About five years ago, San Juan High School teacher Shirley Bowers realized that half her students had no idea what she was writing on the board.

"I had a student remark that he couldn't read my notes," Bowers said.

His fellow classmates fessed up, too. Bowers' notes were hard to read. They were in cursive.

Over the past decade, teachers and secondary students across the country have reported a trend that their parents and grandparents could scarcely imagine:

The millennial generation is increasingly cursive illiterate.

The digital age has pushed to the periphery a penmanship skill used for generations. The world of personal computers, e-mail and texting has rendered the handwritten note an anomaly, something that many of today's students get only from grandparents. Some parents complain that their middle schoolers can't sign their names.

Cursive – the long, flowing style of penmanship in which the letters are connected – is taught to youngsters letter-by-letter in daily drills. Teachers in Elk Grove, Folsom-Cordova, Sacramento City, San Juan and Twin Rivers unified school districts report teaching it.

However, cursive instruction is not state-mandated, nor is cursive fluency tested as a California standard. So emphasis on penmanship varies from district to district and school to school.

Many students can't read it, and many more can't write it, either.

Despite its marginalization, cursive is still a state educational standard in California. Kids should be able to legibly write in cursive or joined italic lettering by the third and fourth grades, the state says.

"I love teaching cursive, so it's hard to let it go, but with the priorities of No Child Left Behind, it's almost being forced out," said Elizabeth Wihtol, who teaches third grade at Twin Rivers Unified's Pioneer Elementary School.

A few days ago, Wihtol wrote a lower case cursive "r" on an overhead projector and showed her class how to make the letter.

The room was quiet. The children lowered their heads as they practiced. One boy, a lefty, stuck his tongue out in concentration.

"It's fantastic how the words connect – it's so different in cursive," said Alyssa Dallman.

"Once you know how to write cursive, you know how to read it," said Hunter Jurkovich. He could now decode the "secret" cursive notes his older sister writes.

But while cursive fluency often makes elementary kids feel like grown-ups, this rite of passage often loses its currency once kids hit middle school, teachers say.

Middle and high school teachers receive word- processed assignments uploaded to Web sites. Pupils mastering complex content may be more of a priority than perfectly formed cursive script. Fluency dries up.

"Unless you use it, you lose it," said Susie Schaffer, a retired third-grade and English Language Arts lead teacher at Folsom Cordova Unified.

She thinks cursive needs to be emphasized beyond one or two years of elementary school. "People are beginning to realize that children are graduating with atrocious or illegible handwriting," she said.

Mark Bradley, an English and U.S. history teacher at Rio Tierra Junior High, said it takes his students longer to read something in cursive than when each letter is written separately – also known as block or print. And he added that they groan when asked to write in cursive.

"It's a bit like going for a root canal for them," Bradley said.

On a recent impromptu writing exercise, in which time was an element, of 65 students, only one wrote in cursive. The rest of the essays were in block, he said.

He then posed a question to his students: "If I paid you by the word to write something in a hurry, would you use cursive?"

Of those same 65 students, only two said they would.

Bradley also said he's noticed that his fellow teachers – those about 10 years younger – tend to write in block letters.

"It's been a slow change over time, but accelerated by word processing and texting," Bradley said.

Some cursive proponents say the problem is exacerbated by teacher credentialing programs that no longer train potential teachers on cursive instruction.

* * * Call The Bee's Melissa Nix, (916) 321-1090.