Handwriting

My favorite subject in grade school was lunch. When I'd get home, my mom would say "So what'd you do today?" I would triumphantly respond "I ate lunch!"

My least favorite subject was handwriting. Handwriting would prevent me from ever teaching a regular elementary classroom because I simply can't do it. I got Cs in handwriting when I was *lucky*. We had these little booklets that we would use to learn how to write the "right" way. The books that taught us how to print weren't so bad I guess. The big problem was cursive.

Those lessons in cursive writing had one big lie behind them: "When you get older, you're going to have to write in cursive for everything. All the time. Forever and ever."

Lies. LIES.

If I was supposed to write everything in the meticulous cursive that the book wanted us to do, I'd still be on the word "if" in this sentence. We all stopped using cursive as soon as possible and no one ever called us on it.

As tedious as those classes could be, the worst were the days were when the magical handwriting lady would come in. This was a little old lady who looked like every other little old lady that you have ever met, and she could make every letter look just as perfect as it did in the book.

I remain convinced that demonic possession was involved in her penmanship, because mine didn't really work out quite as well.

So after all of this, they would take your handwriting samples to be graded by the book company. We were told how important those scores would be to our futures. As if my 8 year old hand wasn't jittery enough, now I find out that I won't get into college if I can't write in cursive.

Cursive led to a lot of confusion in my life. To me - both at that time and right now - "writing"
means, well, WRITING. Putting words on a page regardless of method. So imagine my confusion when this happened in third grade:

It turned out that "writing" meant "cursive." I had no idea; no one had bothered to tell me. And apparently, I must have been a monkey living among normal, thinking humans, because not one of my classmates seemed to be having the same difficulty. My teacher didn't even bother to explain the problem to me until my fourth attempt.

As I went on in life, I discovered, as we all do, that cursive wasn't required at any point in life. It also turned out that I could indeed go to college with crappy handwriting. If only I'd known then what I know now...

UPDATE:

Apparently, hello Reddit. Someone found me I guess?