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Flashback Friday: The Spongebob Movie and Cursive writing

‘The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie’
By Nikki Duran

I will be the first to admit that I was never the biggest fan of “SpongeBob” as a kid. However, when I saw “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” on Netflix, I did what any other 19-year-old college student would do: I sat down and I watched the crap out of it.

Curled up on my futon, I felt as though I was watching this movie for the first time all over again — maybe because it was the first time I’d seen the movie since I was in middle school.

As I sat there, I felt myself experiencing the same confusion, humor and despair I felt as a kid —from SpongeBob getting passed over for a promotion, to Mr. Krabs being framed for stealing King Neptune’s crown, to the quasi-romance between Patrick and the mermaid princess, Mindy (who, after looking it up, I realized was voiced by Scarlett Johansson).

I hadn’t realized how much I enjoyed — or how much I had missed — this movie until I watched it again and, even after all this time, I still believe that the rock version of the song “I’m A Goofy Goober” is the best part of the entire movie.

Cursive writing
By Zachary Dixon
Once upon a time in the third grade, we did drills. Not running drills with a sergeant shouting in our ears, but an overbearing teacher making sure your penmanship was intact. Those same teachers would always say the same thing: “Everyone will be writing in cursive in the future.”

From the swirling arches of a capital “H” to the very confusing structure to every form of a “Z,” cursive was the bane of a third grader’s existence. The pressure to carefully construct these awkward amalgamations of letters we had just barely learned didn’t make sense then.

I can’t be the only one who thinks that a letter in print should at least resemble its counterpart in cursive. An “A” made sense, but what is a lowercase “b”? Some sort of lowercase “l” with its pinky out so that it can be fancy? How did they justify lowercase “f”? It’s like if lowercase “b” got a cane, a top hat, and a monocle. Way too fancy for me.

I’ve never been so happy to prove my teacher wrong than when my fourth grade teacher told me not to write in cursive. I can remember the shouts of glee my stressed, pained fingers made. They continued to cheer as the digital age rushed in and cursive writing faded into obscurity.

These days, I rarely hear positive conversation about cursive outside of Bradley’s English department. Whether that’s due to a fondness for that type of writing or because some refuse to use computers, I’m not sure. Every teacher has a version of cursive script that they have personalized into illegibility.
Though I like to think cursive died in elementary school, I guess it’ll always have life on the Hilltop.

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