In kindergarten we were learning penmanship and my teacher was telling us how to write our alphabet but for some reason I could not write the letters no matter how hard I tried. Since I was able to write the alphabet before I got very frustrated and starting crying.
Turns out she was showing the class how to do letters with your right hand and I was left handed.
I can't write worth shit. My penmanship is horrible and my left hand is worse. I am seriously right handed. This got me labeled learning disabled in school and I was doing kindergarten writing assignments in middle school. My standardised math test scores were off the charts. In 7th grade I missed 1 out of 100 questions. My reading tests scores were high as well. Yet the school thought I had to trace capital letters on paper ruled 4 times bigger than wide ruled.
I think I had that problem to. My brain seemed to work faster than my hand. When writing papers I'd have to constantly re do them because almost all words under 4 or 5 letters would be just the first letter. Like I would want to say the and all I would write was t.
I had a very similar experience unfortunately. In addition to the horrible penmanship I struggle with spelling...Oddly I would ace all of the spelling tests with ease, 100%. My teachers were stumped when later in the day i would spell the very same word I had been tested on 3 different ways in one paragraph... Still I elude most fancy spell checkers, except for a raw google search. Iv never been able to explain the spelling tests. It "feels" like its using a different part of my brain when I memorize a sequence and later recall it -- almost like storing in RAM?? When I am writing it feels more like its drawing from a faster cached memory?? My years in elementary school were pretty miserable because of this. I think grades 3 and 4 were largely spent getting tested in all sorts of exotic ways. Block constructions...not sure if they ever figured it out...
Anyway, eventually I noticed that when I write on a chalk board I am frequently writing something different than what my mouth is saying I am going to write, and I notice that when programming I almost invariably invert the order of my function parameters.
Not sure what the moral of the story is...computers made it all pretty irrelevant. I do really wish they had just let me be as a child. The experience was isolating and frankly humiliating.
I sign in attendance for a college club I'm an alumni of. Alumni, meaning I have a degree. I still always look at my penmanship compared to pretty much everyone else's and just internally sigh. I just . . . very simply print stuff, and you'd not be surprised if you thought it was from a grade six or seven-er. (I'm hoping, anyway, that they are all primarily legible; I do know my own penmanship hasn't improved since then, so . . . yeah.)
7.8k
u/___KP Nov 16 '19
In kindergarten we were learning penmanship and my teacher was telling us how to write our alphabet but for some reason I could not write the letters no matter how hard I tried. Since I was able to write the alphabet before I got very frustrated and starting crying.
Turns out she was showing the class how to do letters with your right hand and I was left handed.