Inspiring students to want to learn takes work, dedication, and a real commitment to meeting students’ learning needs and being able to use a variety of strategies to keep students interested. I enjoyed David Warlick’s blog post which discussed Antique Samplers (Wikipedia definition: A (needlework) sampler is a piece of embroidery produced as a demonstration or test of skill in needlework. It often includes the alphabet, figures, motifs, decorative borders and sometimes the name of the person who embroidered it and the date) because it sort of reminded me of the whole idea with cursive writing and how years ago cursive writing was deeply embedded into the grade 2-3 curriculum therefore everyone from that particular era basically all handwrite. But….is handwriting all that important? I attended a workshop a couple of weeks ago and one of the presenters discussed this kind of “loss” of handwriting skills. He went on to describe all the usefulness in utilizing this ‘art’ but then he mentioned that teachers of students in elementary grades were sometimes frustrated in trying to teach handwriting since teachers in the middle and upper levels just printed on the board anyways. This reminded me of myself teaching middle years students…I tried handwriting on the board but I guess I just never learned the ‘art’ of writing certain letters properly since the students would often mistake them for other letters. Maybe placing too much emphasis on these types of trivial things causes, in one way or another, a loss of student interest.