At a very early age, possibly when I was in Kindergarten or the first grade (whenever the basics of writing is taught) I remember having difficulty writing one particular alphabetical letter. In class I was learning to write the alphabet, both capitalized and lower case letters, but I recall having difficulty writing the lower case “a”. Seeing as my name has two of these lower case letters in it, this proved to be problematic. I think back to that time now and suppose that since I was able to write every other letter without having to lift my pencil much, and the “a” required me to make at least two separate marks, this was probably my problem. I couldn’t quite grasp the idea and feel of making two separate marks. I felt as if I was writing the letter “o” and the letter “l” side by side, and it seemed unnatural to me. That’s when my grandmother decided to teach me how to write a cursive lower-case “a”. All was mended after this and I never had a problem writing again. When it came time to learn cursive in school I was an extremely quick learner. However, this little lesson from my grandmother is probably the reason why I merge basic print and cursive styles when I write today.
Books and reading were in my life at home, but not nearly as much as at school. In my childhood I lived with my grandmother (an avid reader) and my mother (a significantly less avid reader). My mother enjoys reading, but was not taught to love it. My mother is left handed and slightly dyslectic, and as a child her teachers forced her to use her right hand to write with until the third grade. She has since been fairly apathetic towards reading and writing all of her life, so it’s no surprise to me that I was not enforced to read in the home very much. The first book I recall enjoying was probably the first book I read. In the forth grade we were required to write a book report, and so for the first time I was truly required to read a whole book. I enjoyed it thoroughly and began searching out more novels I enjoyed on my own. I began writing for pleasure shortly after that initial spark of interest as well.
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I mix my cursive and print too but I've only noticed that about myself recently. Sometimes it seems I can write faster in cursive but I hate my cursive because I can't make sense of it myself when it's rushed.
ReplyDeleteIt was only a problem for me when I took ENG311 where I had to memorize the IPA notation. For that class print was necessary.
Do you know if schools today force children to write right-handed?
I don't believe that classes force students to write right or left handed now. They allow them to write how they will write, I would assume. I recall even when I was in kindergarten having scissors for those who were left handed in the classroom. I think what happened to my mother was just an unfortunte circumstance of that time. The education system has learned since then (I would hope).
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