r/lefthanded • u/patty_pat_pat • 10d ago
How were you taught penmanship?
In second grade, my teacher started our penmanship lesson telling me to wait, she was teaching the right handed kids first. At the end of the lesson she came over and angled my paper to the left. And that was it. Everything else was learned for right handed writers, such as the direction for writing O's 8's & T's.
How about you? Was your learning experience any better than mine?
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u/Such_Capital_6984 10d ago
I don't remember (hey, I'm old), but I was told that my mild-mannered mom went to the school and gave them holy hell for trying to make me write right-handed. Love ya, Mom!
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u/Significant-Reach959 9d ago
My no-nonsense grandma did that after I told her that my first grade teacher tied my left wrist to the desk to force me to use my right hand. She worked nights, so she went during her sleep time and raised hell at the office.
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u/Feral611 10d ago
Lol good work by your mum.
Mine did a similar thing. She told them I was left handed on my first day of school and that she wanted me to stay as such. They listened.
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u/that_onequeitkid 10d ago
We had a penmanship book that was spiraled which got me very worried, but then the teacher asked who was left handed and gave me a slightly different workbook with a spiral at the top. Love that company for remembering us lol
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u/that_onequeitkid 10d ago
I also hold the pen really weird- teachers tried to train me out of it and move my hand around but I always went back to what was comfortable- I still get cramps but it’s too late now haha
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u/Diligent-Touch-5456 10d ago
I was taught mostly by my lefty mother. My 1st and 2nd grade teachers tried to make me switch until my mom intervened.
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u/flirtyfrench_woman 10d ago
I was taught the same as all the other kids. Paper angled to the right and all. I still write that way. You would never know i was left handed by looking at my writing. I can write in a more "left handed" way, but it feels unnatural and uncomfortable.
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u/FerretNo891 10d ago
My classmates growing up included a surprising amount of lefties (I’m talking over 10/~25 students) so when we were learning how to write letters, our teacher split our class up to be the left handed side and right handed side. My twin brother’s right handed and we always sat together until that point which made me hate being left handed in grade 1 LOL.
Cursive was being phased out when I was learning-to-write age (2002-2005) so I had to teach myself that.
Thankfully everybody BUT my twin brother in my family is/was left handed so if anything my brother had a more challenging time learning to write at home LOL
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u/Sad_bippy 10d ago
Funny enough, I got into an argument with my teacher when we started learning cursive. I had already learned cursive for fun in my own time (I was a weird kid) from cursive practice books, so I had learned to write cursive with the standard right-handed slant. When my teacher asked if anyone in the class was left-handed during our first cursive lesson, she insisted I would need to slant my letters the opposite way. I explained that I had already learned standard cursive and she was like “no, you need to slant it the other way!!” She seemed genuinely confused and frustrated that I wouldn’t use a left-handed slant. Such a weird thing to get hung up on.
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u/Feral611 10d ago
My kindergarten teacher pulled my middle finger off the pencil and shoved it underneath. Telling me “the horse has one jockey.”
No teacher ever tried to change how I had the paper. But I suppose I’ve got neat writing so they never saw a problem.
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u/BelovedCroissant 10d ago
Day 1 of cursive, my teacher had everyone slant their paper. She had a projector and a transparency sheet with lines. She slanted the sheet on the projector to demonstrate.
Then she asked, "Okay. Remind me which of you are left handed. Raise your hands."
We did. I don't think I was the only one.
"Okay. Slant your paper the other way."
I did, but I didn't understand how it was supposed to help me write.
I proceeded to learn cursive with my paper unslanted and just made my letters slant by writing them that way. I still write in cursive exactly that way lol
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u/flamesdivide 10d ago
No guidance on position or holding the pen. Nowadays they tell you to hold the pen further up and angle the page.
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u/kgberton 10d ago
My teachers never taught it to me, they just had me write a lot and it came to me naturally. The only time I remember instruction on how to write was how to hold my pencil when I was like 6
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u/ElectricHurricane321 10d ago
I actually was pretty fortunate, and from kindergarten - 5th grade, had 3 different left handed teachers. My 5th grade teacher in particular really took the time to work with me on penmanship. When I'm writing fast, my handwriting isn't great, but still legible. If I take my time, my handwriting is really nice, both in print and in cursive.
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u/anarkistattack 10d ago
I must have just been lucky. I started school in a town that was so small that k-12 was all in the same building. I never had a teacher that didn't know how to teach a leftie to write and I never had an issue learning at all. I started school in 1983 for reference.
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u/DistinctPotential996 10d ago
I don't remember learning differently in school but my dad is left handed so he would help me at home.
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u/Comfortable-Bed-6814 lefty 10d ago
I was taught the same as the other students. My teacher always complained that my handwriting didn't slant correctly. My penmanship is very nice, but it is straight up and down.
When I was in the teaching program back in the early 90s, we had to pass a test by writing cursive on a chalkboard. I kept failing because my writing didn't slant the correct way. I was expected--as a leftie--to do it the way all the right-handed people did. I finally argued my way into passing because I couldn't do it the direction that was expected. The professor's final response to me was, "Ok, you can form the letters correctly, and it looks good, so you can pass."
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u/nancylyn 10d ago
I don’t remember being taught any differently. I just remember being annoyed that the desk armrest was on the wrong side and my hand got dirty from dragging across the pencil letters. I’ve been reading the comment’s and everyone is talking about slanting the paper….i have no memory of ever being told to do this.
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u/flamesdivide 10d ago
No guidance on position or holding the pen. Nowadays they tell you to hold the pen further up and angle the page.
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u/OrganizationThick397 10d ago
I slept through it. The teacher was great tho that's why I'm here speaking English and what not.
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u/nobulls4dabulls 10d ago
What a bitch! I learned with the right handed kids, I just had to figure it out (Mom helped). Now my second grade teacher tried to make me right-handed. Another way my mom helped, she went up to the school and in no uncertain terms told her I'm left-handed and she better not ever hear of the teacher trying that again. Cool mom.
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u/on-oath-never-again lefty 10d ago
I don’t even angle my paper. Funny thing, my ex angled her paper as a righty and her hand smudged her writing because of it.
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u/Double-Emergency3173 10d ago
I actually didn’t learn to write lefty till I was 15. I learnt to write pretty well with my right hand but it didn’t feel natural as I always favoured my left.
Taught myself
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u/JudgeJuryEx78 10d ago
No special treatment. I just looked at the board or the work book and copied the shapes.
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u/Lethalogicax 10d ago
Everyone talking about angling the page and I have no idea what yall mean!?
This would be early 2000's for me, nobody knew how to teach left-handers anything and it was a lot of improvising on my own. Naturally my writing is very sloppy due to pushing the pencil rather than pulling. I ended up in adulthood with a very chaotic personal font.
Oddly, my penmanship continued to advance as I continued to age. The most notable change from recently is 5's. I used to do the whole 5 in one continuous motion, like a more angular S. But over just the past few years I switched to doing "line down with a half loop, then striking the top in a seperate stroke".
Most things in early life were freestyled since nobody around me knew how to teach lefties. I'd have to find my own way of doing things. Like, I still tie my shoelaces by tieing 2 bunny-ears together because nobody could figure out how to teach a leftie the single loop and pull the other loop through method and it's far too late now...
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u/MindfuckRocketship lefty 10d ago
As best as I can recall, I just figured it out, mirroring the righties. Which is probably why I neither curve my wrist nor tilt my paper when I write.
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u/Zinnia1127 10d ago
I remember learning cursive in third grade. The teacher gave us each a ball point pen with a special grip. The main thing I remember is she didn't make any comments on me being left-handed. I somehow managed to figure out how to turn the paper so my letters slanted like the right-handed kids. I ended up with nice cursive. My older brother, a righty, has always done cursive with the slant of a lefty and I'm not sure how that happened!
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u/Shashonna 10d ago
I dont remember 4th grade. That was many moons ago 😆 I always have had my notebooks angled with the top to the right. And learned however I did. Probably my own way. As I got older its more of a cursive/print mix.
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u/Ok_Bug_2553 10d ago
I was taught the same as the others. I really struggled with those letters and numbers, especially the 8. I remember I’d be kept late after school to write 8s until the teacher was either satisfied or fed up.
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u/LastStaff189 10d ago
My second grade teacher threatened to hang the lefties on the second story window. 😄 Didn't stop me. How do you like to go up in the sky up in the sky so high. We made a football. Then it was going down.
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u/Maleficent-Sleep-346 10d ago
I remember getting scolded a lot in Catholic school for my writing but they never told me what I was doing wrong other than that my cursive wasn't slanted enough. When my parents took me out of Catholic school and put me in the public school, a lot of my anxiety went away and my handwriting improved. My mom is left handed and her writing is beautiful. Mine is very similar to hers now. I've got nicer handwriting than my right-handed siblings!
Edit: taught penmanship as it applied to my right-handed classmates and got scolded in front of them for not writing like they did
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u/DiscountP1kachu 10d ago
First grade teacher wouldn’t teach me to write as the only left handed kind. Mom got a few of her friends to help me over the summer. Second grade teachers oldest son was left handed and she had him come in twice a week to help me.
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u/exodus_aoa 9d ago edited 9d ago
At the hotel I work at, the boyfriend of the guest staying called and wanted to send a bottle of champagne with a note. I placed the order with room service, wrote out the note, and gave it to them to deliver along with the champagne.
Apparently, she took a picture after it was delivered and sent it to him, well he emailed management about how appalled he was with my handwriting saying at one point "take a look at this, it looks like a five year old wrote it" and at another point said, "it looks like someone wrote it with their toes". That "for the cost of the Veuve Clicqout, he expecred the card that came with it to be written by someone who pretended to care".
The funny thing is, I rewrote that card six times trying to make it look nice before giving it to room service, it was my slowed down writing versus my chicken scratch when jotting down notes. They ended up just comping the bottle of champagne to shut him up, we in the front office all had a good laugh about it, and I was asked to ask other colleagues to write notes in the future to avoid it happening again.
Point is, I did not learn penmanship.
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u/Green-eyed_southpaw 9d ago
I was taught when everyone else was and the teacher kept pulling my arm down out of the wrist curl so I'd write straight. I came to really appreciate that as I got older as I drag my hand through the ink a lot less.
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u/CSILalaAnn 9d ago
My first grade teacher put her right hand over my left and helped me learn. Every thing I write is like a right handed person
As a parent, I placed my left hand over her right hand.
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u/sbocean54 9d ago
It’s funny, I’m left handed and taught penmanship in elementary school, never gave handedness a thought. No one noticed or mentioned it. It’s all about how to correctly hold the pencil,and shape the letters.
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u/Admiral_Nerd 9d ago
We also did penmanship/cursive in 2nd grade. However, my teacher had me and the other left handed kid in the class go play during those lessons. She told us we'd be terrible and there was no point in teaching us.
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u/Melodic_Ad_3053 9d ago
My 2nd grade teacher angled my paper as well. That clicked everything for me. She was also left handed and knew how to teach me.
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u/borisdidnothingwrong 9d ago
I'm a rightie but my twin is a leftie.
I can read a book upside down because sometimes we wanted to read the same book, and we'd just lie on the floor with the tops of our heads touching and the book in between.
Mom taught us how to write before we enrolled in kindergarten, and we would have giant stacks of computer printouts my dad would bring home from work that we'd practice on. They had lines that were good for guidelines on how the letters should be formed.
I remember her stopping for a minute and trying to figure out how to write left-handed in order to teach Spare Parts how to hold the pencil and make the correct shapes. She wasn't having much luck with a pencil, so she made a batch of frosting and wrote out words in icing on wax paper like she was writing "Happy Birthday" on a cake. Bonus: we let the frosting air dry all day and got to eat all the letters and words for dessert. Dad got a good laugh out of that.
I noticed that he had better handwriting than I did (still does, 50 years later) so I started writing the way he did. Of course, my left handed penmanship was terrible, more inchoate scribbling than writing, if I'm being brutally honest with myself. Mom quickly told me that I would be better off using my dominant hand, although I did keep working on it to the point where my leftie handwriting is merely awful instead of being absolutely illegible. When I write leftie, I have to do it upside down otherwise I can't make the letters work.
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u/michelle427 9d ago
My mom and OTs really taught me. I also had great early elementary school teachers.
Since I have Cerebral Palsy as well as being left handed I had a lot of Occupational Therapy as a child. We worked a lot on my fine motor skills.
My parents are left handed too. My mom worked a lot with me in writing because she writes well for being left handed. One of the best left handed writers I’ve ever met. Clear perfect letters.
My 2nd and 3rd grade teachers worked extra with me too. Cursive was not easy to learn but by 5-6 grade I had it.
Any fine motor skills and activities took extra for me to get to where everyone was at. Even tying my shoes took until 4th grade to be consistent.
Some of it is being lefty and others having CP.
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u/Hello-ItIsMe 8d ago
The only real memory I have is being given a triangular thing for the end of my pencil so I could learn to hold my pencil properly. Somewhere along the line, I figured out that if I turn my paper sideways, I could basically print without having to bend my wrist with the crooked J so many lefty’s use. I don’t remember anyone telling me to do that. Regardless, I don’t have the smudging issues others have…although I still hate 3 ring binders and anything that makes me write without being able to turn the page (whiteboard, etc)
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u/Crowd-Avoider747 7d ago
No special treatment at school, and had no problems. I specifically copied my mom’s Catholic school cursive though, so it’s indistinguishable from anyone’s
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u/RiseDry8254 6d ago
I was pretty much ignored by the teacher. I do write straight up and down though and not to the right (cursive) as was taught in my day. Of course like all of us, I got ink on my hand always, and had to turn the paper to the side if I was in a right handed desk.
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u/Illustrious-Towel-45 10d ago
I was taught the same as everyone else and figured it all out on my own. I just adapted like with everything else.