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November 1993: Penmanship
While I largely think of American state run schools as being designed only to meet the requirements of absolutely average people, and being mildly chaotic breeding grounds for antisocial tendencies where Ritalin or Lithium are dispensed in the place of discipline, there was one thing about my particular school that I did appreciate. I am left handed, in America nobody even blinked when I picked up a pen in my left hand. This was something new and exciting for me. When I was first sent to school I was sent to a Japanese school near to my grandfather’s home. It was a very good school and it was very strict, which meant that people who wrote with their left hand were strongly discouraged from doing so, and that anybody who persisted was punished for it. At that age I was too young to get the a regular bus by my self, and there was no school bus in the world that would have traveled the distance between the base and the school, so I slept at my grandfather’s house during the week and only came home at weekends, and when, after my first week, I came home and asked my Mother why the school wanted me to stop writing with my left hand, she took it as being an attack on my American ancestry and got rather upset. My Mother marched into the school first thing on Monday, accompanied by two very large men from the base, and explained to the principle why I should be allowed to write with my left hand and not be made to use my right hand, and from then on I was allowed to use my left hand. It was the only time that I recall my Mother ever getting involved with a school issue without an invitation from the councilor to discuss why I wasn’t being patriotic enough, and it was also about that time that I decided that it might be better if my Mother didn’t come to my school any more than strictly necessary. After my Mother’s motivational speech on behalf of left handed people I was officially allowed to write with my left hand, but it drew curious looks from the other students and it made the teachers frown because they disapproved of it, so I quickly endeavored to learn how to write with my right hand just to fit in, and I continued doing it throughout my schooling in Japan. When I reached America I continued to use my right hand out of habit, but I soon noticed that that there were one or two other students in the school who were left handed, and that they were writing without getting funny looks or frowns from the teachers, so I simply switched over. I wrote in English using my left hand because it was how I wrote at home and in Japanese using my right hand, out of habit. This largely meant that when wrote anything, I started using one hand then switched the pen over to the other side to write my name at the end, which I resolutely refused to write in English characters. |
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