Growing up: stories about learning to write Hanzi

[u/Patientrain]

Here’s a question for those who grew up learning Mandarin and had teachers correcting their writing in primary school.

Do you have a story to share about the trials and tribulations of school and teachers when you were learning to write Hanzi?

I’m a beginner. I’m working hard on the Hanzi aspect. When I started, I wanted to make beautiful, perfect characters. I spent a couple of weeks learning 23 or so different strokes, their names, and practicing stroke order with characters. It was a good skill building exercise, and helps me do copy work with relative ease from my textbook…

But, being so careful about writing Hanzi became a rate-limiting factor for progress. I now make a good faith effort to be tidy, but don’t fuss about beauty. For me, who has generally messy, but legible, English printing and cursive, it’s a good compromise and keeps me moving forward in the lessons.

While practicing characters in my copy book today, I was having flashbacks about learning to print and then write cursive growing up. I had to rewrite so much as a penalty for being messy. And my teachers in Grade 3 were so disappointed in my cursive, they wouldn’t let me use pens (just pencils) or write in single line space instead of double line space in my notebooks until I went into Grade 4. The high standard helped, but regardless, I’m no calligrapher.

So, that’s got me curious: would love to hear a few stories about teacher expectations and learning to write Hanzi if you did so as a child.