The past is a different country. They do things differently there.

[Gadget]

I sympathize - think I told you before that both my niece and her son  have it. There's been some research linking it to the left handed gene but I'm not sure 

[meles]

My Dad knew up to his 20 x table. It was a source of bewilderment to him that I could not even learn up to my 7x. 

meles - who is very grateful for the invention of the pocket calculator.

[Lydart]

Meles ... I discovered just today that my mobile phone (Nokia, 11 yrs old and very retro !) has a calculator on it ! 


The dyslexia runs in the female side of our family ... my #2 daughter (and her daughter), me, my mother, grandmother and gr. grandmother all were terrible spellers ... so I'd say for the previous generations, that was what caused it !   I'm not left handed, but ambidextrous !!  (As were my mother and grandmother !)  Odd ....

[meles]

Oh! So's mine! Didn't know that! 

But... I can't work out how to use it! 

I'll have a bit of a practice tomorrow.

meles

[Gadget]

It's something to do with a fuzzy brain as far as I can recall -no aspirtions on your brain, Lydart    I got a fuzzy one too 

I know my sister read up on it and left handed/ambidextrous brains are different in the middle where the two halves join. We need a social psychologist or a neurologist to help us out on this one, I think 

Getting back to the past: did anyone else who was left handed have trouble in school in the olden days? there have been some threads on this before. I only had one teacher who gave me problems and she had been left handed but forced to become right handed 

[meles]

I had no problems at one primary school, but at a second, they still used steel nibs, which were darned near impossible to use if you're left-handed. They simply suggested I should change hands. I learned that you could manage if you twisted the paper 90 degrees...

meles

[Gadget]

Yep - i did that. Now they teach left handers to put the paper that way.

I'm pretty good at writing right to left though 

[meles]

I can mirror-write too - but only in copper plate style....!

meles

[Subaru]

The kids have left-handed scissors at school now, even left-handed rulers and pens.

It's surprising just how many left-handers there are nowadays, there is at least 1 in every class that I do class support in.  Maybe it isn't made such an issue nowadays, there probably was as much years ago.  I know my OHs grandmother was rapped on the knuckles every time she went to use her left hand by her teacher.  She ended up ambidextrous because of it.

My OH is left-handed.

The pupil I support the most at school is left-handed, and I have moved him in all his lessons so that he sits on the left side of the desk, giving him more room to write.  There's nothing looks more awkward than a left-hander and a right-hander sitting side by side trying to write