Watt's Gnus

Cursive

My handwriting is distinctive and when I take my time and focus ... quite beautiful. I should've been more disciplined and studied calligraphy.

But...

I was a strange child. I almost failed kindergarten and was a mediocre student in 1st and 2nd grade. By 3rd grade I had memorized the multiplication table and worked on division. My parents encouraged this. I ignored the teachers. There was nothing they could teach me.

I was shy, short, skinny, weak, goofy-looking and couldn't see. Any future I was going to have depended on academics not popularity or sports. I also had poor hand-eye coordination and I was far-sighted. When I put my glasses down I couldn't see them. My printing was awful.

I was told that as a left-handed boy I'd never have good handwriting. When I was 10 I spent all summer proving them wrong. One letter at a time.

My mother encouraged me as I practiced a standard American form similar to the Palmer method. I loved longhand, the circles, the flourishes. I copied my mother's style of handwriting and even taught my sister. She never quite caught on ... but then ... perhaps she was right-handed like my father who wrote in barely legible scrawls.

I loved paper, but lefthanders smudge both ink and pencil. This was not acceptable to the nitpickers of that time. But I was stubborn. I 'knew' that I was smarter than my teachers and did things my way. And I knew my mother would back me up. She'd been forced as a child to write with her right hand. No teacher dared defy her!

So, I held my pencil wrong. I put the paper in the wrong position. I could write nicely and frankly ... their right-handed opinions didn't count. I made my handwriting as beautiful as I could. I practiced for hours.

By 6th grade I was getting an A in Penmanship, an A in Arithmetics. One quarter I had straight A's.

I proved them wrong! But by then I was an awkward and unlovable 12 year-old. But that's another story.

Have you ever been in a situation where someone doubted you and you proved them wrong? Tell us about it.

I saw this article and felt a bit vindicated. We lefthanders are not being properly studied in a righthanded world. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3zbyj/brain-science-is-ignoring-left-handed-...

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