more and more reliant on keyboarding, texting, Skype, video sharing, and the myriad other forms of digital communication, penmanship is rapidly falling by the wayside.

Once a required course in elementary schools, handwriting is no longer generally seen as valuable or relevant enough to take up school curriculum time. While that may or may not be the case, learning penmanship can still be beneficial.

Handwriting proponents point to advantages such as improved brain development, greater retention of information when one takes notes manually, and the ability to read historical documents that were written in cursive.

As with handwriting, many skills lose relevance as we evolve. I guess we pick and choose which to keep alive. Maybe learning penmanship in this day and age is akin to students of my generation learning Latin. Or the Macarena.

I hope my grandchildren learn penmanship. I will gladly teach them if they are interested. I hope I continue learning skills for communicating digitally. Maybe my grandkids will offer to teach me.

I kind of doubt that I will ever learn Latin. I can live with that. And the Macarena… well, that’s another story.