My teachers put the curse in cursive.

Mrs. Demmer, Mrs. Sibilrud, and Mrs. Bach taught penmanship while wearing high heels. That’s right, my teachers wore high heels. That’s why there were few men elementary school teachers in those days.

My teachers taught printing and writing. Printing and writing were separate things in those thrilling days of yesteryear. We were taught cursive handwriting in which flowing strokes joined the letters in a pleasing manner. With minds of mush and stubby fingers grasping untrained pencils, we, the future teenagers of America, worked the erasers as hard as the lead. We paid rapt attention because we were graded on our penmanship, even though there has never been a single Nobel Prize awarded for handwriting.

My wonderful teachers weren’t perfectionists, but they wanted us to be.

It couldn’t have been easy being my teacher. I found it difficult to write without drooling. Teaching me good penmanship was like buying a hat for a dog. The dog doesn’t want a hat.

We were taught that our names should be signed with pride. A signature should not only reflect confidence, but it should be easy to read. My classmates and I practiced signing our names. No piece of paper was safe from our pens and pencils. Most of our signatures were large and readable.

My signature was once like that of John Hancock — large and legible. John Hancock was a merchant, statesman and patriot of the American Revolution. He was president of the Second Continental Congress and served as the first governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is best remembered for his large and stylish signature on the Declaration of Independence.

Because of that autograph, “John Hancock” became a synonym for a signature. John’s signature was a robust one. A cartoon bubble over my head shows the signatories of the Declaration of Independence passing a card around to sign for a sick comrade. They are making sure that John Hancock was not the first to sign. If he had been, there would have been no room for any other signatures.

I remember with fondness my teacher’s remarks, “Look what Allen did, class. He almost spelled his name correctly.” I liked my classmate, David Ignaszewski. I was just glad I didn’t have to spell his name.

My early signatures were large and friendly to the eye. My signature has deteriorated to being large and unreadable. It has become a thing of shreds and patches.

Those of us with vague signatures search for signatures worse than ours. A friend, who is a successful farmer and a good guy, has a signature that is a hump followed by a line and then a lump followed by a little longer line. He makes me want to polish my signature.

My mother learned the Palmer Method in school. My grandmother was a teacher and was a strict adherent to this technique of teaching handwriting. In the Palmer Method, students were taught a uniform style of writing with rhythmic motions. Mom related tales of left-handers forced to use their right hands due to the problem they had of dragging their hands through what they had written.

Students were instructed to use elbows, not just their wrists. They would make endless strokes in special booklets — rows upon rows of little lines, all exactly the same length, and tilted at the same angle. After mastering lines, they moved on to loops (while being told, “Circle, circle, circle”), then to lines and loops combined, and at last to actual letters. They used the motion of their arms and shoulders to form characters, without moving their hands. They were admonished to practice their “push-pulls” so that their writing wouldn’t look like chicken scratch. Practice made perfect.

I didn’t get in on the Palmer Method. I studied cursive. I learned what went above the line and what belonged below the line. I learned that my lowercase “k” looked too much like my uppercase “K.” It still does. My handwriting reached its acme midway through the fifth grade (the best four years of my life). It has devolved into something that looks like a funhouse mirror reflection of good penmanship. My handwriting has declined into an appalling combination of cursive, printing, hieroglyphics, and smudges. I have written a note to myself and been unable to read it a day later.

Writing in cursive was a method of expressing a personality. Penmanship is an art. It is a dying art. We don’t write as many checks or letters as we once did. We punch a keyboard regularly. Some may consider handwriting to be an anachronism, but legible handwriting is nevertheless important.

We still need to write Post-it Notes.

Hartland resident Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.