At the time handwriting was being taught in school, elbow problems (complications from hemophilia) made handwriting quite painful, so I was using a (silent, electronic) typewriter for in-class assignments.
Needless to say, typing handwriting assignments does nothing to improve handwriting!
Nearly forty years later, I still haven't learned to write in cursive, and my lower-case printing is either illegible or painstakingly slow. So, with the exception of single-character mathematical variable names, upper-and-small-caps it is.
I think a lot of students who grew up with ballpoints reached a similar conclusion. I knew a few and from time to time have used the strategy when legibility is required.
Cursive was developed to work with traditional pens, and it really does not flow well on a ballpoint. But the school systems, of course, never made such a distinction.
"Cursive" means slanted. "Current" means joined-up (from the french "courant", literally "running"). Not all cursives are current - Chancery cursive, for instance - and most recent schoolroom current writing isn't cursive.
That may be what it means in a technical sense, but what most of us Americans were taught in elementary school was joined-up writing that was presented to us as "cursive," the only (and obviously much more sophisticated) alternative to "print".
All upper case, caps were just bigger than the others.
Stayed with that until I left High School. Was making some point or other, or was just a PITA.