duck-shaped pain

J. writes with the dreaded Left-Handed Hook. This is the baffling writing position that some left-handed people have, where they grip their writing instrument like a dagger, curl their hand into a claw, and position it above the spot they're planning on writing on. Pen or pencil movement is slow and limited, the resulting letters tend to be as gnarled and cramped as the hand that produced them, and the entire process just looks painful.

I, too, am left-handed. I have interesting writing positions of my own, [1] but I somehow managed to come out of public school completely Left-Handed Hook free. I'm not sure how this happened, since every other lefty I knew in my school career had varying degrees of The Hook.

When I was in fourth grade, I got transferred to a brand-new elementary school that had been built near my house. Others at the elementary school I had left were terribly jealous of those of us who were chosen to go to the new school, since it had a swimming pool in it and a vomit-inducing tire swing. [2] My fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Chambers (I think � I've sort of tried to block her out) was the first left-handed teacher I'd ever had, and stamping out the Left-Handed Hook was her own personal crusade.

At the beginning of the year, she rounded up all the leftys and made us show her how she wrote. She frowned and made agitated Hmmming sounds as the others wrote, clutching their pens like weapons. Then it was my turn to demonstrate. She perked up as my hand flowed across the page. Little did I know what her approval meant, or what I was in for.

She had been conferring with other teachers in the school about the epidemic Left-Handed Hook problem. Together, they all decided that the left-handed kids in the school needed some extra help, something that we could all do instead of recess once a week.

So, every Monday or Tuesday or some other day of the week that I soon began to dread, all the lefties in the school had to gather in one room after lunch was finished. [3] The Hook offenders gathered around one table where a lone student was seated � me. Then I was commanded to write, so that they could watch me and observe my acceptable style of writing. Dozens of sets of eyes watched me as I churned out the most banal sentences possible. "School is fun. The sky is blue. I own a cat. His name is Tony." It's not like I was given any sort of topic to work on � sheer technique was the objective here � but I couldn't bring myself to do much more than simple, declarative sentences, what with all these people watching.

Then everyone sat down and tried to mimic what I was doing. When someone reverted to their ingrained Hook ways, they would have to stop, come over to where I was sitting, and I would demonstrate how "normal" people wrote once again.

Marvelously, I did not get beaten up after these sessions. I just got shunned. I think I would have rather have been pounded � it would have been over quicker.

In the end, the teacher managed to change no one, except me, who developed a major complex about writing in front of people. Still sort of there, but the most lingering effect has been the major full-body cringe that comes over me every single time I see anyone sporting a Left-Handed Hook.

I finally tired with the complete non-excellence of gbook.nu -- the bellowing beached whale of free guestbook providers -- so I switched. There is now a new one -- unfortunately, it's not one which will allow me to leave smart-ass comments in reply, but there's only so much you can ask out of something you get for free. Remark away.

[1] Left-handed people who do not use The Hook to write with tend to have other writing peccadilloes of their own. Those of use who tend to write in normal hand position find that to do so, we have to turn the paper almost horizontally to the right, and write more or less vertically. This tends to exaggerate the angle at which letters are made. My letters used to slant precariously to the right, but at some decisive moment in my last, I decided that pushing the pen upwards as my hand went down the page worked better than pulling it down, and now they slant to the left, in a backhand. Can you read it? No.

[2] I was not excited about either, since I couldn't swim (which meant I got singled out for lessons instead of being allowed to disappear within the group) and every tire swing I'd been into up to that point had ended up being more attractive to wasps than children.

[3] No recess and the threat of 30 minutes of shrill writing instruction caused many of us to linger over our chicken fingers and rosy applesauce much longer than would normally be warranted. Nothing like being singled out for Special Help to make a kid stall as much as possible.

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