Last summer, workers removing chalkboards from a high school in Oklahoma City discovered another set of boards hiding underneath. They had last seen the light of day in 1917. The boards were still chalk-marked with drawings, a calendar, and mathematics. But perhaps most striking were the writings—all of it in cursive.

As Sherry Kishore, principal at Emerson High School, said to the Oklahoman, “The penmanship blows me away … totally … because you don’t see a lot of that anymore. We have kids that come that prefer to print because they don’t know how to do cursive, and some of the handwriting in some of these rooms is beautiful.”