Palmer, anyone? by GJ

Does anyone teach the "Palmer Method" of handwriting anymore? The major premise of this approach is "practice, practice, practice." You wrote each letter of the alphabet until your teacher was satisfied that you had mastered the correct form. Any letter that was still weak was to be written until it was strong. Tough letters were capital O's, D's, F's, G's, etc. Homework was composed of filling pages with these capitals.

As I recall, this method was begun in third grade, + or -, and hit hard in fourth. At my new school in Elgin Illinois, in 1938, I met my sixth-grade teacher, Miss Perkins. On the first day, she made it clear that we were now expected to demonstrate, daily, that we had learned Palmer. She meant it, and she stuck to it. On any given day in that grade, if you hastily, or forgetfully made a sloppy capital O, your remedy was to fill a page of CORRECT capital O's before you went out for recess. Knowing this made you quite careful as you worked on that page.

For most of that year, I thought Miss Perkins was the toughest, meanest old witch. (And she was elderly!) Later in the term, I began to mellow toward her as I found myself with fewer and fewer demands to re-do those pesky capitals. Today, I thank the lady. I really believe that very few sixth-grade teachers bothered to stress Palmer once they got the kids who were supposed to have mastered it two years before. I thank her even more for the fact that all of my life since then, I have been complimented on my handwriting. How many other human skills can we expect to trace back to a single teacher? Not because she taught it first, but because she made us practice what we had been taught. Next---memorize, anyone?