Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!nrl-cmf!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!aipna!edai!cam From: cam@edai.ed.ac.uk (Chris Malcolm) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: left handed Keywords: Forcing wrong-handed behaviour Message-ID: <259@edai.ed.ac.uk> Date: 26 Jan 89 17:53:16 GMT References: <725@htsa.uucp> Reply-To: cam@edai (Chris Malcolm) Organization: University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh Lines: 71 In article <725@htsa.uucp> fransvo@htsa.uucp (Frans van Otten) writes: >Considering this, what should we think of forcing left-handed people to >write with their right hand ? (I believe this is mainly in the past, now). >-- > Frans van Otten > Algemene Hogeschool Amsterdam > Technische en Maritieme Faculteit > fransvo@htsa.uucp I am a naturally right-handed person who was forced at school to write with my left hand. I started out right-handed, and developed a poisoned thumb (age 6ish, 18 months into writing skills). ME: Please miss I can't write, see my bandaged hand. TEACHER: I'm not having anybody lazing around doing nothing in my class. You can write with your left hand. ME: But miss I can't write with my left hand, I'm right-handed. TEACHER: Two years ago you couldn't write with your right hand either. Now you can start learning to write with your left. Now! Let me see you picking up your pencil! In your LEFT hand you fool! Well, I learned to write with my left hand. Then the poisoned thumb got better and the bandages came off. It so happened that by this time I could write a little better than with my right hand, so I stayed using my left. One day the teacher noticed. TEACHER: I see your right hand is better now. You'd better stop using your left hand, it's not the proper hand for writing with, and you are right handed. ME:(quietly to myself): You made me change from right to left which was **** difficult and I'm ****ed if I'm going to change back again just for you, you **** **** old **** of a ****, so there! As a consequence I write with my left hand, paint mostly with my left but sometimes with my right, and do everything else normally with my right hand. No problem. There's more. At the age of 18 my English teacher threatened not to let me sit my examinations on the grounds that my handwriting was illegible. Trying to improve proved very difficult, and I decided that joined-up-writing was a mistake if legibility and high speed were required. I devised and taught myself a simple printing script with maximum letter differences under deformation. I changed writing styles when I proved able to write both at the same speed. Naturally my signature changed as well. Yet even today, over 20 years later, if I sign my name with my toe in the sand (something I do very very rarely), whichever foot I use, I naturally without thinking use the old school form of my signature which I haven't used with my hand for over 20 years. This may be related to the fact that when I started to wear spectacles for myopia I still had myopic dreams for the next ten years, even if I went to sleep wearing my spectacles. I recall many years ago (reference forgotten) in a book on handedness the suggestion that an unusually large proportion of satirical writers were left-handed, along with the speculation that this might have something to do with having linguistic skills in both hemispheres. Yes, this was a long long time ago, back in the fearful days when they taught grammar and clause analysis to little children - but don't underestimate what some teachers will get up to in the privacy of the classroom even today! Chris Malcolm Department of Artificial Intelligence