By Jonathan Wynn

Her name isn’t as well known
as Trayvon Martin’s, and her side-story is less sensational. And yet, Rachel
Jeantel’s short time on the witness stand in the George Zimmerman trial—and the
media’s response to it—says a lot about our contemporary society. As the last
person to speak with 17-year-old Trayvon moments before George Zimmerman killed
him, Rachel has been caught up in one of the most-watched trials of the last
few years.

Rachel has been ridiculed on blogs and snickered at in the media for her time on the witness stand. She had testy exchanges
with Zimmerman’s defense attorney Don West, some ”unpolished” responses to
questions (i.e., responding to the hypothesis that Martin initiated contact
with Zimmerman as “real retarded”), and at one point needing to speak up so the
jury could hear her. It remains to be seen whether or not pointing out these
attributes are attempts to undermine her credibility as a witness.

She also admitted she could
not read a handwritten letter aloud—as to enter it into public record—because
she couldn’t read cursive. And while this was an opportunity for some to criticize (and generalize) about African-American school
kids (see breathtaking examples of racism directed toward Jeantel from
Twitter), it should have been an opportunity
to think about the U.S. education system. As I watched the media respond to
Rachel’s testimony I wondered how likely it was she learned cursive in school.

 It turns out that over the
past few years many schools have dropped handwriting from their curricula.  Supposedly because cursive is less useful in
the digital age, standardized measures of student assessment have moved away
from evaluating handwriting. Forty-five States and three territories adopted
what is called the Common Core State Standards for English, including Rachel’s home state of Florida. This core standard does not require students to
learn cursive.

The fact she could not read
cursive, then, is not her fault as much as a failing of her education, and an
example of the fallout from No Child Left
Behind (NCLB) and standardized testing in general. (Computerized,
standardized, multiple-choice tests don’t require handwriting, do they?) It is unlikely
that NCLB will be put on trial the way George Zimmerman is in a courtroom and,
frankly, the way that Rachel Jeantel is in the media. I wonder how many people
who criticize her now were in support of NCLB. 

Critical thinkers should
always peel away a few additional layers when it comes to such social
phenomena. And here is one more: It’s important to note that, like many skills
one learns in school, there are ancillary benefits and latent functions in
learning handwriting. According to scholarly research, handwriting develops fine motor skills, stimulates creativity, and helps
students retain and understand information better than typing (see ABC News on
this). Handwriting stimulates the Broca’s Area, a part of
the brain that is associated with language comprehension and speech-associated
gestures.

 Time has a piece explaining her testimony in the context
of language usage, and points out this exchange:

“Are you claiming in
any way that you don’t understand English?”

“I don’t understand
you, I do understand English,” said Jeantel.

“When someone speaks
to you in English, do you believe you have any difficulty understanding it
because it wasn’t your first language?” asked West.

“I understand English
really well,” said Jeantel.

While the author (John
McWhorter, who wrote What Language
Is) makes the case for
understanding the difference between Black English and Standard Written English
(see also, David Foster Wallace on this), there are other potential connections that could be made
when it comes to handwriting and speech, right?

When we think about how
teaching to the No Child Left Behind-related reading and math standardized tests
limits students’ cultural capital (see George Farkas’ research on this), Rachel Jeantel’s world becomes more
meaningful than the one-dimensional caricature the media has portrayed.

What other ways, do you think
handwriting is used as a form of cultural capital? In a completely different
context: How do doctors use their handwriting?