An article in the Washington Post describes how teachers in Northern Virginia are learning to write.  Or learning how to teach writing.  You may assume that we are talking about prose, poetry, and other forms of expression.  However, these teachers are learning how to teach young students the craft of forming letters, spacing words, and creating legible hand-written products.  You may think that this is a waste of time.  I would strongly disagree.  As a teacher, I know how this is becoming a lost art.  Students in middle school and high school are struggling to put pencil to paper, not because a lack of subject material, but because they lack the physical ability, skill if you will, to form the letters.  Teachers have always been faced with the challenge of being able to decifer what the student wrote and what they intended to write.  This has been come more and more complicated with the rise of technology. I love my computer.  I enjoy emailing friends.  I appreciate the benefits of using a word processing program to create documents.  But the truth is, a hand written letter, note, or card is much more significant that a typed email or a text.  Unfortunately, our students also appreciate the ease of the typed-word, so much that they have neglected the written word.