"The tricks of Satan": Lefties about how they were retrained
Now to meet a person who writes with his left hand is easier than ever. But just recently, all left-handers were retrained in schools and at home — sometimes with very cruel methods. We talked with six people whom we tried to teach to write with our right hand about how they experienced the pressure of teachers and parents - and how it all ended.
At the time when I went to the first grade, the children were not yet able to read and write before entering school. But my grandmother worked as a teacher of the Russian language, so at the age of four I did everything. I wrote with my left hand, and everyone noticed that, for example, it was also easier for me to do applications with my left.
When the school started squiggle sticks, they began to scold me that it turns out sloppy. The teacher called my mother: she explained that I need to “redo” my hand, because in the Soviet country “it’s not allowed”, we have, they say, everything is for right-handers. I remember my mother then said that relatives can bring us scissors and pens for left-handers. There was a scandal at school: oh, we are friends with decaying capitalism (this is 1986), and in general, do we have any pens in the USSR? We will retrain! Mom said: "Do what you want" - then my brother was three years old, and she was up to nothing.
I was forced to sit, removing my left hand under the thigh, and cover it with a school uniform dress. If I pulled out my left hand, they approached me and knocked neatly with a ruler on the table. Mom was told to tied the left hand at home, and I didn’t touch anything at all. In the end, I learned to write with my right hand, and decently.
Then I was transferred to the gymnasium. There, I mostly wrote with my right hand, and when I started to do it with my left, the teachers said: "Well, what you write with your left, you know how with your right." In high school, I caught myself thinking that I would go all nafig - you can also change hands. I have a bunch of abstracts with records under a different bias, now to the right, then to the left - it feels like a storm has hit.
I think that retraining is breaking. You already fail, and when they start to fuck at all, you feel like a renegade. Once at a lesson the teacher knocked a magazine on the table: "We all look at me!" Silence, the students raise their heads. "And now we are waiting for Sveta to shift the handle from the left hand to the right." I was ready to just fall through the ground.
We had another lefty in the class - a boy who couldn’t write with his right hand at all. I remember how he sobbed over the writings all the time: his mother scolded him for his carelessness. I do not remember what hand he wrote in the end, he was taken in the second grade. Now in the end I write mostly with my right hand.
Before school, they did not force me to write with my right hand, but at school they asked: "Why do you write with the left? We must with the right." Forbidden, before it was strictly. And I was always disciplined: it is necessary - it means it is necessary. Although my pencil fell out of my right hand, I couldn't even hold it with my fingers. But forced.
Parents also said: "How will you write with your left hand? Come on, get used to what you do now. If you are born left-handed, retrain." I was nimble, nimble, if everyone did not look, I wrote with my left hand - so that at home they tied my left hand to me, I don’t remember what. My sticks turned out to be winding, but gradually, slowly, I coped. Then he went to the army, and there, too, the weapon was just under the right arm.
It seems to me, it is not necessary to retrain children. They would not retrain me, so I would do everything with my left - and as a result, with inaccurate work, my hands are equivalent. I take a knife, a spoon, an iron in my left hand. And I write right, yes.
From childhood I took everything in my left hand — scissors, a spoon, a brush — but the awareness, the understanding that I was left-handed, came to me in elementary school. There they began to retrain me. I remember the process itself vaguely, I recall only frequent flushes: they said to take a pen or chalk in my right hand.
The lines turned out to be quivering and crooked - in contrast to those that I led out with my left hand. But for some reason they said that it is necessary to write exactly the right one. They explained it this way: when you use your right hand and write from left to right (as most do), the hand does not block the word.
In middle grades, a math teacher jerked because on the blackboard I wrote with my left hand. She associated it with practice in the hospital, where people with disabilities who had problems with their right hand had to do everything with their left. And the fact that for me the right hand was “problematic”, apparently, did not bother anyone.
In college and university, I again tried to write with my left. It came out instantly, but I couldn’t write for a long time like this, because an un-trained hand quickly got tired. In student times, he wrote lectures: now left, then right. But it was easier to write this way than to read: when you read one page of text written differently, you think more about the method than what is written.
At this time, the question arose about which hand to take a computer mouse. But, apparently, he only got up with me: all the jobs at the institute were adapted for right-handers. Here I didn’t stop and decided that it was necessary to learn to take the mouse with the right one: I often had to use other people's computers and constantly rebuild them under my left hand. There are also problems here: when I use programs that require complex movements, I feel that the right one gets worse.
I used to think that maybe not bad, that they retrained me: both left and right hands are developed, “adapted to society”. But now not sure. After all, trying to develop my right hand, I paid less attention to my left hand - and who knows how much and what I never created with it.
Since childhood, I took pens and pencils in my left hand (I kept the spoon and fork, by the way, with my right hand), but in kindergarten nobody paid attention to it. The parents did not worry either - but when I went to the first class, they and the teacher said that everything, the pen should be held with the right hand. Of course, it turned out badly, the hand did not obey, for the handwriting they put triples. There were no harsh measures, they just said to shift the pen to the other hand.
At home, when no one saw, I wrote with my left hand. If they noticed, they started to curse, and with tears I continued to write right. At the same time, I didn’t understand at all why it was necessary to write this way, because there were no logical explanations - that’s all. It was a period of injustice and tears.
For a year, progress was so-so (I wrote terribly with my right hand, and with my left it was good), and mom, seeing my sufferings, in the second grade asked the teacher to let me write with the hand that suits me best. When I asked my mother why I was no longer retrained, she replied that the teacher was experimenting, and she eventually got tired of it. So I remained left-handed.
Honestly, I do not remember the moment when I realized that I was left-handed - she was very little. I played and painted with my left hand. My great-grandmother retrained me: she was a believer and believed that being left-handed was the tricks of Satan and all this was from the devil. As far as I remember, she took the instruments from my left hand and shifted it to the right - and so with all the other actions.
Since I was quite small, I learned to use my right hand quickly and went to school right-handed. As a result, I cannot write with my left hand, and when I write with my right hand, I have a terrible handwriting. As a child, what had to be retrained did not matter to me. But now, already in adulthood, it seems to me that I was deprived of some potential opportunities: there is a theory that left-handers are more creative people.
My parents retrained me to do everything with my right hand: when I took something with my left, they simply shifted the subject to my other hand. Sometimes it came to swearing. I remember only a few moments - I already wrote in school with my right hand. I did not worry that I had to relearn myself - in any case I do not remember the details. Is that a shame when cursed that he took the wrong spoon in his hand.
At the same time, for the first time I realized that I was left-handed at the age of ten, when I realized that I definitely could not play table tennis with my right hand. Intuitively tried to shift the racket to the other hand - it turned out that it was more convenient. At the age of fourteen I bought myself a recipe for left-handers and began to learn to write with my left hand. True, now I write it much worse than the right. I notice that it is more convenient for me to do many things in everyday life with my left hand: open doors, comb my hair, wash a car, sweep.
PHOTO:Boggy - stock.adobe.com (1, 2, 3)