Question on Left Handedness
Sep. 2nd, 2006 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxAnother question - "Why are people left handed?"
In my case - defiance. :-)
I was raised in one of the last schools where teachers went about "training" children to use their right hand, out of some warped sense of religious zeal (even now, the word "sinister" means "evil" as much as it means "leans to the left", and people still mutter darkly of "followers of the Left Hand Path" in occult and Christian circles).
This "training" the teachers offered consisted of striking the offending left hand, very hard, over the knuckles with a ruler.
I was actually fully ambidexterous until my "training" began. After a time, someone wisely decided that a school which had a policy of injuring kids was a school full of teachers all lining up to be sued, and the "training " stopped.
Other children emerged from this too late - they came out right handed, with chronic stutters - one dreadful side effect of such "training". I came out of it jubilantly, defiantly left handed, with vestiges of ambidexterity, and a nice, balanced personality, though with a predilection toward rebellion for the rest of my life.
Handedness is often as much a matter of choice and personal effort to force your brain to learn new tricks as it is about genetics. How do you think stroke victims whose writing hand is paralysed eventually learn to write again with their free hand?
In my case - defiance. :-)
I was raised in one of the last schools where teachers went about "training" children to use their right hand, out of some warped sense of religious zeal (even now, the word "sinister" means "evil" as much as it means "leans to the left", and people still mutter darkly of "followers of the Left Hand Path" in occult and Christian circles).
This "training" the teachers offered consisted of striking the offending left hand, very hard, over the knuckles with a ruler.
I was actually fully ambidexterous until my "training" began. After a time, someone wisely decided that a school which had a policy of injuring kids was a school full of teachers all lining up to be sued, and the "training " stopped.
Other children emerged from this too late - they came out right handed, with chronic stutters - one dreadful side effect of such "training". I came out of it jubilantly, defiantly left handed, with vestiges of ambidexterity, and a nice, balanced personality, though with a predilection toward rebellion for the rest of my life.
Handedness is often as much a matter of choice and personal effort to force your brain to learn new tricks as it is about genetics. How do you think stroke victims whose writing hand is paralysed eventually learn to write again with their free hand?
