Cursive.

I was just thinking about this every day for the past few weeks as I watch my class work on their morning work. Every single day they do a few pages in their handwriting practice book. Each page gives practice with one cursive letter, upper or lower case. I have never seen them actually write anything else in cursive throughout the entire rest of the school day, nor have I ever seen the teacher do anything with the cursive workbook. I've never seen her use cursive either. I don't know that the workbook will ever be taken up or checked or anything at all. I've also been practicing my cursive for no real reason and realizing that I don't even remember most of the capital letters, and that I really don't like it at all. Why do we learn cursive? Is it something we really need to know? From third grade on, every single year, our teachers told us we had to practice it now because the next year we would have to write EVERYTHING in cursive. But that year never came and now I really don't know why we bothered. I was just thinking about that lately for some reason....