(The Conversation) – Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.” Then he handed it to me to read.

Turns out the skill your teachers drilled into you never stopped mattering.

Many people of a certain age remember practicing loops and waves, moving our small hands clutching pencils across pages with light blue dotted and solid lines. But in many schools, that elementary ...