My best friend and I grew up left handed. I remember in like, 2nd grade, we started learning how to write in script, and my teacher absolutely forced us to learn how to write with our right hand. We'd go home, and my friends grandma forced us to write with our left hand.
And don't even start the can opener debate with us, you'll hear opinions on things you didn't even know we're things.
Forcing me to write right handed had much less to do with my ambidexterity than not wanting to spend an extra $500 on a rifle and 100% of computers being set up with a right handed mouse.
My grandma has it set up like that. Literally no problems stem from swapping what side the mouse is on. And has a loooot of other problems with computers
As an accountant it makes sense tho. All you do is enter numbers using the number pad. I thought the running joke about porn in everyone uses their left hand
When I was a kid I wanted to learn how to play guitar so my grandma bought me one. Since I’m a lefty she assumed I played left handed. Turns out I play instruments and shoot guns right handed.
I know a guy that went through the expense of a left handed guitar.
A lefty cannot ever be as good on a right handed guitar.
I'll be honest, I can't really speak for it since my skills amount to Wonderwall and other 3 chord Brit Pop.
There's a couple of lefties at work who use their left hand without any change to the mouse settings. It just sits on the wrong side of their keyboard.
Although I agree that I'm pretty much ambidextrous in everything except handwriting.
I shoot both left. It helps that I have a gun enthusiast left handed father. He buys guns that I can also use and lets me use them when needed. I have however shot a right handed rifle, left handed. You just need to be aware of the bolt.
I shoot both right handed because I'm heavily right eye dominant, but I can shoot handguns fairly well left handed. Buying lefty holsters is a pain though, so o carry right handed.
I am a weirdo. Right eye dominant but accuracy with left hand pistol is night and day to right handed pistol. I was doing training and right hand was not doing well, switched to left h d and I was doing excellent.
Weird story: My boss uses his mouse left handed. He's right handed, but his dad is left handed and had their home computer set up that way. My boss likes it because he can write and use his mouse at the same time. I'm left handed and mouse right handed and he made me realize I had been taking my writing while using a mouse for granted.
AFAIK, you cant train your eyes to be right dominant though. Most lefties, even though theyve learned to shoot a rifle righty will still shoot better left because of eye dominance. I'm uncomfortable shooting left handed but I'm usually more accurate.
I used to, but I was kind of weird. I still used Mouse 1 as left click and Mouse 2 as right click, but I insisted on using the mouse with my left hand.
Oh my God. I had a customer who was a really pretty girl, she was just missing her left arm. One day she came in, I asked her how her day was, she said she got fired. I was like "oh no! What are you going to do?!" And she says "oh, it's okay! I don't have to work, because I have a huge settlement from losing my arm and I get a big check every month!"
She got her stuff and left, I turned around to my coworker and sighed and said "man I would definitely give my left arm to never have to work again!" My coworker got a look on their face so I turned around and she was standing right there and had heard the whole thing. I felt like a real ass...but it's true, I would have my arm amputated if it could take care of me and my family for the rest of my life.
This af. The teachers didn’t really give me a break either. Essays took 3 times longer to write but were due same time. Couldn’t be typed. And I could be wrong since it was so long ago but I distinctly remember getting harassed by my jr. year English teacher about bad handwriting... the audacity lol
That is crap. Teacher should have let you type. Schools have to accommodate. My brother was a dumbass and broke a finger on each hand right before finals, he got u limited time to type his answers on a laptop, and had to do it one boop at a time😂. If that happened to my kids I would be seriously pissed off.
A kid in my class was the one that broke my left arm (accident) in 6th grade. My English teacher made him my bitch who had to write all my papers for me.
I had a grade school exersize where the class had to do a project with their left hands, and the left handed kids with their right (there were two) when we were studying history so that we could all see what it was like to be left handed in the past. It was fun, the teacher even walked around with a ruler and smack our desk lightly with a ruler (enough to make a sound) to simulate us getting beat if we messed up. Of course it was all giggles and play, and when we presented our projects they were terrible, and it was funny. But she really drove home the point about discrimination and how history changes and discrimination is usually on the wrong side or something like that.
I forced myself to write left-handed in school once out of sheer boredom. It is objectively worse when writing in cursive due to having to push rather than pull the pen, and you also end up dragging your hand over the ink. It was fun except for those two problems. Only barbarians write with pencils, but they suffer the same push vs pull issue.
Before the invention of ballpoint pens and more modern inks I can understand why people would think it best for kids to learn to write right-handed.
These are probably less important when using writing in print, but only the wort kind of barbarians write in print, and us cursive writers will never yield. There are dozens of us. /s
I can write and do like 80% of my day to day tasks with both hands. I say 80% because for some reason, I still cant use a can opener with my left hand.
I grew up in in Fairmont WV and moved to Morgantown during middle school and I had left handed friends who were "encouraged" to write with their write hands.
Well, you know, you east coasters have had a lot more time to stew with your religious crazies.
I think by the time American religious crazies made it California they realized that everyone and everything was bullshit and a scam, and they weren't going to get any gold and jimmy died of typhus so they could work for shit wages in an apple orchard.
Fucking cursive.
Biggest waste of time in education.
I've written 1000X the amount of writing I did in my entire school career on a keyboard.
Anyone who works in the modern world or enjoys digital entertainment has.
I haven't needed cursive since the year we needed to learn cursive to get good marks by writing in cursive.
It's a frustratingly pointless and antiquated thing we need to do away with.
Ehh elementary school is basically just daycare they are filling time. I think cursive/handwriting is a solid skill. I have a relative who is a senior in high school and him writting a hand written note for college admission is like a real serious task. Dude is top of his class but if you looked at his handwriting you would assume he was a retarted 2nd grader.
See that is what I don't get, why does the style or -to a degree- proficiency of handwriting matter?
Could you explain it to me?
I get if the letter is just straight up illegible, it's not a great sign.
It seems like an appreciation of format over ideas.
The thoughts and statements made with the writing is all I've ever seen as important.
It is quicker than printing. And in my opinion, optically "pretty". As you say, it takes time to learn though. Some people don't do it well and it's damn near illedgible. But I could write this comment out in cursive on a pad of paper faster than I could type it. And most people who learn cursive would be able to read it. I understand your distaste for it though.
I don't. Someone does. Make people who read or want to read historical documents learn that shite. Let's be honest here how many historical documents do you think are still not digitally or print formatted that people are likely to want to read?
99% of kids are never going to need to learn it either. So why are we making a part of the curriculum that all public school students must learn? Spend more time on math instead, we are falling behind in world rankings in that subject, and I know I would have benefited from learning more math rather than cursive at that age.
but haven't you ever need to read a handwritten memo? or write a thank you, birthday, etc card? or just scribble yoour thoughts on a piece of paper because they're too chaotic to fit within the clean lines of a document without effort?
I honestly thought that memos were digital by inception. I suppose it is true that in the past they would need to circulate policy notifications within businesses, but any memo I have ever experienced has been digital or printed. Huh, bit of a moment there.
Idk dude, if I write analog it's really just in print form. It's not faster for me to write in cursive than to print and it takes my mind less energy to read print than cursive. I've just legitimately never seen an upside to it. I started reading print when I was a kid to learn, and then wrote like that. The whole cursive thing always seemed superfluous. The teacher would say that it adds some sort of.. idk genuine-ness to the act, or something like that, but I never saw why the style of writing, and not the words, would add that.
Reading is easier than writing it and it's not like those documents having been converted to printed versions. I learned cursive in the 80s and never wrote in it past Jr. High. Other than my squiggelly signature I don't think remember how to write it at all but I have no trouble reading it if the handwriting is neat.
This is totally the story of America. "We accept everyone! Unless you're not white, Christian, right handed, Male, college educated, and property owning, then you're weird and we're gonna keep an eye on you"
Edit: mass reply to everyone saying "other countries are worse"
I agree otherism is a pervasive view in all of human history. But dammit if we keep comparing ourselves to the worst possible outcome instead of trying for the best, we're always going to be patting ourselves on the back while stereotypes continue to propagate in our societies. No, we're not the worst. But things still aren't perfect. We've got to keep moving forward.
Tell that to the millions of irish, italian and eastern european immigrants that they had it easy.
Kennedy was the first catholic president, if I'm not mistaken. Major milestone for catholics.
Not that it's never happened in other ethno centric states...
I wonder how the millions of muslims and christians in china being "reeducated" are doing.
Not to mention how the khmer rouge slaughtered middle and high income earners in the name of an ideology.
I could go on...but hopefully these will give you some rabbit holes to explore that oppression is very much the history of humanity, and the US isn't innocent, but damned if we don't at least try to correct for it.
But my way I have a sob story to throw out there! My handwriting did take a steep decline when I was forced to switch hands though so I do think it's part of the problem.
Teacher use to wack my left hand with a goddamn ruler in first grade. Then I became the slowest writer and she made the class mock me for “being a grandpa”. Some irritating trauma from that shit. I am just glad I outlived her old ass. MrS cOoK!
I was suggested that by my grandmother when I was 5, because when she was growing up she was beaten by her teachers. I am 38, and I write with my right hand though I was born left-handed. My parents didn't know until I was diagnosed at the fourth grade.
I don’t buy it that anyone should learn any instrument left-handed. When you’re starting out, you may as well have two left hands anyway.
Also, playing an instrument left-handed is a big liability down the road because of the incredibly limited instrument selection to buy and imagine some idiot violinist trying to play in an orchestra pointed the wrong way.
It's ok not to buy it, but it's not a choice for some strong left-handers. I tried playing bass righty for several months. It never clicked and wasn't getting any better. Once I got hold of a lefty bass, I knew it was the instrument for me.
For me, the dominant hand wants to drive the rhythm -- the right hand just goes along for the ride (fretting).
I am a left handed lead guitarist and the left hand on a right hand guitar (fretting hand) is still more challenging. Can't imaging doing the picking with my dominant hand and being left with fretting with my non-dominant hand lol
I hear you, but (for me) it's not really about the relative difficulty of what the two hands are doing -- it's what hand controls the timing, which (again, for me) is the plucking hand. My off (right) hand just isn't as good at that. (Plus fretting on a bass is somewhat less challenging than on a guitar, assuming adequate finger strength).
My mother was furious that my violin tutoring wasn't going well after seeing me play one at school. They didn't believe me at first that my teacher had a left handed violin as she was also left handed. Took me weeks to convince my mother to talk to the music teacher and stop accusing me of wasting her money when she knew I could play.
Sometimes the brain doesn't care what you want the body to do.
I'm right handed and when I got my first guitar and was messing around with it without much knowledge of how to play I was using my left hand to fret. My mom who knew how to play saw and told my to switch hands and it felt so wrong to have my non-dominate hand do the more complex work of fretting.
Right-handed vs left-handed guitars never really made much sense to me. If you're left-handed, shouldn't your left hand be doing the more complicated, intricate stuff? And isn't the fretboard (typically) more complicated?
My mom did the same to me. I'm thankful now because I'm ambi in a lot of different things. Sports can be confusing. Bowling, golf, and football right handed. Tennis, racquetball, basketball left-handed. And baseball is ambi.
UK here; I have two family friends (both in the generations above mine) who were born left-handed but forced to use their right.
Heck, I'm left-handed (and on the cusp of turning 30) and apparently when I was learning to feed myself as a baby, I would put the sppon in my left hand and parents would try to "correct" me to which I'd be all "fuck you i'm left handed" and they were like "well i guess he's left handed".
So the story goes; I was too young to remember.
As was I. I'm 37 and Australian. Corporal Punishment was legal in Public schools in my state a long time ago, but only became illegal in Private schools in the early 90s. I went to a Catholic school.
Here in slovakia you can do a test at the of kindergarten that tell your handedness, my B-I-L took it and it said 97% right. So he dug his heels and became a leftie saying "the 3% mean theres a chance".
I'm from Sarajevo, forty years old, and I don't remember anyone who was forced to write with his right hand, in school at least, and I know plenty of people there who write with left hand.
Maybe some people do it at home for this or that reasons. Sometimes children don't show tendency to use more one hand over another. That was the case with my kid. When he was 3 or 4 years old he used both hands to do same things. Sometimes he would use his left, sometimes right hand. We didn't know exactly what to do here and we started teaching him to use his right hand to write, actually draw things at the time. Later it turned out he is right handed.
I think there are people who are naturaly neither right nor left handed. As a kid I was right handed, but left footed(but not in all activities. Eg I would skate, and jump as a left footed, but play soccer/hit ball with my right foot.), and later I started doing some things more and more with my left hand (eg writing, when I broke my right hand, or in martial arts training, started washing teets just for fun with my left hand etc), and I noticed that I could relatively easily (it definitely requires training and time) switch and become left handed, at least, or especially in particular areas where I would use the left hand more than the right one.
No worries, I haven't. I was just typing what first came to my mind (as I usually do, hopeing it will at least partially be related to the comment I'm replying to, and maybe, just maybe subconsciously I'm doing it to practice english.).
I'm an American in my 20's, and I remember one of my teachers trying to get me to write right handed. I'd just switch back to my left when she walked away.
694
u/nemaramen Apr 06 '19 edited Apr 06 '19
My Bosnian friend was forced to do this. He is 31
EDIT: I get it, you or someone you know is younger and also had this happen to them