OT- Handwriting neatness

[RU848789]

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I am a lefty and as I recall the teachers had a hard time teaching me to hold a pencil or pen.

And, as my wife teacher tells me, and as I recall, you write with a number two pencil when learning how to write..

That would shoot down your theory, I would think...not much smudging with a pencil

My wife also believes that teachers would not slant the paper correctly for lefties

For the record, I now hold a pen correctly and my fingers remain below the writing..... I basically did that retraining myself f as an adult....a lefty can do it

I was actually just making an educated guess - this source generally confirms what I was saying...

http://handedness.org/action/leftwrite.html

 

[Piscataway_rivals]

Really? Amazing!

Isn't it?

 

[rutexan84]

My handwriting has always been awful. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has told me "you should have been a doctor".

 

[wheezer]

I was actually just making an educated guess - this source generally confirms what I was saying...

http://handedness.org/action/leftwrite.html

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Actually the article seems to verify pretty much what both of us have mentioned....it does say that the curved hand is a result of improper training, position of the paper, and incorrect grip, things I mention.....

It agrees with you that doing it is an attempt to avoid smudges and also to see what you are writing better

But the main point is that the student should not have wound up with the curved hand writing (or hooked,as it is called here) . the author goes so far as to draw a line through the picture of it..

But from my observations, a good majority write with the hooked hand

So, these individuals are allowed to go through elementary school without being corrected..... I
Was a curved hand, but I forced myself, as an adult, to use what appears to be a right handed style without smudging.......

 

[wheezer]

Apples to oranges. Not teaching math because smart phones can do math for you is completely different from not teaching cursive writing because keyboards/keypads are an alternate way to write. There's no deeper, more fundamental understanding of inputting letters with regard to doing it by hand or by keyboard, so the only value I see in cursive writing is teaching fine motor control, which I imagine could be done in many other ways, whereas the smart phone or any calculator is performing important-to-understand work behind the scenes that is essential for people to learn on their own.

Your cashier example, while annoying, doesn't necessarily mean people are generally worse at math than they used to be. I grew up with some dumb people and I'd be surprised if the % of dumb people has really changed all that much in 30-40 years. I could be wrong, but I think you just got an especially dumb one.

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The problem is that people wind up getting jobs when they cannot do the skill that the job requires and need a machine to figure it out ....the machine doing it masks their inability....

I go back to a time when cash registers did not tell the clerk the amount of change to give a person, you were supposed to handle that yourself......I doubt a lot of cashiers could do that today, but it really is not hard if you understand how to count out the change from the amount rung in, up to the bill the customer gave you.

Back in the day, that girl would not have gotten the cashier job.....she would not have been "smart" enough

 

[knightfan7]

Did you work in Newark?

For around 2 years then out to one of the offices in Morris Co.

 

[Scarlet_Scourge]

My handwriting is terrible most of the time. Though I can write neat if i want to. It is just that these days most of what is handwritten are just quick notes.

 

[Veiox]

For around 2 years then out to one of the offices in Morris Co.

My great Aunt always tells stories about doing all that stuff by hand. BTW, she has been the President of PREA on and off several times. She is now 86 and still going strong.

 

[knightfan7]

My great Aunt always tells stories about doing all that stuff by hand. BTW, she has been the President of PREA on and off several times. She is now 86 and still going strong.

I served some time as VP of one of the employee associations. Ran trips to the Bama game and Garden State Bowl. Back then Pru used to really take care of you. From the medical facility in the Washington street bldg, to trips to broadway shows, to basketball, softball, and touch football leagues. And those free lunches were a god send for those of us just starting out. All you could eat with a buffet style menu. They really fostered an atmosphere of togetherness no matter how big or small you were in the organization.

I sometimes chuckle when I hear about what companies like Google get credit for doing. Hell, Pru was doing some of that 40-50 years ago.

 

[RU-AGK]

The summer in between kindergarten and first grade my grandmother taught me cursive and would drill me daily. I hated it at the time as you might imagine but I was light years ahead of my class by the middle of first grade. I am also a lefty so my teacher wasn't able to instill any improper techniques at that point as I was more than able to write anything she could throw at me in perfect penmanship while my classmates were all still learning to hold the pencil.

I won all the penmanship awards. Even earned myself a spot in the school's time capsule that was buried in the school's front lawn someplace.

FWIW cheap Bic Clearstics are the best ballpoint pen for lefties as the ink dries quickly and does not smear.

And yes, make no mistake, as I get older and more and more young people can't write in cursive, please know that I am judging you and quite harshly.

 

[ag67]

I am also a lefty. Using chalk in the old days made a mess and also contributed to a nasty case of psoriasis.

Concerning math skills, I went to buy a $.76 coffee refill a few days ago and gave the young man a dollar and a cent thinking I would make it easier for him. He could simply give me back one quarter. He looks at me and starts rummaging through the change drawer, trying to figure out just what he was supposed to do - until I told him all I needed was a quarter.

My students used to kid me about being a lefty. When we reached the genetics chapter I would tell them that through linkage left-handedness was associated with superior intelligence. However many times left-handedness was due to a mutation at a site linked with feeble-mindedness. I would state confidently that I knew which type of left-handedness I had inherited - which for some reason seemed to amuse them immensely.:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: I know better than to ask that question here

 

[fanhawk19]

Completely disagree. It helps refine fine motor skills developed when you learn printing. Almost nothing else can replicate it. Definitely not keyboarding.

And what do you do on a daily basis with your "fine motor skills"? I'm guessing not too much.

You probably miss 8-track tapes and Betamax, too. Welcome to 2015.

 

[Piscataway_rivals]

And what do you do on a daily basis with your "fine motor skills"? I'm guessing not too much.

You probably miss 8-track tapes and Betamax, too. Welcome to 2015.

I'm a dentist

The ignorance is strong in this one...

 

[fanhawk19]

I'm a dentist

The ignorance is strong in this one...

Aren't people in the medical profession notorious for having terrible handwriting?

Someone here sure is ignorant, but I don't think it's me.

 

[onesimus_rivals]

Finland has recently stopped making hand writing courses part of their primary curriculum. Get ready for even more chicken scratch.

 

[Piscataway_rivals]

Aren't people in the medical profession notorious for having terrible handwriting?

Someone here sure is ignorant, but I don't think it's me.

Simmer down tweetie bird. You are conflating messy handwriting by an adult who is in a rush, seeing a ton of patients and retrying to get in and out quickly with the need to develop fine motor skills.

And when is the best time to develop the foundation to pretty much any skill? That's right, as a child when the neural pathways are most easily connected.

Now go get your shine box.

 

[GoodOldCook]

the nuns beat good penmanship into kids in Catholic grammar school.

I think handwriting is becoming more and sloppy given that we use actual pen and paper so infrequently now. I could swear I have read articles that say some school systems are not even teaching cursive writing anymore...

It is true, Mrs. S. My wife is a second grade teacher in a Mercer County school district, and penmanship (cursive) has been officially dropped from the curriculum. They don't ask questions about penmanship on the PARCC or the SAT/ACT, so they are not important enough to cover.

 

[robcac26]

My handwriting used to be terrible. One time in third grade, my teacher handed me back an essay I wrote saying she wanted me to submit an essay, not a Chinese jigsaw puzzle. Now my handwriting is pretty good because I haven't used cursive since fifth or sixth grade, and I write in all capital letters to make it simple. At work I handle a lot of registration forms and participant waivers, and probably at least half of these forms have some part that is completely indecipherable, so annoying.

As for math, I don't know much about Common Core, but I know that at least the math portion of it would help people count change and do mental math better than trying to regroup and carry the one in your head. Think of the example at the top of this page where someone paid $1.01 for a 76 cent coffee refill. We know the change is 25 cents because we pretend the .76 is .75 and the 1.01 is just 1. The cashier was probably trying to do it the old fashioned way, which is to cross out the last 1, make it an 11 by taking from the next column, oh wait it's a zero so now we need to make it a nine and then cancel out the 1 in the left column, now we subtract the 6 from the 11, etc. That is so much more complicated than just realizing the .76 can be made into .75 and the 1.01 can be 1, but for some reason we have people outraged about trying to teach kids to do math this way, probably just because whatever news source they watch/facebook pages they follow told them to be.

 

[fanhawk19]

Simmer down tweetie bird. You are conflating messy handwriting by an adult who is in a rush, seeing a ton of patients and retrying to get in and out quickly with the need to develop fine motor skills.

And when is the best time to develop the foundation to pretty much any skill? That's right, as a child when the neural pathways are most easily connected.

Now go get your shine box.

LOL, I guarantee that you run the fryer at McD's and are not a dentist.

Talk about an idiot, good lord.

 

[RUStudent]

I have such crappy hand writing. When something needs to be printed, I write in all capital letters. That way someone can read my handwriting, along with myself.

 

[huskersalways]

If I wrote to where you could read it you would quickly know that I suck at spelling.