With My Pen and My Electric Typewriter ...
I have absolutely horrible penmanship. Not that I haven't seem worse, but it's still pretty awful to try to decipher. This was made even more insufferable by the fact that my mother's handwriting was absolutely beautiful. In fact, one of them main reasons we sold so many personalized craft items was due to how lovely her writing made it appear.
Now there were numerous factors that contributed to this problem. First of all, since my parents divorced during the summer after I finished second grade, we couldn't afford the tuition for the private school I had been attending. Therefore, from third grade on, I was in public school. Plus, there is the fact that due to a move, had to change schools halfway through the year and ended up in a totally different one starting in fourth grade.
My first school, Echols, was a good place. I really enjoyed it there and loved my teacher. However, they were ahead of my previous school in the fact that they had already been taught how to approximate space between words and I was still using my finger as a spacer. Needless to say, this forced skill (they didn't teach me how to do it, they just told me I had to do it) was not helpful in the least to my writing abilities. But I managed to get through it and did alright after that.
A few weeks before I was going to have to transfer, our class started learning cursive. We were being taught a newer style and I was just beginning to conquer the individual letters and was beginning to work on words when I had to go to the new school.
The school I was supposed to attend was already at capacity so I ended up at another nearby school, Ballman. While I liked the school itself and actually had a close circle of friends (all boys), my new teacher was a demon from Hell.
When I arrived we were having classes in the gym because they were doing some sort of work on our classroom area. She was not the loudest speaker so this made hearing difficult. It didn't help anything that when I arrived they were just finishing their cursive lessons. Add to this that they were being taught the older style and anything not looking like it (i.e. most of the letters I had learned) were considered incorrect and marked as such. Nothing could be done to change her mind about this so I had to spend extra hours at lunch, after school and each night re-learning how to write. It was not easy and I had a very hard time with it but I eventually was able to come up with a passable amalgam of the two styles that would work for her.
I must also point out that I am not a fast writer and I usually press down very hard when writing. Therefore, writing is difficult for me and I avoided it whenever possible.
Now, one of the main reasons I have such hatred for my second teacher that year was that she felt I should write faster and my slowness was holding back the class. This was especially notable on spelling tests. She would read out the sentence we were to write down twice and refused to repeat it anymore nor would she let everyone finish writing before reciting the next sentence. Also, any incomplete sentences were marked as incorrect. Needless to say, my first test was a zero and I managed to make some points after that by learning to memorize the sentence and write it fully, then quickly memorizing the next sentence she read. All of the sentences I was able to complete were correct but I was lucky to make it through 50-70% of the ones read. Not surprisingly, having to write at these speeds helped contribute to my atrocious penmanship.
When the time came to begin fourth grade, the school I should have been in, Bonneville, was able to enroll me so I started there. They accepted my horrible handwriting for what it was and did not penalize me for my slowness. As a school on the whole, they were far from perfect but at least my problems there were not as a result of my writing abilities.
I did manage to teach myself a decent version of calligraphy that I can now use when I need to write something more legible but my overall handwriting is still crap.
As you may have guessed, the above rant was my current entry in therealljidol's LAST CHANCE IDOL. The topic was Crossing all the T's. I hope you have enjoyed my interpretation as well as reading another glimpse into my past. I'm sorry that this one was less pleasant than most of my past offerings but frankly, there are infinitely more stories like this in my background.
TTFN!
Now there were numerous factors that contributed to this problem. First of all, since my parents divorced during the summer after I finished second grade, we couldn't afford the tuition for the private school I had been attending. Therefore, from third grade on, I was in public school. Plus, there is the fact that due to a move, had to change schools halfway through the year and ended up in a totally different one starting in fourth grade.
My first school, Echols, was a good place. I really enjoyed it there and loved my teacher. However, they were ahead of my previous school in the fact that they had already been taught how to approximate space between words and I was still using my finger as a spacer. Needless to say, this forced skill (they didn't teach me how to do it, they just told me I had to do it) was not helpful in the least to my writing abilities. But I managed to get through it and did alright after that.
A few weeks before I was going to have to transfer, our class started learning cursive. We were being taught a newer style and I was just beginning to conquer the individual letters and was beginning to work on words when I had to go to the new school.
The school I was supposed to attend was already at capacity so I ended up at another nearby school, Ballman. While I liked the school itself and actually had a close circle of friends (all boys), my new teacher was a demon from Hell.
When I arrived we were having classes in the gym because they were doing some sort of work on our classroom area. She was not the loudest speaker so this made hearing difficult. It didn't help anything that when I arrived they were just finishing their cursive lessons. Add to this that they were being taught the older style and anything not looking like it (i.e. most of the letters I had learned) were considered incorrect and marked as such. Nothing could be done to change her mind about this so I had to spend extra hours at lunch, after school and each night re-learning how to write. It was not easy and I had a very hard time with it but I eventually was able to come up with a passable amalgam of the two styles that would work for her.
I must also point out that I am not a fast writer and I usually press down very hard when writing. Therefore, writing is difficult for me and I avoided it whenever possible.
Now, one of the main reasons I have such hatred for my second teacher that year was that she felt I should write faster and my slowness was holding back the class. This was especially notable on spelling tests. She would read out the sentence we were to write down twice and refused to repeat it anymore nor would she let everyone finish writing before reciting the next sentence. Also, any incomplete sentences were marked as incorrect. Needless to say, my first test was a zero and I managed to make some points after that by learning to memorize the sentence and write it fully, then quickly memorizing the next sentence she read. All of the sentences I was able to complete were correct but I was lucky to make it through 50-70% of the ones read. Not surprisingly, having to write at these speeds helped contribute to my atrocious penmanship.
When the time came to begin fourth grade, the school I should have been in, Bonneville, was able to enroll me so I started there. They accepted my horrible handwriting for what it was and did not penalize me for my slowness. As a school on the whole, they were far from perfect but at least my problems there were not as a result of my writing abilities.
I did manage to teach myself a decent version of calligraphy that I can now use when I need to write something more legible but my overall handwriting is still crap.
As you may have guessed, the above rant was my current entry in therealljidol's LAST CHANCE IDOL. The topic was Crossing all the T's. I hope you have enjoyed my interpretation as well as reading another glimpse into my past. I'm sorry that this one was less pleasant than most of my past offerings but frankly, there are infinitely more stories like this in my background.
TTFN!