Al's Morning Meeting

I have seen it in places like Gallup, N.M., and Odessa, Texas, and in larger cities, such as Seattle.

In other places, like El Paso, Texas, the problem is not so much staffing as the danger escorts face. I have seen many references to escorts hitting or getting hit by other drivers.

In Boston, a controversy arose when police provided a funeral escort for a convicted child rapist's funeral.

What is your city's or county's policy? What does the law require other drivers to do when a funeral procession approaches? What ever happened to the tradition of pulling over to allow funeral processions to pass?

Why not travel with a funeral escort and see why the job is so dangerous? I suspect escorts try to stop a lot of traffic in a hurry. Passing drivers don't always pull over. And the drivers of cars that are in the funeral procession are probably distracted by their grief.

"Doonesbury" War E-mails

I want to point you toward something that I think is a sign of our time. The "Doonesbury" comic strip recently ran episodes about the role of e-mail, IM and live cams in the Iraq War.

Blogs written by families and soldiers say the strips are right on. Soldiers in Iraq use their laptops to reassure loved ones that they are OK. When electronic messages fail to make it home, some families panic. This is poignant stuff. Can you put a face on it?

Handwriting Goes Down the Tubes

Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems the handwriting of my Poynter colleagues is going down the tubes. Mine has always been pretty awful, so no change there. Maybe there's a reason.

The Washington Post suggests that that an over-reliance on keyboards is harming our kids' ability to learn cursive writing skills. Does it matter? The story says:

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.

Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.

Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research. And others simply lament the loss of handwritten communication for its beauty, individualism and intimacy.

"It's like so many other things in our society -- there's a sense of loss for what once was," said Laura B. [Smolkin], a professor of elementary education and early childhood development at the University of Virginia.

At Keene Mill Elementary in Springfield, Debbie Mattocks teaches cursive once a week to her gifted-and-talented group of third-graders -- mainly so they can read it. All their poems and stories are typed. Children in Fairfax County schools are taught keyboarding beginning in kindergarten.

"I can't think of any other place you need cursive as an adult other than to sign your name," she said. "Cursive -- that is so low on the priority list, we really could care less. We are much more concerned that these kids pass their SOLs [standardized tests], and that doesn't require a bit of cursive."

Older students who never mastered handwriting say it doesn't affect their grades. "A lot of kids have just awful handwriting. ... Teachers don't take off points for poor handwriting," said Matt Paragamian, a 10th-grader at St. Albans School in Northwest Washington. Many of his classmates take notes in class on their own laptops and do homework on computers.

---

Reorganizing the Girl Scouts

The organization is undergoing its first transformation in 30 years. Volunteers will now be training girls to recognize self-mutilation and teaching them online etiquette. The uniform will get a makeover, too.

Why TV Ratings Will Grow

Soon, Nielsen will begin measuring the viewing habits of college students living outside the home. It's about time. MediaWeek reports:

Nielsen Media Research announced it will include college students living outside the home in its National People Meter audience estimates beginning Jan. 29. Viewing will be included for students attending both traditional colleges and also for those attending trade schools, culinary institutes and other higher education facilities.

Nielsen's move to include college students living outside the home was previously announced, but the actual date was up in the air until now. It is expected that daytime viewing of broadcast soap operas, as well as sports events, will particularly get a boost in their ratings from the inclusion of this new viewing group.

It has long irked me that even though, in some towns, college students make up a significant percentage of the TV audience, the ratings didn't measure their viewing. The ratings also miss people who watch sports while sitting in a bar and people who watch TV in hotel rooms and offices. This would be similar to newspapers measuring circulation by using home-delivery figures while ignoring rack or street sales.

The ratings also do not account for people who live in military barracks. For some markets near military installations, the people who live and work at those facilities compose one of the largest populations they serve. And yet, it goes unmeasured.

Nielsen is going after these audiences with new technology called "Go Meters." It is reasonable to suspect that TV ratings will rise once these audiences are counted. In a mobile society, in-home viewers are still the largest audience, but certainly not the only one.

We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.