Yes, This Was a Thing

Yep, my mom went to school in the 50's and she was not allowed to use her left hand to write.
 


My Grandmother was always trying to get me and my brother to eat with our right hands. Thankfully my Mom corrected her and insisted we eat with whatever hand we wanted to. Hard to believe that used to be controversial.

The worst was the penmanship in 2'nd grade though. They'd let us write with our left hands, but we had to hold the pencil with it resting in the crook of your finger and thumb. OK, great for right-handers, but you can't see what you are writing and you smear the writing with your left hand. It took me forever and I missed many recesses because of those archaic rules. I do with they would still teach cursive writing but I am glad the penmanship days are over.

Edit to add;
I wish I had followed the lead of my right-handed daughter. Just to be different, she taught herself to flip the paper upside-down and write upside-down. That would have REALLY thrown my 2'nd grade teacher for a loop!
 
Interesting trivia, the definition of the word sinister includes: Sinister comes from a Latin word meaning “on the left side, unlucky, inauspicious”. I think that may be part of where the association of left handedness being bad or evil comes from.
 


My Grandmother was always trying to get me and my brother to eat with our right hands. Thankfully my Mom corrected her and insisted we eat with whatever hand we wanted to. Hard to believe that used to be controversial.

The worst was the penmanship in 2'nd grade though. They'd let us write with our left hands, but we had to hold the pencil with it resting in the crook of your finger and thumb. OK, great for right-handers, but you can't see what you are writing and you smear the writing with your left hand. It took me forever and I missed many recesses because of those archaic rules. I do with they would still teach cursive writing but I am glad the penmanship days are over.

Edit to add;
I wish I had followed the lead of my right-handed daughter. Just to be different, she taught herself to flip the paper upside-down and write upside-down. That would have REALLY thrown my 2'nd grade teacher for a loop!
My dad did try this with my oldest. I have never seen my oldest so mad at his grandpa. He was about 3 and coloring with his left hand. My dad put the crayon in his right hand several time. My son glared at his grandpa, made a big show of putting the crayon BACK in his left hand, and went back to coloring. I told my dad to give it up and just accept his grandson was left handed. He should be happy his namesake is right handed!!!! :lmao:
 
I do with they would still teach cursive writing

my son had the worst handwriting in the younger grades but when his private school started teaching cursive around 2nd or 3rd it was the difference between night and day. the kid's cursive (left handed) is beautiful and he could write so much faster. he would say 'it's doesn't hurt to write anymore'.

we later learned that for a significant chunk of kids on the autism spectrum it's much easier to write in the continuous flowing manner of cursive vs the up and down/on and off the paper practice of printing. it's just the mechanics of how their brains work.

i think both printing and cursive should be taught in school-then let the kids use whichever suits them better.
 
I'm a lefty/cross dominant/ambidextrous person. I very much remember in the '70s being taught that I should be right handed. I refused, they caved.

I also remember always folding a piece of paper to stick under my left hand so that I didn't get it covered in pencil lead as I wrote.
 
My daughter is a leftie. No one in our family deterred her from being one. Sad it ever was considered "wrong."

The only issue we had was teaching how to tie shoes. :confused3 I don't know why it kept getting lost in translation, but it did. Even when we faced each other. I found a YouTube video on left handed shoe tying and after she watched it a dozen+ times it clicked! :D
 
Catholic schools in particular were infamous for a harsh insistence on writing with the right hand. There was even a particular style of cursive writing that was prevalent at Catholic schools from at least the 50s through the 70s in our area to the point that to this day it's possible to notice some who attended Catholic school simply by their handwriting.
 
So glad this was ignored when I came along in the 80s!!!!!

By the time I attended the same school in the 1960's as my mother did in the 1930's, the practice had been abandoned, at least at that particular school.

Interesting trivia, the definition of the word sinister includes: Sinister comes from a Latin word meaning “on the left side, unlucky, inauspicious”. I think that may be part of where the association of left handedness being bad or evil comes from.

I remember hearing stories that the left was considered the "Devil's hand."
 
My almost 2 yr old grandson is left hand dominate already, has been since he held his first toy.
My mother was telling me how people use to correct that and say it was wrong back in her day, her mother included, crazy.
 
Catholic schools in particular were infamous for a harsh insistence on writing with the right hand. There was even a particular style of cursive writing that was prevalent at Catholic schools from at least the 50s through the 70s in our area to the point that to this day it's possible to notice some who attended Catholic school simply by their handwriting.

my grandfather was born in 1894, attended catholic schools and had stunning cursive to the day he died in his late 80's. i have some of his writings and it always struck me that there was something a bit different looking to it vs. traditional cursive, i had never seen anything quite like it until last summer when i visited an old catholic mission in idaho founded in the mid 1800's. there were displays of letters written by the priests and other religious staff. i noticed immediately that some were identical cursive to my grandfathers. when i read the history on display it appears that they were educated/subsequently taught in schools in the same geographic area my grandfather grew up so with the information you've provided i'm guessing it was that region's particular style.

thanks for the missing piece of the puzzle!
 
By the time I attended the same school in the 1960's as my mother did in the 1930's, the practice had been abandoned, at least at that particular school.
Both my kids private pre-schools actually had kids try writing with both hands, no matter what had they instinctively went to and asked them which felt better to them. That was in the 1990's.
 
So glad this was ignored when I came along in the 80s!!!!!
It sure was there though when I was in a Catholic daycare center. Born in '88 and still in the very early '90s they were trying to convert left-handed kids to being right handed. That's actually why my mom removed me from that daycare as they would continuously call her telling her I kept putting the big crayon in the left hand and they would take it from me and put it in my right hand. She would tell them back that I was left handed and to let me do what I had been doing.
 
Catholic schools in particular were infamous for a harsh insistence on writing with the right hand. There was even a particular style of cursive writing that was prevalent at Catholic schools from at least the 50s through the 70s in our area to the point that to this day it's possible to notice some who attended Catholic school simply by their handwriting.
That really makes me think of my step-father-in-law. Now he's right handed and always has been but his cursive is slightly different and he has told us in the past how the nuns at the Catholic school he was at were extremely strict on handwriting lessons.
 
we later learned that for a significant chunk of kids on the autism spectrum it's much easier to write in the continuous flowing manner of cursive vs the up and down/on and off the paper practice of printing. it's just the mechanics of how their brains work.

My elementary school only taught cursive. I believe the idea was that it was supposed to be easier for young children to initially learn to write in the flowing, more scribbling-like manner than printing. I cannot remember what the teaching method was called, but I do remember that we also used pegboards with rubber bands, tangrams, and other things that were more tactile to understand various concepts. (Public school in the 1980s)

I actually was technically never taught how to print. I just picked it up by knowing what the printed letters looked like because I was an avid reader. We moved to FL when I was in 3rd grade and I just got to go hang out in the reading nook while all the other kids struggled learning cursive.
 

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