The web page titled "Saboteurs of Education Create a Fumblefinger Society" argued that penmanship training is valuable because students will need to print and write rapidly and legibly throughout their lives, and because penmanship lays a foundation for a manual dexterity which finds wide application, and which is requisite for many professional tasks.

If that were all that could be said on behalf of penmanship training, it would be enough to earn it a respected place in every curriculum.  When penmanship training is enriched, however, vastly more can be said on its behalf, and a proportional elevation of penmanship in our estimation necessarily follows.

What is meant by enriched penmanship can be seen by examining a few pages from the penmanship exercise books of Marko, which show enrichment in the second, third, and fourth stages, with near-asymptotic enrichment being attained in Stage 3.

Vol. 1    p. 1
Age 05:00    Grade K:Sep

"Grade K:Sep" designates the first month (Sep for September) of Marko's Kindergarten year (K).

As can be seen on p. 1 of Marko's first exercise book, the uppermost line presents a model that Marko imitates for the rest of the page.  A few of the characters below the top line may also be teacher-written exemplars, often distinguished by being circled, and usually positive to show what should be striven for but sometimes negative to show what should be avoided.

Marko writes two lines on Sep 22, four lines on Sep 23, skips Sep 24 and 25, then writes three lines on Sep 26.  From p. 1 and p. 16 immediately below, the goal seems to be to write approximately two lines daily, and the time required might be estimated to be about five minutes.

The much later dates of the bottom two lines on p. 1 resulted from — one may guess — Marko's returning to p. 1 to write on formerly-abandoned blank space so as to make available for simultaneous comparison how much progress he had made over the intervening seven months, but not succeeding as well as he had hoped because of the awkwardness of writing at the very bottom of a page that is raised well above the surface of the table because held within a thick notebook, and also because the pen sometimes ran right off the bottom of the page, and also by running out of room on the right edge of the page because of having to place the date on the same line as the alphabet.

Vol. 1    p. 16
Age 05:02    Grade K:Nov

By page 16, almost two months have elapsed, and Marko is writing what he happens to be reading with his family, the fairy tale of Rapunzel which starts like so:

At this early stage in Marko's education, "reading with his family" means largely being read to, but occasionally invited to himself read aloud some small portion, if only a word or two, and progressing gradually toward the final goal of reading a proportional share.

The Rapunzel exercise shows a first step toward enriched penmanship, so called because to the skills being built of penmanship and general manual dexterity have been added spelling and grammar, capitalization and punctuation, storytelling and narrative, and as the story describes people with yearnings and frustrations and plans, it might be said to also build skills of understanding human nature which encompasses the two most valuable skills of all — knowing what other people are thinking and what they are likely to do next.

Of course Rapunzel is juvenile literature, and a little bit of juvenile literature may be desirable, and in any case is unavoidable.  However, too much of it, and extending too long, stunts growth, and becomes dull to both adult and child.  Remember that children are hard-wired to be plunged into a complex environment and figure out how it works by themselves.  Accordingly, they should not be denied the enjoyment, and benefit, of adult conversation and adult literature.

In Marko's case, his family stumbled across Pirates of Penzance — the incomparable Kevin Kline-Linda Ronstadt version — and which Marko began using for penmanship practice at Age 05:07, Grade K:Apr.  Four months later, at Age 05:11, Grade K:Aug, Marko is working on the first line of the Policeman's Lot song, as shown below at Vol. 1, p. 88. The background of Policeman's Lot is that the police sergeant (played by Tony Azito), terrified at facing the pirates who are about to arrive, and whom he is obligated to arrest, rationalizes his fear as being a disinclination to incarcerate fellow human beings who are perceived as fully deserving liberty, were it not for the rare intervals when they engage in criminal activity. A "coster", by the way, is short for "costermonger", one who sells fruits and vegetables from a cart in the street, and who in the days when Pirates was written had a reputation for being rough, and whose "jumping on his mother" might be taken to mean speaking harshly or disrespectfully to his mother.  The film version only enacts the first two stanzas of the song, although Marko's penmanship took him into the fourth. The movie clip viewable below starts with the Police Sergeant saying "This is perplexing!" in response to Ruth having informed him that the backup that he had been expecting to help capture the pirates has been withdrawn.  The movie sets the scene for the Policeman's Lot song thusly:		Fore: The Pirate King (Kevin Kline).   Back, left to right: Ruth (Angela Lansbury), Major-General Stanley (George Rose), Frederic (Rex Smith), Mabel (Linda Ronstadt)

And right after that comes the Policeman's Lot song whose first four lines Marko is shown practicing below, and whose continuing further into the song can be inspected at Marko's Penmanship Notebooks:

Policeman's Lot

Clicking either the image above of Tony Azito playing the Police Sergeant, or the caption underneath it, will play the Linda Ronstadt-Kevin Kline movie version of this scene, the viewing of which is essential to understanding the further discussion below.

Vol. 1    p. 88
Age 05:11    Grade K:Aug

Marko has been writing Pirates of Penzance passages for more than three months when, on p. 88, he is shown working on the first line of the Policeman's Lot song.  He is no longer being supplied with a model to be copied, such that all writing on the page is his, except for occasional comments written in by his instructor.  The text to be written is in part being supplied by a printed libretto which lies at hand, and in part by memory, as the lyrics are fully memorized.

Appearing here is an eruption of "g" reversal, and on p. 89, visible through the partly-transparent paper, another eruption of the same, and also an eruption of "d" reversal and of "p" reversal.

Vol. 1    p. 93
Age 05:11    Grade K:Aug

Eruptions of "c" reversal join a single further eruption of a "p" reversal (uncircled in his fifth line).  What may have happened here is that the eruption of a double "c" reversal in line five began to be copied as Marko proceeded, and was not immediately caught by the instructor until Marko had imitated the error a few more times, simply because the instructor was not looking over Marko's shoulder as he worked.

Vol. 1    p. 95
Age 05:11    Grade K:Aug

Just a little further practice begins to eradicate letter reversals.

Vol. 1    p. 99
Age 05:11    Grade K:Aug

Interest in digits and Roman numerals interrupts Pirates for a while.

So, there you have Marko — not yet out of Kindergarten — practicing the first four lines of Policeman's Lot.  As has already been mentioned, more extensive coverage of Marko's practicing Policeman's Lot can be found in Marko's Penmanship Notebooks.

What is evident, then, is that the list of skills being practiced in Rapunzel has now been expanded.  As Marko has been hearing the words articulated aloud, he is now also learning both pronunciation and the intonation that is called for by grammar and social context.  As he has watched the actors delivering their lines, he is also learning gestures and facial expressions that may be appropriate.  As there is vocal and instrumental melody, he is also learning music.  And as the words now have rhythm and rhyme, then he is learning something about poetry as well.  And as the image of the movements made by the screen characters remains in memory, then Marko also learns something about dance and choreography.  And as the episode has been presented with attention to scenery and staging and casting, Marko is learning something about theater as well.

And as there is little in Pirates that does not contain some deliberate incongruity, some exaggeration, some hyperbolization — in other words, some joke — then Marko is also learning humor.  Recollecting that Marko scored in the 97th percentile on the Verbal Absurdities subtest of his Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, one may speculate that his strength in this area had been bolstered by his five-month immersion in the thousand-and-one verbal absurdities of Pirates of Penzance (the "immersion" consisting of nothing more onerous than writing Pirates passages an average of five minutes per day).

And as there arise questions of crime and punishment, leniency and forgiveness, seemingly-incongruous traits within a single individual, natural inclination clashing with duty, then the passage teaches something about human nature and psychology.

And perhaps most important of all, between Rapunzel and Pirates, the English has vaulted from juvenile to sophisticated.  It is a tenet of TwelveByTwelve that the advanced vocabulary and the complex grammatical formations that a student practices, and the correspondingly more subtle thinking behind the words, are all being internalized, and thus being made more available in his own speech and writing and thinking.

Let's see what we get when we count the number of skills being acquired in what to the untrained eye stands in danger of being perceived as a mere penmanship exercise:  (1) penmanship, (2) general manual dexterity, (3) capitalization and punctuation, (4) spelling and morphology, (5) grammar and syntax, (6) pronunciation and intonation, (7) gesture and facial expression, (8) story telling and narrative, (9) music and song, (10) poetry, (11) dance and choreography, (12) staging and theater, (13) incongruity and humor, (14) human nature and psychology.

Two other songs sharing the same delightful characteristics as Policeman's Lot, and that offer the same propadeutic gains, are Faithless Woman! and Apprentice to a Pirate, both of whose videos, along with Marko's penmanship practice, can be found on the Pirates Supplement web page.

Let us take the occasion of the above discussion to formulate a couple of TBT rules:

Do these rules reflect what we have just seen Marko doing in his penmanship exercise?  Well, perhaps.  We do seem to witness at least a dozen skills being improved simultaneously.  And if Kindergarten-plus-twelve takes us to Grade 12, and if Pirates of Penzance English is at least Grade-12-appropriate English, then we may be said to be satisfying the second rule as well.  Of course the rules must be understood as idealized goals which the teacher should keep in mind during every decision, but which can be fully implemented only occasionally, and perhaps which it is desirable to fully implement only occasionally, as explained below.

But to achieve the very high richness of Pirates of Penzance is made possible only by studying the performance of an operetta, or one may say of a musical comedy, and appreciation of musical comedy is not the ultimate goal aimed at in language development.  A higher goal is to learn to be absorbed by no more than the written word, or one might say to be drawn into verbal content that lacks the bells and whistles of the Pirates video — no audible music, no visible dancing or gestures or facial expressions — nothing but the printed word, and with the reader's mind supplying whatever else is needed for total absorption, and so Marko's further penmanship tended to lean more toward excerpts from whatever non-musical-comedy material that was currently being read.

Vol. 2    p. 13
Age 06:04    Grade 01:Jan

Toward the bottom of the page, Marko switches his penmanship from Pirates of Penzance to a book being read aloud by the family, Charles Reade's The Cloister and the Hearth (1861):

Vol. 2    p. 20
Age 06:04    Grade 01:Feb

Three more sentences from Cloister and the Hearth:

Vol. 2    p. 27
Age 06:05    Grade 01:Feb

Evidence that in March of Marko's Grade 1 year, the family is reading J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit:

The Cloister and the Hearth is still available to draw on when a particularly short penmanship sentence is wanted:

Vol. 3    p. 71
Age 09:07    Grade 04:Apr

Years have flown.  Marko writes in Vol. 3 in cursive.

G. K. Chesterton writing on Charles Dickens:

At the bottom of the page is indication that the family is reading Les Misérables, in translation of course.

Vol. 3    p. 73
Age 09:08    Grade 04:May

More from Les Misérables, but with a twist — Marko introduces two jokes.

First joke: following Victor Hugo's "This is a law", Marko inserts "bill 45 signed by Abraham Lincoln".

Second joke: Marko puns "prodigal" into "pro-de Gaulle".

Vol. 3    p. 81
Age 09:11    Grade 04:Aug

The first entry is from Morton J. Cronin, Vocabulary 1000:

Next is more from Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, abbreviated probably the sooner to get through the day's exercise:

Of primary interest on this page is the quote at the bottom about Corsican justice, from the biography, Napoleon, by Vincent Cronin:

The Corsican-justice quote is significant because of its indication that although History is not much spoken of in a description of the TwelveByTwelve pilot study, it was being pursued in the background, as for example in the reading of the Napoleon biography, and also of other biographical and historical works, most notable among which being George Orwell's Animal Farm, which was studied in particular detail, and with its parallels to the Russian Revolution being noted.

Vol. 3    p. 82
Age 09:11    Grade 05:Sep

Marko has been prepping for UBC Chemistry 103, which is about to commence, and therefore switches to practicing passages out of his Chemistry text.  Penmanship was being increasingly neglected at that time — for example, between 18-Jul-1988 and 24-Aug-1988, there are no entries.  These chemistry passages are the last penmanship exercises that Marko ever wrote.  The deterioration in quality may have resulted from feeling that penmanship is a childhood exercise being now supplanted by UBC Chemistry, among other things.  Quality more generally might have suffered from it never having been anticipated that the penmanship workbooks would someday go on public display.  That Marko can write well when he tries is evidenced by the better of his Age 9 efforts.

The chief reason for reproducing this terminal page, though, is Marko's joke.  Across the top of the heading "Law of Conservation of Mass" he has scrawled "I did not know mass could talk"!  This recalls his earlier changing Victor Hugo's "Man, in a state of revery, is generally prodigal" to "Man, in a state of revery, is generally pro-de Gaulle".  And why not?  Was not Marko's rich education teaching him humor alongside all the other things?  Did not within practically every line of Pirates of Penzance lurk a joke?

More specifically, recommend the saboteurs, never teach narrative when you can teach disconnected sentences, never teach a sentence when you can teach disconnected words, never teach a word when you can teach disconnected letters, and never teach both the upper and lower cases of disconnected letters at the same time because these are topics that are best spread over separate lessons.

Age 06:05    Grade 01:Feb

When the saboteur of education is confronted with the command to teach the writing of the letters "g" and "p", he would regard as anathema having the students write "While Gregory Gogol grazed a gaggle of gray geese in Glasgow, Peter Piper was picking a peck of pickled peppers in Papua".

The saboteur prefers to impoverish the exercise down to a writing of only the lower-case "g" and "p", and if the inclusion of words is forced upon him, he permits only their minimal appearance as disconnected words, favoring particularly words that the student is unlikely to ever hear or read or use himself, like "gig" and "pip", and he presents these words undefined and unexampled in use, and therefore devoid of power to either enlighten or amuse.

Age 06:10    Grade 01:Jul

And, reasons the saboteur, when progression to a higher level is unavoidable, then for as long as possible let it be to no more than the level of disconnected words, thus delaying the learning of grammar and syntax, and all manner of higher things that children are better off not knowing.

www.quickmeme.com/~

Children who are restricted to the sort of exercises above feel a pain which they are too inexperienced to be able to identify as the pain of intellectual starvation, and who do not understand that they have a right to demand that their hunger be answered not by morsels but by meals.  Among them are few Oliver Twists with the recognition that they have the right to demand more, which is to say, more stimulation, more complexity, more enrichment.

But if impoverished exercise is bad, why did Marko do any?  The reason is convenience.  Cursive-writing workbooks lay at hand, and preparing enriched materials would have taken more time than was available.  In any case, the impoverished exercises were done rarely and briefly, and an occasional exposure to impoverishment might be considered to be educational, just as the occasional experience of physical hunger is educational.

Minimizing enrichment is not a thoughtless or impulsive preference, it is a meticulously orchestrated plan carried out under the guise of educational expertise, under the pretense of educational sophistication, as is exemplified below, where letters and words are doled out in minuscule portions according to a strict schedule:

www.readingkey.com/~

However, the TBT view is that language exercises which leak out individual letters and words in a slow drip are responsible for the production of impoverished instructional materials.  They produced the Dick and Jane series of impoverished readers which dominated North-American education from 1930 through the 1970s, facing pages from six Level 1 Dick and Jane readers appearing below:

Dick and Jane, We Look, Level 1 reader Look, look. Oh, oh, oh.		Dick and Jane, Jump and Run, Level 1 reader Jump, Puff.  Jump, jump, jump.  Jump, Puff, jump. Run, Puff.  Run, Puff, run.  Run, run, run.  Jump, jump, jump.
Dick and Jane, Something Funny, Level 1 reader Look, Dick.  Look, look. Oh, oh.  Look, Dick.		Dick and Jane, Away We Go, Level 1 reader Go, Tim.  Go up.  Go up, Tim.  Go up, up, up. Go, Tim.  Go down.  Go, go, go.  Go down.  Go down, down, down.
Dick and Jane, Go, Go, Go, Level 1 reader Oh, Sally.   Come, come.  Come, Sally, come. Oh, see.  See Sally go.  Go, Sally, go.  Go, go, go.		Dick and Jane, We Play, Level 1 reader Oh, Dick.  Oh, Jane.  See Spot. Funny, funny Spot.  Spot can play.

And the very National Reading Vocabulary rules shown above are among the many which produce impoverished reading today:

www.readingkey.com/~

www.readingkey.com/~

The colored letters on the Trip to Fox Mountain page above further illustrate the application of what gives the appearance of being educational expertise:

www.readingkey.com/~

Whether all this expertise does any good can be estimated by comparing the reading passages in the table below, and estimating, first, what language skills may be expected from students in conventional schools who read such passages as are in the upper row, keeping in mind that these passages contain words being delivered on schedule, and some of whose letters may be color-coded by scholars able to sort consonants and vowels into hard and soft, and identify vowels that are "r-controlled", and recognize a diphthong when they see one; and by estimating, second, what language skills may be expected from students in TwelveByTwelve who read and write and memorize the adult literature in the lower row, and which literature introduces words following no schedule and which words are devoid of color-coded letters.

George Bernard Shaw

And so we return to the question that was on our minds at the end of Chapter 1 — which is whether there exists a conspiracy to retard children's learning.  The motivation seems to be there — the Great Clash.  And the evidence begins to pile up.  The suppression of Marko and Jake's outbreak of excellence.  The abandonment of manual dexterity when it is needed throughout life and in support of professional skills.  The weakening of language proficiency by reliance on impoverished reading materials.  In general, the creation of mass ineptitude when the methodology to create mass excellence lies at hand.