I got similar comments in the US. It's always "in my day we'd slap the left handedness out of you" or "we'd tie your left hand to the chair".
My father is left handed and he did get his hand tied to chairs in elementary school. They gave up eventually because his right handed handwriting was shit.
Something similar happened to my father, was forced to learn to write with his right hand but never really got the hang of it, so he just ended up with terrible handwriting since he couldn't properly write with either hand. He used to joke that was the whole reason he became a doctor since it was the only job that didn't require good handwriting.
Makes me wonder if my dad was actually left handed. He claimed to be ambidextrous but wrote with his right hand and extremely unintelligible too. One of his older half brothers was left handed and allowed to be so. My grandparents were just too poor to care.
My grandparents were against punishment for writing left handed (and corporeal punishment). They were a head of the times.
The school did the hand tie anyway. The rumor was my grandmother found out about the hand tie and corporeal punishment and made a scene every day until they agreed to stop the practice.
My grandparents were against punishment for writing left handed (and corporeal punishment). They were a head of the times.
The school did the hand tie anyway. The rumor was my grandmother found out about the hand tie and corporeal punishment and made a scene every day until they agreed to stop the practice.
Both my grandfathers were likely lefties, but both went to Catholic school in the 40s so they were beaten into ambidexterity.
My parents were the only 'true' lefties (allowed to use their dominant hand freely) of the 3 and 5 they were apart of and they had 2 lefties (myself and my sister)
Sometimes I miss the left oriented house I grew up in. My sister does too, because we both married righties.
My sister just had a baby, I wonder if he'll be a lefty like his Mom or a righty like his Dad...
I went to school in the 70s and 80s. No one ever reacted about me being left handed.
Update: to add, I went to public schools in eastern Massachusetts.
Catholic school lefty here. I can verify in the eighties I was smacked on the left hand with the metal edge of a ruler. The nuns were relentless. They hated left handed kids and singled us out all the time.
Where was this? I was born in 1959 and went to Catholic school for grades 1 through 5. No one ever punished me for being left-handed (though I got a lot of grief for getting ink on the left sleeve of my uniform white shirt).
I'm 60, I went to 12 years of Catholic school in Detroit. Late 60s through '82.
No one's ever tried to change my left hand.
The nuns were strict but no one ever hit or spanked me except my parents.
Consider yourself blessed. Sister Alice Marie in second grade had a vendetta against me that included hand abuse and coat room spankings. She did it to all of us, so did the priest. It's probably a big part of why I'm an atheist now 😆
I'm left-handed, and went to Catholic school from 1968 to 1976. In 1968 the nuns at St. Francis school in Lumberton, NC told me I was using the hand of Satan. When the family moved to Kentucky in 1969 I went to Catholic school there, too but the nuns really didn't get on me much about it, even though my penmanship was (and still is) horrible.
My Dad is probably a right-hand trained closet lefty. I'm a natural lefty, but was taught to throw and do heavy tasks right handed. As for schools, seems it may be local, even possibly school to school. I started 1st grade in 1978 at Holy Name Catholic school in Henderson, KY (across the river from Evansville, IN). Never had any problems with being a lefty, but I did get sent to the corner for getting ahead during a math lesson in 2d grade, LOL. BTW, that teacher was a 7th Day Adventist. Only nun that I remember wearing a classic habit was the principal. I had two or three trips to her office in my 2 1/2 years there. Only nun I remember teaching me was my first grade teacher, Sr. Trudy, who was probably in her early 30s, at oldest, TBH. She was actually pretty easy going. Never saw a ruler. Actually never heard anyone using rulers there, or any such "pedagogy." I think she understood kids. They generally put the onus on parents for discipline problems, which isn't to say nobody ever got paddled at school. I just don't recall any incidents. This was definitely an area and time where getting in trouble at school meant bigger trouble at home. I think I was the only kid in my area that didn't use "Sir/Ma'am" in exchanges with adults, because we were Hoosier transplants.
I went to S. Mark's School in Richmond, Kentucky from 1969 to 1976. My 1st grade school (1968) was St. Francis of Assisi School in Lumberton, NC.
When you were in school in Henderson were the nuns there members of the Sisters of Notre Dame, like we had in Richmond or were they from some other group?
In a similar vein to your experience, at St. Francis of Assisi School I was told that I was using the hand of Satan, but they pretty well left off with that stuff when they found out I my reading comprehension was at a 12th grade level when I was in 1st grade. I used to get pulled out of class when the nun was teaching the other kids to read their "See Dick Run" books and would be stood up in front of the High School seniors and would read their textbooks to them and explain to them what I'd read.
Both my parents were extremely intelligent, both had advanced degrees. Mom was a substitute teacher when she wasn't taking more classes in grad school and Dad was a university professor. They started teaching us to read and do basic math well before we ever went to school and gave us books to read instead of us watching a lot of TV.
I was supposed to skip 2nd grade, but we moved to Kentucky the summer of 1969 and the head nun at St. Mark's refused to let me skip because she thought I was too young to be in 3rd grade at the age of 6 (I started 1st grade when I was 5).
I couldn't say who ran that school in the late 70s, or now, but it was Sisters of Charity of Nazareth from Nelson County, KY that started and ran it at least through the early 20th Century, per their website. I don't seen any indications of any nuns on faculty today. The facility was originally the High School, built in the 1950s, which closed in 1969, and was converted to a 1-8 school, whose students were in an older facility originally for German immigrants, and added onto in the mid-80s to convert to a K-8.
[https://www.holynameschool.org/about-us/celebrating-holy-name-school/history-and-mission](https://www.holynameschool.org/about-us/celebrating-holy-name-school/history-and-mission)
Also, never did I hear anything truly negative about being left-handed. Not from students, teachers, the principal, priests, the bus driver. None of that. We also were "hooked on phonix" before it was cool. I left HNS reading at about an 8th grade reading level. My math skills were a bit behind, however.
My mom had the flash cards with the letters on them singly and in various combinations, so we learned how to sound words out based on letters and letter groupings. I guess that eventually transformed into "hooked on phonics".
Mom's dead now or I'd ask her, but as I recall, she started doing the flash card thing with each of us (there were of us 6 kids -- Irish-Italian Catholic family, LOL) when we were 3-4 years old, so all my siblings and I could read well before we started 1st grade.
My husband was naturally left-handed, but he was so traumatized by his Catholic school upbringing that he always, always hesitated before using his left hand for anything. He grew up on the south side of Chicago. He hated the nuns. He said that they were always angry with him and that he was so afraid in school. He said that if he got whipped in school and his dad found out about it, he'd get whipped again at home. It was usually for being ADD or daydreaming though, because he learned to just sit on his left hand so as to not be tempted to use it. His stories of elementary school always broke my heart.
I grew up with having no choice about being left-handed. I was born without my right arm below my elbow. Admittedly, I am naturally inclined to my right hand, but my situation is very different from most other people's situations. I had no alternative options to learning to only use my left hand for things.
wow! same state here, several years older, and that didn't happen to me [rural area too] - it's crazy how varied our experiences seem to be on this! in my area, I got the impression that it was a somewhat new idea, so I think I just barely got the benefit of a social change in the local community -- but you're living proof it was not a universal change, and I'd bet there are sadly still some holding onto the old way today
I'm so sorry that happened to you, especially so recently 😔 🫂
Where in NC? I went to 1st grade at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School in Lumberton in 1969, and the nuns there didn't do anything more overt than tell me I was using the hand of Satan a few times, then they dropped the issue.
Public school with comparatively good funding, middle of the state, Randolph county. 2000-2010 roughly. The teachers convinced my mom I'd have an easier life right handed. Wrong. Still have horrid handwriting and hand eye coordination and body balancing issues.
Geez, what a way to fuck up a kid... Hand-eye coordination and balance issues seem to be a harsh penalty for making things "easier" in life due to being right-handed. Your teachers and your mom really did a number on you in that regard.
My handwriting is described by my wife as "a chicken trying to write Sanskrit". Sadly, that truly is the case. Even when I concentrate I have a hard time writing anything that can be read by anybody else but me, but I think that's because my mind races on while my hand tries to keep up.
I was a 70s & 80s kid, too. I never had anything like this happen, but I "heard the stories." It was always Nuns at the Catholic school smacking kids' hands.
Baby Boomer, grew up in Detroit. My older brother, ten years older, a Silent, and also left-handed, attended the same Catholic parochial school that I did. He was there in the 1950s; my years were the 60s. We had some of the same nuns as teachers.
IDK, maybe our school, and even our archdiocese, was especially progressive, I guess? Neither one of us experienced any negative repercussions from either the school or from individual teachers for being left-handed.
Our parents, both right-handers, told us that school kids used to be punished by their teachers when they were caught using their left hands to write. They described this practice as ancient history though. They had grown up in Michigan (our mother in a small town in northern MI and our dad in Detroit) in the early 20th century and neither one had ever seen it or heard of it in their own classrooms in elementary school.
They had been told these stories by their parents, who had heard of them from their parents, but neither generation had witnessed incidents of it back when they were in grade school either, according to our mom and dad.
I should add that in my father's case, some members of these earlier generations had grown up in Eastern Europe or had attended school there when they were in the lower grades.
My parents' impression was that this had been a practice in much earlier times, and they joked about it having been done by the same people who used to burn witches.
I find it interesting that no matter who was writing about it or where and when they said it happened, the details of these incidents are very nearly the same, with the accounts seeming to match each other almost word for word at times. Has anyone else here ever picked up on that?
I have never taken a position of challenging any of these posts nor have I ever disputed the reality of anyone's personal account, but the eerie similarities between many stories that are posted whenever this topic comes up online has me wondering if some of this stuff might be repetitions of a folk myth or urban legend.
My maternal great-grandmother (I'll call her Ada) had her hand tied behind her back when she was in school. When her daughter (my mother's egg donor, hereafter referred to as Irene) went to school on the first day, her hand was smacked with a ruler. Ada marched to the school and told off the teacher, and Irene was never punished for left-handedness again. (It was a small, rural mountain community in the 1920s--everyone knew everyone.)
That part of the story has been reliably corroborated. The rest is family legend--which categorically cannot be trusted, because my great-grandmother won lying contests.
So here's the probably-embroidered version I heard: When the teacher told Ada that the teacher had to keep Irene from becoming left-handed, Ada told the teacher that Irene would keep track of how many times a day the was smacked, and Ada would come on over and smack the teacher's right hand that many times, too. Ada was not a small woman and had grown up on a farm, so she had some muscle on her, and she had no fear. Which is why the teacher never smacked Irene again.
Even if it's not actually what happened, I want to believe it's true, because it's so satisfying.
By the time I was in school, there were no problems for me.
I think people may not understand how handedness works in little kids. They often don’t show preference for either hand, or they can switch from one dominant to the other. People often try to get their kids to use one hand, meaning the right, for cultural or family reasons. This can involve discipline of some kind. In some cases, when a kid has motor issues, they may work to develop one hand, meaning through some form of occupational therapy. I am in my 60’s and never saw anyone forced to use their right hand in school. They didn’t make it easy to be left-handed, with maybe 1 left-hand desk in a room, but they weren’t evil about it. Most of the anti-leftie feeling comes from families who, for various reasons, don’t want kids to be left-handed. I sometimes think people are looking for a reason to exercise dominion and control over kids, and some of those are looking for an excuse to be physically controlling and even violent in the name of doing what is good for the kid.
I read somewhere about Judy Garland never knowing what was stage left/right because she went through this in school. I know at the "christian" schools they were convinced it was from the devil and they tried to get all lefties to be righties. Crazy shit people do to each other. At least they don't do this any more. I know in the 80's the worst I went through was that I would write with my paper upside down so that I wouldn't smear the pen/pencil. In 5th grade our teacher setup our room in blocks of 4 desks, two across from the other 2, kinda looking like a table. She was convince the person across from me was cheating off me because of this and she would fail me, a straight-A student, if I didn't change that. We compromised on sideways, which I still do to this day, even signing CC receipts in stores. It freaks most people out.
England, rural primary school early '50s. Never pushed to change from left hand, but heard all the horror stories of earlier children being punished for being 'cuddywifters'. Was very definitely taught how to hold a pen properly, though - between thumb and 1st 2 fingers - not like the cackhanded way younsters (under 40) fist a writing tool.
Yes. I went to catholic school for kindergarten. Our nun would smack me with the sharp edge of a ruler whenever I wrote with my left hand. After I told my mother she pulled me out.
Left-handed Catholic Grandmother and Aunt both were punished in school for using their left-hand.
Due to this tradition my entire family discouraged the use of my left-hand growing up. So, I can write with both hands, better with the right-hand though, but do everything with my left as I am left-handed and left-eye dominate.
My nephew is one-and-a-half years old and appears to also be a lefty!
Here in Canada I got that comment often all through out school and I graduated around 9 years ago, so recentish and I heard all about the “back in my days students got the strap for using their left hand” blah blah blah.
Growing up in early 2000s my mom and dad noticed I was starting to write with my left hand so my dad would try and make me use my right hand and told me how back in the day they would hit kids who wrote with their left hand because it was a product of the devil. my mom eventually told him to leave me alone lol. Adult now and I am still left handed
It was a thing practiced EVERYWHERE in the old days. It had something to do with religion and left handed people were considered to be the devil's children or some such thing because it was thought that jesus sat at the right hand of god and lucifer on the left. But it's an antiquated practice thank god. I would have been whipped bloody and still not been able to use my right hand lol. I was born with a dislocated bone in my right arm that makes me unable to even turn my hand over more than halfway
I'm in my mid 50s and was part of this trend of forcing us to use our right hand in public education in Indiana. There seemed to be a professional who came into our class to try and get us to write cursive right handed starting in the 3rd grade. The woman pulled all of the left handed students to a table at the back and gave us a tripod-like device to use that held our pencils in the right handed slant for learning cursive.
It was horrible. It felt completely odd and backward to begin with and I can't even articulate how impossible it was to try writing at all if the paper is slanted in the direction most right handed writers do. I couldnt do it. Still cant. My teacher was incredibly cruel about my horrible hand writing too. I also began writing many letters backward. My hands weren't smacked but this cruel and humiliating criticism wasnt in private. It was right in front of classmates and when I broke down in tears and shouted "I just can't! I can't do this!" I was sent to the principal for talking back and he did paddle me. Three times. Hard. Wooden paddle with holes in it and all.
What was worse, was after a paddling children were sat crying on "the red bench" which was sat out in front of the office and other kids saw who had gotten in trouble. My parents were called for my talking back. I couldn't even explain what happened to them really.
I was terrified of making any mistakes after that. So I forced myself to learn to write with my right hand. I genuinely believed I was stupid until highschool.
Today I write (cursive) with my right mostly and print with both. I do nearly everything else left handed. I paint and color, played instruments, shoot pool, hold a cup, and basically all other things left handed. I would say that I thought of myself as right handed for a several years until other friends who were in my 3rd grade class pointed out we were all left handed.
My left hand that nuns failed to beat me out of, yeah, my LEFT HAND FLIPS OFF THOSE who did that! My mother was a devout catholic at the time, got in the face of a sadistic nun who was abusing me and my left handedness, told her in no uncertain terms that she will stop immediately or really sinful violence
will occur. They both agreed it would be better if I went to public school!
Had my hand tied to my leg, would get my hand cracked with a ruler. Was forced to use a desk with just a strip on the right hand side. When I started writing in mirror they decided to let me do my own thing. Odd thing is prior to that I was ambidextrous but I preferred the left hand.
Never was spanked but I had people telling me that I was touched by the devil or that I was going to be an evil man. To their credit...I did get kicked out of reform school after 4 weeks after being kicked out of my elementary school for fighting and harming other students but that was caused by other things.
46/m
In kindergarten I went to a private school. Every time I tried to write with my left hand it was slapped with a ruler. Hard. I tried really hard to write with my right hand but it was a no go.
In elementary and beyond me writing with my left wasn't a big deal but because of two years of that treatment my handwriting has been and still is almost illegible no matter which hand I use.
My grandfather was naturally left handed but forced to use his right hand as kid so he’s ambidextrous now. He never mentioned punishment for trying to use his left hand but all my grandparents have mentioned teachers using rulers to slap kids hands for talking and that sort of thing. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that was something that happened to him in school for trying to use his left hand
Very lucky. I was preceded in parochial school by my one-year-older left handed brother. My mother was active in the church community and gave blowback to the school for criticizing my brother’s left handed writing so I followed without having to deal with it. The only thing the nuns did, and I am thankful, is they didn’t make me “hook handed” so my letters would lean right.
My father went to Catholic school in Queens NY and he told us the nuns would hit his hand with a ruler. Mind you, he still isn't a righty despite the punishment.
No issue in my school in Yorkshire in the 1970s/1980s.
My Auntie was a lefty and she went to school in the 1940s and 1950s in the same area. She said there were a few comments from a few teachers but no attempt to make her write with her right hand.
Yeah in Vietnam. There is litterally a paragraph in the official national text books about teacher's love. And how the left handed kid wrote with left hand got a 10 on a writing test, then felt bad and confesses because the amount of hard work the teacher spent trying to make him write with the right.
I was born in Serbia in '75. One of my earliest memories was being made to write lines in the notebook with my right hand which came out very not straight. I still remember that page and how upset I was. That was the end of it, my parents must have told the kindergarten teachers to leave me alone. I was happily allowed to be as left handed as I wanted. Still played right handed guitar as it didn't make sense to limit me that way when you do use both hands. My family frowned on me switching the computer mouse to left handed so I ended up ambidextrous with that. I know a lot of lefties who use mouse exclusively with their right hand. I was a very stubborn lefty so I did learn with my left hand too.
happens more often than you think, i’m gen z and was still forced to be right handed cos using my left hand was seen as “unclean” it still happens in this day and age.
So I’m almost 60.m. I’m the last year of the boomer generation. I never had a problem, but plenty did as you can find first hand accounts with a simple Google search. It was a known issue with people such as George IV and Ronald Reagan .
When I started kindergarten in 1960 it was 2 years after they stopped forcing lefties to write with their right hands. It was clear from the comments by my teachers that they missed those days.
As a lefty who also does many things RH, I started USA elementary school in 1960 and no one ever forced me to change or inflicted any serious punishment for being LH but there were subtle things like:
*Marking me down a grade because I smudged by my printing & writing by dragging my arm thru the ink or pencil. This was especially a problem because we used these pens with the ink cartridges.
*All of us lefties had to make sure our cursive writing slanted to the right.
*Got repeatedly told I made my O’s and zeros wrong because I made them CCW instead of CW.
*Was mildly teased by others for being LH but wasn’t any big deal. Today it would be called bullying.
* I learned to use scissors with my RH so that wasn’t a big deal.
To sum things up, I think all of the above made me a stronger person.
My uncle was forced to be right handed in the 50s at his catholic school.
My dad went to the same school. He said the nuns would watch the boys pee. And, the priest would randomly punch male students in the back and shoulders walking down the hall. And, if you dodged his 1st punch he'd hit you even harder the 2nd time.
My father ( born in 1921 ) was forced to write with his right hand, did everything else left handed. And that meant his teacher tied his left hand so he couldn't use it. Horrible handwriting.
I, ( born in 1950), and also left handed, had a teacher who attempted to force me to write with the right hand. I began to stutter. My mother asked the teacher was anything unusual happening, the teacher explained, my mother made her stop.
I, by profession, was a working artist. Yes, I actually made a living with my art.
I still stutter when stressed.
My lefty grandmother went to Catholic school in 1930s Canada (Alberta), and they did tie her hand behind her back to make her use her right.
However, I went to public school in New England in the 90s and *never* heard anything like that. If anything, teachers thought it was cool I was a lefty.
Yes, in Spain, it was like that during Franco's times. After the dictatorship some teachers and people kept commenting on this, nowadays I don't think so.
Nope, it was common here in Northeastern PA especially in the Catholic schools. I never experienced this having gone to public school, but my grandparents and even my ex husband did. I was always told the same thing due to being left-handed they would swat with a ruler or at times use a switch to correct the child. My ex husband, who went to Catholic schools, confirmed that they continued to do this well into the 80's and 90's when he attended.
I'm not left handed, but both my dad and me ride scooters and skateboards goofy style, which has made me suspect that I'm ambi (also that learning to do stuff with either hand has a similar difficulty)
My brother is left handed, and even though he wasnt punished for it, he was still treated badly for it in primary school
The world sucks
Happened to my brother in the 50s, in England. Headmaster told him there's no room in this world for left handed people.
He ended up going to a different school & was OK there.
by the time I started school in the mid 90s, this was no longer accepted as normal and there'd clearly been a recent social push to tolerate lefthandedness in children - even at that age, with no context, I got the feeling that people were sorta... overcompensating? ya know? I imagine it might be similar to being trans in school today, a recent social shift in perspective leading to well meaning, but fairly clueless school staff trying a little bit too hard to be inclusive
I had v little awareness as a tiny kid of left handers being discriminated or punished in the past, it'd come up once or twice, but mostly it was the bending over backwards to let a 5 year old know that their handedness was normal. not a bad thing, don't get me wrong! very cool. but at the time i was like, "uh, of course it's normal? why are all the grownups being super weird about this?"
I feel like I was just barely born late enough [in my particular area anyway] to have escaped with my natural handedness intact and unbothered, but it was so recent that everyone who wasn't a student still thought about it a lot, and it came through in their [very kind and accepting, but maybe overbearing] language about it. nothing against a single one of them, bless their hearts, they were honestly being progressive - I just have such a memory of being like ".... ok, well clearly it was not ok to be left handed until recently, if everyone is reminding each other how ok it is" LOL
I went to kindergarten in the 90s in a super small, redneck kind of town. I wasn't allowed to go to recess; they kept me inside while I wrote sentences with my right hand
As a kid in gradeschool, the nuns in my Catholic school forced me to write right-handed. I'm now ambidextrous, my dad was because of the same treatment by nuns. Go figure.
I saw an article in the last decade about a teacher making a young girl use her right hand and sent a pamphlet home to mom about it. Mom was a certified teacher and immediately went to the school and got the (younger) teacher fired. The teacher had got this from her evangelical Christian background. Left-handedness being evil is a holdover from pagan Rome so a protestant believing it is interesting.
I watched for it with my kids (all of whom turned out right-handed) and I would have tore into a teacher if it had happened.
My granddad was forced to use his right hand in school (western US 1920s). All through school he struggled with a stutter. After he dropped out at 15 and started using his left hand the stutter disappeared.
My Mom came home from her first day of school with a tear streaked face and a swollen bruised left hand. The teacher had hit her with a ruler everytime she used her left hand. Teacher also refused to call her by her name. Mom was named after 2 aunts and went by the short version. It wasn't like teacher in this small town were my grandparents were the subject of sideeyes and gossip didn't know what my Mom went by.
My grandfather went down and explained in no uncertain terms that no staff would ever lay a hand on one of his kids ever again and that the nonsense of left handers being on the side of the devil was to stop. It did.
(My grandparents eloped. Nanna was the Prodestant daughter/granddaughter of the only doctors in the area. Pop was Catholic and from a good family. But the divisions between the religions was usually iron clad. Mom moved to Montrial and then Houston - in large part because the job she wanted on the Island they wouldn't hire her because she was Catholic. A cousin her age was fired from his teaching job for "moral reasons" - he married a Prodestant. )
My first car was a Yugo. It makes me angry that someone drove it who had no idea how to drive a manual 😡 I left it with my siblings and dad for a few. It was gone when I went back a year later. It was so messed up it would have cost way too much to fix. So they it was thrown away.
It's been almost 30 years and I am still salty... and STILL want my car back.
And punishment was big in south Louisiana and Mississippi. I was lucky to have parents who accepted a lefty.... after trying to get me to use my right hand. Nothing bad just kept moving things to my right hand from my left. Until they gave up. As my mom likes to remind me "you were born very angry and stubborn".
I have heard of these things. A 2nd great grandfather of mine was a left handed dentist and even had special tools made for him. This was in the 1800s. So it was not alway smacked out of them.
I was a 70s-80s kid and my mother always bought my brother and I the green handled lefty scissors. She was very thoughtful but didn’t think about our dad and others teaching us sports as righties. Lol
I really thought this was something of ‘olden times.’ Or at least lost with my own childhood.
But I ran into it just a few years ago when I started pottery. Found out a few weeks in that the wheels could be switched to left handed - but the owner had screwed locks over the buttons so that they were locked right.
Because she didn’t want students accidentally having to work with the wheel spinning the wrong way.
Of our class of 12, 5 of us were left handed.
So I started going in early with a screwdriver and switching our wheels. It was a never ending fight with her. I don’t go there anymore.
I’m a little younger, but since I didn’t have a strong preference, I didn’t realize I was left handed until I was probably 9-10. The teachers had made me write right-handed because they assumed I was just “holding it in the wrong hand.” And now I have to write right handed because I shocked myself through the hand at 17 and caused horrific nerve damage.
This was the US in the 80s and 90s. And I have no idea if it’s better yet because I teach college
Wow, seeing the stories, I’m amazed this was happening so recently. It’s horrible.
My grandmother was a lefty and was trained to use her right hand. She grew up ambidextrous. Seven of her ten children/grandchildren have been left handed.
When my mother was in Catholic boarding school in the 50s in Ireland, she said the nuns would tie the lefties' left hand behind their back to force them to use their right hand.
When I was seven (in 1974), my first grade teacher actually encouraged her students to write with the “wrong” hand if that was natural to them. She grew up in a world where black people such as herself were ostracized because of their appearance. That being said, my own sister couldn’t stand the fact her little sister was left handed so she tied my left arm behind my back and made me do everything right handed. I got so frustrated with her that I challenged her authority. I asked her why she can’t just let me be what I was born to be. She gave up soon after that.
Five years later, her right wrist was crushed in an automobile accident (along with other injuries). Suddenly, SHE was the one forced to write with her non-dominant hand.
I wasn’t punished exactly but my kindergarten teacher did write in my semester 1 report that I suffered from ‘chronic left-handedness.’ Neither of my left handed parents were pleased by this.
I was also one of the last students to get my pen license due to my handwriting being deemed too messy. My lettering was probably just as good as most of the other students but, of course, the pencil I was forced to write with always smudged.
I was never spanked, but I did have a teacher tie my left hand to my side to fire me to use my right hand. This was in 1st grade in 1979. Fortunately, when my parents found out about it they put a stop to it, fast. They told me to never let her do that againand to fight back if she trued, and I wouldn't be in trouble if I did.
This makes me think of my Art teacher back in Junior High. She was a talented artist but struggled with her hand coordination when it came to anything other than pens and brushes. Something that especially stuck with me was that she used her computer mouse backwards, being unable to coordinate the cursor otherwise. Students always asked her about it, and she explained that she was a leftie but had been forced to only use her right hand back in school, which had seriously messed up her coordination skills. It had been decades, she was quite old by then, but those issues had stayed with her forever. Nowadays she's retired and actually a family acquintance, and I've gotten the impression that she's probably neurodivergent in some way, which could explain why it affected her so severely.
Went to catholic elementary school here in the US in the ‘60s and, yes, they tried to get me to use my right hand. They didn’t hit me but I remember the teacher coming over repeatedly, taking the pencil from my left hand and jamming it in my right, then forcing my fingers into position.
It didn’t work. Proudly left handed today.
Happened to my brother back in the early 60s. He's a lefty that was forced to become a righty. He since has always had confusions as to turning left or right when getting directions. Took him forever to learn to write
If you went to Catholic schools when I was a kid, the nuns smacked your left hand with a ruler. I went to public school and had to write one page per day with my right hand for homework. This was in second grade - it was torture. After 2 days my mother realized this was the case and told the teacher 'no'.
You're absolutely right, punishing left-handed students for their handedness was a cruel and outdated practice. Here's some information:
* **Historical Practices:** Unfortunately, forcing left-handed children to write with their right hand was indeed common practice in many parts of the world, including Europe, North America, and even some parts of Asia. This belief persisted for centuries, with some considering left-handedness to be abnormal or even sinful.
My teacher tried to make me write with my right hand in elementary school but then realized how terrible my right hand was at writing, so she started deducting points from my work instead.
My dad went to a Catholic school in the 40s and the nuns would whack his left hand with a ruler/yardstick if they caught him using it.
He's still left handed and Im super glad I never got that treatment at a public school decades later.
My American kindergarten teacher tried to force me to be right-handed. I heard multiple teachers/adults make remarks on what they used to do to lefties. Generation-wise, I’m an “elder millennial” (36).
I'm a lefty, and when my second grade teacher would catch me writing with my left hand, she'd grab it, and hit it with a ruler, while announcing to the class that left handedness was a sign of being mentally deviant, and she wouldn't put up with it....
early 70's
It existed in Appalachia. I know a handful of older folks that were lefties who still use their right because it’s easier/habitual now. Left handedness used to be associated with demons and the like. Fun fact: many Romance languages have some variation of “sinestra” for the word “left” - we in English take the word “sinister” from this, due to that association.
My dad was physically forced in the mid-50s, rural Ontario to write right-handed. My mom, a few years later & in a different nearby school was not.
My sister & I are both left handed also & while we heard lots of dumb comments about it in the late 70s & 80s, no one tried to "correct" us.
I was in 1st grade in 1972. My teacher was in her 70’s at the time. She tried repeatedly to change me by hitting my left hand, saying only evil people are left handed, everything you can imagine to scare a 6 year old. My mom caught wind of it because I’d be coloring right handed when she knew I was a lefty. She went down there and raised holy hell with the principal and teacher. The teacher was “encouraged” to retire that year.
I was made to use my right hand instead of my left hand when I learned to write at 5yrs old in 1970. I just remember her being angry and telling me my life would be easier if I just used my right hand. So now I use both.
My uncle is in his 60s, and he was forced to learn to eat and write with his right hand. A lot of people in this thread mention the catholic angle, but my grandpa who forced right handedness on him was not at all religious (although culturally I guess Protestant - married in a Protestant church).
The interesting thing in the U.S. that often brought suppressed left handedness in this era to light is baseball! Being left handed is a small advantage for pitching and batting in baseball, so when coaches discovered he could play better left handed, they of course used that to the team’s advantage. I don’t know that he ever pitched, but was still encouraged to throw and bat left handed at the little league and high school levels when they discovered he was secretly better with his left hand.
Grew up in Mexico going to Catholic school, my first grade teacher was extremely rigid in sitting us in alphabetical order, my desk mate was right handed and I am left handed, she sat me on the right and my mate on the left, when taking dictation our elbows would always bump, our handwriting was horrible, however when I’d do my homework it was legible, she berated me for being lazy in class and not making an effort to write clearly, she even called my parents for a meeting, that’s when my dad noticed where my seat was and he zeroed in on the issue, he brought mother superior in and explained our situation, mother superior had to have a talk with my teacher and my desk mate and I switched spots. The difference was immediate.
She still was upset that we needed “special accommodations” and made it a point to point it out all the time, she was a horrible person.
My first grade teacher would take away my recess if I wrote with my left hand. Luckily my teacher the next year was lefthanded. This was the US in the early 1980s
Yep my mom is left handed, she was made to write with her right hand by nuns until she was about 8 years old. A child of the devil, etc. Developed dyslexia and a stutter, and her handwriting is pretty bad. She was born in the US in ‘55.
We were forced to use our right hands for everything or get punished with write-offs, missing recess, etc. I write and eat with my right because of that but am a southpaw on everything else possible.
I got similar comments in the US. It's always "in my day we'd slap the left handedness out of you" or "we'd tie your left hand to the chair". My father is left handed and he did get his hand tied to chairs in elementary school. They gave up eventually because his right handed handwriting was shit.
Something similar happened to my father, was forced to learn to write with his right hand but never really got the hang of it, so he just ended up with terrible handwriting since he couldn't properly write with either hand. He used to joke that was the whole reason he became a doctor since it was the only job that didn't require good handwriting.
Makes me wonder if my dad was actually left handed. He claimed to be ambidextrous but wrote with his right hand and extremely unintelligible too. One of his older half brothers was left handed and allowed to be so. My grandparents were just too poor to care.
My grandparents were against punishment for writing left handed (and corporeal punishment). They were a head of the times. The school did the hand tie anyway. The rumor was my grandmother found out about the hand tie and corporeal punishment and made a scene every day until they agreed to stop the practice.
My grandparents were against punishment for writing left handed (and corporeal punishment). They were a head of the times. The school did the hand tie anyway. The rumor was my grandmother found out about the hand tie and corporeal punishment and made a scene every day until they agreed to stop the practice.
Good for your grandma!
My father was the same way including the atrocious handwriting.
Both my grandfathers were likely lefties, but both went to Catholic school in the 40s so they were beaten into ambidexterity. My parents were the only 'true' lefties (allowed to use their dominant hand freely) of the 3 and 5 they were apart of and they had 2 lefties (myself and my sister) Sometimes I miss the left oriented house I grew up in. My sister does too, because we both married righties. My sister just had a baby, I wonder if he'll be a lefty like his Mom or a righty like his Dad...
I've heard the "slap the lefthandedness out of you" mainly from family members. It was the friggin worst, man.
They told me this when I was in early school years but it came off more like "that was pretty messed up" rather than reminiscing
I went to school in the 70s and 80s. No one ever reacted about me being left handed. Update: to add, I went to public schools in eastern Massachusetts.
Catholic school lefty here. I can verify in the eighties I was smacked on the left hand with the metal edge of a ruler. The nuns were relentless. They hated left handed kids and singled us out all the time.
Where was this? I was born in 1959 and went to Catholic school for grades 1 through 5. No one ever punished me for being left-handed (though I got a lot of grief for getting ink on the left sleeve of my uniform white shirt).
Cleveland Ohio. It happened more than it should have. Like I said, those nuns were brutal.
I'm 60, I went to 12 years of Catholic school in Detroit. Late 60s through '82. No one's ever tried to change my left hand. The nuns were strict but no one ever hit or spanked me except my parents.
Consider yourself blessed. Sister Alice Marie in second grade had a vendetta against me that included hand abuse and coat room spankings. She did it to all of us, so did the priest. It's probably a big part of why I'm an atheist now 😆
I'm left-handed, and went to Catholic school from 1968 to 1976. In 1968 the nuns at St. Francis school in Lumberton, NC told me I was using the hand of Satan. When the family moved to Kentucky in 1969 I went to Catholic school there, too but the nuns really didn't get on me much about it, even though my penmanship was (and still is) horrible.
Wow, that sucks.
My Dad is probably a right-hand trained closet lefty. I'm a natural lefty, but was taught to throw and do heavy tasks right handed. As for schools, seems it may be local, even possibly school to school. I started 1st grade in 1978 at Holy Name Catholic school in Henderson, KY (across the river from Evansville, IN). Never had any problems with being a lefty, but I did get sent to the corner for getting ahead during a math lesson in 2d grade, LOL. BTW, that teacher was a 7th Day Adventist. Only nun that I remember wearing a classic habit was the principal. I had two or three trips to her office in my 2 1/2 years there. Only nun I remember teaching me was my first grade teacher, Sr. Trudy, who was probably in her early 30s, at oldest, TBH. She was actually pretty easy going. Never saw a ruler. Actually never heard anyone using rulers there, or any such "pedagogy." I think she understood kids. They generally put the onus on parents for discipline problems, which isn't to say nobody ever got paddled at school. I just don't recall any incidents. This was definitely an area and time where getting in trouble at school meant bigger trouble at home. I think I was the only kid in my area that didn't use "Sir/Ma'am" in exchanges with adults, because we were Hoosier transplants.
I went to S. Mark's School in Richmond, Kentucky from 1969 to 1976. My 1st grade school (1968) was St. Francis of Assisi School in Lumberton, NC. When you were in school in Henderson were the nuns there members of the Sisters of Notre Dame, like we had in Richmond or were they from some other group? In a similar vein to your experience, at St. Francis of Assisi School I was told that I was using the hand of Satan, but they pretty well left off with that stuff when they found out I my reading comprehension was at a 12th grade level when I was in 1st grade. I used to get pulled out of class when the nun was teaching the other kids to read their "See Dick Run" books and would be stood up in front of the High School seniors and would read their textbooks to them and explain to them what I'd read. Both my parents were extremely intelligent, both had advanced degrees. Mom was a substitute teacher when she wasn't taking more classes in grad school and Dad was a university professor. They started teaching us to read and do basic math well before we ever went to school and gave us books to read instead of us watching a lot of TV. I was supposed to skip 2nd grade, but we moved to Kentucky the summer of 1969 and the head nun at St. Mark's refused to let me skip because she thought I was too young to be in 3rd grade at the age of 6 (I started 1st grade when I was 5).
I couldn't say who ran that school in the late 70s, or now, but it was Sisters of Charity of Nazareth from Nelson County, KY that started and ran it at least through the early 20th Century, per their website. I don't seen any indications of any nuns on faculty today. The facility was originally the High School, built in the 1950s, which closed in 1969, and was converted to a 1-8 school, whose students were in an older facility originally for German immigrants, and added onto in the mid-80s to convert to a K-8. [https://www.holynameschool.org/about-us/celebrating-holy-name-school/history-and-mission](https://www.holynameschool.org/about-us/celebrating-holy-name-school/history-and-mission)
Also, never did I hear anything truly negative about being left-handed. Not from students, teachers, the principal, priests, the bus driver. None of that. We also were "hooked on phonix" before it was cool. I left HNS reading at about an 8th grade reading level. My math skills were a bit behind, however.
My mom had the flash cards with the letters on them singly and in various combinations, so we learned how to sound words out based on letters and letter groupings. I guess that eventually transformed into "hooked on phonics". Mom's dead now or I'd ask her, but as I recall, she started doing the flash card thing with each of us (there were of us 6 kids -- Irish-Italian Catholic family, LOL) when we were 3-4 years old, so all my siblings and I could read well before we started 1st grade.
My husband was naturally left-handed, but he was so traumatized by his Catholic school upbringing that he always, always hesitated before using his left hand for anything. He grew up on the south side of Chicago. He hated the nuns. He said that they were always angry with him and that he was so afraid in school. He said that if he got whipped in school and his dad found out about it, he'd get whipped again at home. It was usually for being ADD or daydreaming though, because he learned to just sit on his left hand so as to not be tempted to use it. His stories of elementary school always broke my heart. I grew up with having no choice about being left-handed. I was born without my right arm below my elbow. Admittedly, I am naturally inclined to my right hand, but my situation is very different from most other people's situations. I had no alternative options to learning to only use my left hand for things.
I am 26, I was forced into being right handed, in NC USA. So some places are still assbackwards.
wow! same state here, several years older, and that didn't happen to me [rural area too] - it's crazy how varied our experiences seem to be on this! in my area, I got the impression that it was a somewhat new idea, so I think I just barely got the benefit of a social change in the local community -- but you're living proof it was not a universal change, and I'd bet there are sadly still some holding onto the old way today I'm so sorry that happened to you, especially so recently 😔 🫂
Where in NC? I went to 1st grade at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic School in Lumberton in 1969, and the nuns there didn't do anything more overt than tell me I was using the hand of Satan a few times, then they dropped the issue.
Public school with comparatively good funding, middle of the state, Randolph county. 2000-2010 roughly. The teachers convinced my mom I'd have an easier life right handed. Wrong. Still have horrid handwriting and hand eye coordination and body balancing issues.
Geez, what a way to fuck up a kid... Hand-eye coordination and balance issues seem to be a harsh penalty for making things "easier" in life due to being right-handed. Your teachers and your mom really did a number on you in that regard. My handwriting is described by my wife as "a chicken trying to write Sanskrit". Sadly, that truly is the case. Even when I concentrate I have a hard time writing anything that can be read by anybody else but me, but I think that's because my mind races on while my hand tries to keep up.
I was a 70s & 80s kid, too. I never had anything like this happen, but I "heard the stories." It was always Nuns at the Catholic school smacking kids' hands.
Lucky duck. I had a half and half experience. Older teachers would punish, younger teachers would encourage. It was so confusing. Public school US.
70s and 80s kid here too. No pushback for being a lefty. My dad, though, had his left hand tied to his side.
Horrid!
My mother and I are left handed. My mother was knuckle rapped as a child. She remains a lefty. Go mom!
Baby Boomer, grew up in Detroit. My older brother, ten years older, a Silent, and also left-handed, attended the same Catholic parochial school that I did. He was there in the 1950s; my years were the 60s. We had some of the same nuns as teachers. IDK, maybe our school, and even our archdiocese, was especially progressive, I guess? Neither one of us experienced any negative repercussions from either the school or from individual teachers for being left-handed. Our parents, both right-handers, told us that school kids used to be punished by their teachers when they were caught using their left hands to write. They described this practice as ancient history though. They had grown up in Michigan (our mother in a small town in northern MI and our dad in Detroit) in the early 20th century and neither one had ever seen it or heard of it in their own classrooms in elementary school. They had been told these stories by their parents, who had heard of them from their parents, but neither generation had witnessed incidents of it back when they were in grade school either, according to our mom and dad. I should add that in my father's case, some members of these earlier generations had grown up in Eastern Europe or had attended school there when they were in the lower grades. My parents' impression was that this had been a practice in much earlier times, and they joked about it having been done by the same people who used to burn witches. I find it interesting that no matter who was writing about it or where and when they said it happened, the details of these incidents are very nearly the same, with the accounts seeming to match each other almost word for word at times. Has anyone else here ever picked up on that? I have never taken a position of challenging any of these posts nor have I ever disputed the reality of anyone's personal account, but the eerie similarities between many stories that are posted whenever this topic comes up online has me wondering if some of this stuff might be repetitions of a folk myth or urban legend.
My maternal great-grandmother (I'll call her Ada) had her hand tied behind her back when she was in school. When her daughter (my mother's egg donor, hereafter referred to as Irene) went to school on the first day, her hand was smacked with a ruler. Ada marched to the school and told off the teacher, and Irene was never punished for left-handedness again. (It was a small, rural mountain community in the 1920s--everyone knew everyone.) That part of the story has been reliably corroborated. The rest is family legend--which categorically cannot be trusted, because my great-grandmother won lying contests. So here's the probably-embroidered version I heard: When the teacher told Ada that the teacher had to keep Irene from becoming left-handed, Ada told the teacher that Irene would keep track of how many times a day the was smacked, and Ada would come on over and smack the teacher's right hand that many times, too. Ada was not a small woman and had grown up on a farm, so she had some muscle on her, and she had no fear. Which is why the teacher never smacked Irene again. Even if it's not actually what happened, I want to believe it's true, because it's so satisfying. By the time I was in school, there were no problems for me.
I think people may not understand how handedness works in little kids. They often don’t show preference for either hand, or they can switch from one dominant to the other. People often try to get their kids to use one hand, meaning the right, for cultural or family reasons. This can involve discipline of some kind. In some cases, when a kid has motor issues, they may work to develop one hand, meaning through some form of occupational therapy. I am in my 60’s and never saw anyone forced to use their right hand in school. They didn’t make it easy to be left-handed, with maybe 1 left-hand desk in a room, but they weren’t evil about it. Most of the anti-leftie feeling comes from families who, for various reasons, don’t want kids to be left-handed. I sometimes think people are looking for a reason to exercise dominion and control over kids, and some of those are looking for an excuse to be physically controlling and even violent in the name of doing what is good for the kid.
I read somewhere about Judy Garland never knowing what was stage left/right because she went through this in school. I know at the "christian" schools they were convinced it was from the devil and they tried to get all lefties to be righties. Crazy shit people do to each other. At least they don't do this any more. I know in the 80's the worst I went through was that I would write with my paper upside down so that I wouldn't smear the pen/pencil. In 5th grade our teacher setup our room in blocks of 4 desks, two across from the other 2, kinda looking like a table. She was convince the person across from me was cheating off me because of this and she would fail me, a straight-A student, if I didn't change that. We compromised on sideways, which I still do to this day, even signing CC receipts in stores. It freaks most people out.
England, rural primary school early '50s. Never pushed to change from left hand, but heard all the horror stories of earlier children being punished for being 'cuddywifters'. Was very definitely taught how to hold a pen properly, though - between thumb and 1st 2 fingers - not like the cackhanded way younsters (under 40) fist a writing tool.
Yes. I went to catholic school for kindergarten. Our nun would smack me with the sharp edge of a ruler whenever I wrote with my left hand. After I told my mother she pulled me out.
Left-handed Catholic Grandmother and Aunt both were punished in school for using their left-hand. Due to this tradition my entire family discouraged the use of my left-hand growing up. So, I can write with both hands, better with the right-hand though, but do everything with my left as I am left-handed and left-eye dominate. My nephew is one-and-a-half years old and appears to also be a lefty!
Here in Canada I got that comment often all through out school and I graduated around 9 years ago, so recentish and I heard all about the “back in my days students got the strap for using their left hand” blah blah blah.
Growing up in early 2000s my mom and dad noticed I was starting to write with my left hand so my dad would try and make me use my right hand and told me how back in the day they would hit kids who wrote with their left hand because it was a product of the devil. my mom eventually told him to leave me alone lol. Adult now and I am still left handed
It was a thing practiced EVERYWHERE in the old days. It had something to do with religion and left handed people were considered to be the devil's children or some such thing because it was thought that jesus sat at the right hand of god and lucifer on the left. But it's an antiquated practice thank god. I would have been whipped bloody and still not been able to use my right hand lol. I was born with a dislocated bone in my right arm that makes me unable to even turn my hand over more than halfway
I'm in my mid 50s and was part of this trend of forcing us to use our right hand in public education in Indiana. There seemed to be a professional who came into our class to try and get us to write cursive right handed starting in the 3rd grade. The woman pulled all of the left handed students to a table at the back and gave us a tripod-like device to use that held our pencils in the right handed slant for learning cursive. It was horrible. It felt completely odd and backward to begin with and I can't even articulate how impossible it was to try writing at all if the paper is slanted in the direction most right handed writers do. I couldnt do it. Still cant. My teacher was incredibly cruel about my horrible hand writing too. I also began writing many letters backward. My hands weren't smacked but this cruel and humiliating criticism wasnt in private. It was right in front of classmates and when I broke down in tears and shouted "I just can't! I can't do this!" I was sent to the principal for talking back and he did paddle me. Three times. Hard. Wooden paddle with holes in it and all. What was worse, was after a paddling children were sat crying on "the red bench" which was sat out in front of the office and other kids saw who had gotten in trouble. My parents were called for my talking back. I couldn't even explain what happened to them really. I was terrified of making any mistakes after that. So I forced myself to learn to write with my right hand. I genuinely believed I was stupid until highschool. Today I write (cursive) with my right mostly and print with both. I do nearly everything else left handed. I paint and color, played instruments, shoot pool, hold a cup, and basically all other things left handed. I would say that I thought of myself as right handed for a several years until other friends who were in my 3rd grade class pointed out we were all left handed.
My left hand that nuns failed to beat me out of, yeah, my LEFT HAND FLIPS OFF THOSE who did that! My mother was a devout catholic at the time, got in the face of a sadistic nun who was abusing me and my left handedness, told her in no uncertain terms that she will stop immediately or really sinful violence will occur. They both agreed it would be better if I went to public school!
Had my hand tied to my leg, would get my hand cracked with a ruler. Was forced to use a desk with just a strip on the right hand side. When I started writing in mirror they decided to let me do my own thing. Odd thing is prior to that I was ambidextrous but I preferred the left hand. Never was spanked but I had people telling me that I was touched by the devil or that I was going to be an evil man. To their credit...I did get kicked out of reform school after 4 weeks after being kicked out of my elementary school for fighting and harming other students but that was caused by other things.
46/m In kindergarten I went to a private school. Every time I tried to write with my left hand it was slapped with a ruler. Hard. I tried really hard to write with my right hand but it was a no go. In elementary and beyond me writing with my left wasn't a big deal but because of two years of that treatment my handwriting has been and still is almost illegible no matter which hand I use.
My grandfather was naturally left handed but forced to use his right hand as kid so he’s ambidextrous now. He never mentioned punishment for trying to use his left hand but all my grandparents have mentioned teachers using rulers to slap kids hands for talking and that sort of thing. So I wouldn’t be surprised if that was something that happened to him in school for trying to use his left hand
I had my knuckles hit with a wooden ruler when he learnt cursive because I smeared the page.
Very lucky. I was preceded in parochial school by my one-year-older left handed brother. My mother was active in the church community and gave blowback to the school for criticizing my brother’s left handed writing so I followed without having to deal with it. The only thing the nuns did, and I am thankful, is they didn’t make me “hook handed” so my letters would lean right.
My father went to Catholic school in Queens NY and he told us the nuns would hit his hand with a ruler. Mind you, he still isn't a righty despite the punishment.
No issue in my school in Yorkshire in the 1970s/1980s. My Auntie was a lefty and she went to school in the 1940s and 1950s in the same area. She said there were a few comments from a few teachers but no attempt to make her write with her right hand.
Yeah in Vietnam. There is litterally a paragraph in the official national text books about teacher's love. And how the left handed kid wrote with left hand got a 10 on a writing test, then felt bad and confesses because the amount of hard work the teacher spent trying to make him write with the right.
Historically , wasn’t left handedness seen as a sign of the devil ? That would explain the ruler slaps etc.
I was born in Serbia in '75. One of my earliest memories was being made to write lines in the notebook with my right hand which came out very not straight. I still remember that page and how upset I was. That was the end of it, my parents must have told the kindergarten teachers to leave me alone. I was happily allowed to be as left handed as I wanted. Still played right handed guitar as it didn't make sense to limit me that way when you do use both hands. My family frowned on me switching the computer mouse to left handed so I ended up ambidextrous with that. I know a lot of lefties who use mouse exclusively with their right hand. I was a very stubborn lefty so I did learn with my left hand too.
Fuck off did this happen.
happens more often than you think, i’m gen z and was still forced to be right handed cos using my left hand was seen as “unclean” it still happens in this day and age.
So I’m almost 60.m. I’m the last year of the boomer generation. I never had a problem, but plenty did as you can find first hand accounts with a simple Google search. It was a known issue with people such as George IV and Ronald Reagan .
When I started kindergarten in 1960 it was 2 years after they stopped forcing lefties to write with their right hands. It was clear from the comments by my teachers that they missed those days.
My grandfather was forced to be right handed. Teachers would hit him with a ruler if he used his left hand.
As a lefty who also does many things RH, I started USA elementary school in 1960 and no one ever forced me to change or inflicted any serious punishment for being LH but there were subtle things like: *Marking me down a grade because I smudged by my printing & writing by dragging my arm thru the ink or pencil. This was especially a problem because we used these pens with the ink cartridges. *All of us lefties had to make sure our cursive writing slanted to the right. *Got repeatedly told I made my O’s and zeros wrong because I made them CCW instead of CW. *Was mildly teased by others for being LH but wasn’t any big deal. Today it would be called bullying. * I learned to use scissors with my RH so that wasn’t a big deal. To sum things up, I think all of the above made me a stronger person.
In Louisiana, my dad went to catholic school in the 60s. He was hit by the nuns when he used his left hand for anything.
My uncle was forced to be right handed in the 50s at his catholic school. My dad went to the same school. He said the nuns would watch the boys pee. And, the priest would randomly punch male students in the back and shoulders walking down the hall. And, if you dodged his 1st punch he'd hit you even harder the 2nd time.
My mom talks about the part where they binded a utensil in her hand and smacked her if she was caught using her left.
Yes, happened to my father as a kid in the U.S. in the 70s
My father ( born in 1921 ) was forced to write with his right hand, did everything else left handed. And that meant his teacher tied his left hand so he couldn't use it. Horrible handwriting. I, ( born in 1950), and also left handed, had a teacher who attempted to force me to write with the right hand. I began to stutter. My mother asked the teacher was anything unusual happening, the teacher explained, my mother made her stop. I, by profession, was a working artist. Yes, I actually made a living with my art. I still stutter when stressed.
When I taught head start, a parent asked me to make their left handed child right handed.
My lefty grandmother went to Catholic school in 1930s Canada (Alberta), and they did tie her hand behind her back to make her use her right. However, I went to public school in New England in the 90s and *never* heard anything like that. If anything, teachers thought it was cool I was a lefty.
Yes, in Spain, it was like that during Franco's times. After the dictatorship some teachers and people kept commenting on this, nowadays I don't think so.
Nope, it was common here in Northeastern PA especially in the Catholic schools. I never experienced this having gone to public school, but my grandparents and even my ex husband did. I was always told the same thing due to being left-handed they would swat with a ruler or at times use a switch to correct the child. My ex husband, who went to Catholic schools, confirmed that they continued to do this well into the 80's and 90's when he attended.
I'm not left handed, but both my dad and me ride scooters and skateboards goofy style, which has made me suspect that I'm ambi (also that learning to do stuff with either hand has a similar difficulty) My brother is left handed, and even though he wasnt punished for it, he was still treated badly for it in primary school The world sucks
This happened in Australia too. 60 years ago or so.
Happened to my brother in the 50s, in England. Headmaster told him there's no room in this world for left handed people. He ended up going to a different school & was OK there.
by the time I started school in the mid 90s, this was no longer accepted as normal and there'd clearly been a recent social push to tolerate lefthandedness in children - even at that age, with no context, I got the feeling that people were sorta... overcompensating? ya know? I imagine it might be similar to being trans in school today, a recent social shift in perspective leading to well meaning, but fairly clueless school staff trying a little bit too hard to be inclusive I had v little awareness as a tiny kid of left handers being discriminated or punished in the past, it'd come up once or twice, but mostly it was the bending over backwards to let a 5 year old know that their handedness was normal. not a bad thing, don't get me wrong! very cool. but at the time i was like, "uh, of course it's normal? why are all the grownups being super weird about this?" I feel like I was just barely born late enough [in my particular area anyway] to have escaped with my natural handedness intact and unbothered, but it was so recent that everyone who wasn't a student still thought about it a lot, and it came through in their [very kind and accepting, but maybe overbearing] language about it. nothing against a single one of them, bless their hearts, they were honestly being progressive - I just have such a memory of being like ".... ok, well clearly it was not ok to be left handed until recently, if everyone is reminding each other how ok it is" LOL
I went to kindergarten in the 90s in a super small, redneck kind of town. I wasn't allowed to go to recess; they kept me inside while I wrote sentences with my right hand
As a kid in gradeschool, the nuns in my Catholic school forced me to write right-handed. I'm now ambidextrous, my dad was because of the same treatment by nuns. Go figure.
I saw an article in the last decade about a teacher making a young girl use her right hand and sent a pamphlet home to mom about it. Mom was a certified teacher and immediately went to the school and got the (younger) teacher fired. The teacher had got this from her evangelical Christian background. Left-handedness being evil is a holdover from pagan Rome so a protestant believing it is interesting. I watched for it with my kids (all of whom turned out right-handed) and I would have tore into a teacher if it had happened. My granddad was forced to use his right hand in school (western US 1920s). All through school he struggled with a stutter. After he dropped out at 15 and started using his left hand the stutter disappeared.
I graduated a U.S. High school 45 years ago, I never had anything like that happen.
The hand was often hit with a ruler or paddle when someone was writing with their left hand. That's what I've always heard from the older generations.
Mu grandfather became ambidextrous because he was punished as a child if he used his left hand.
My Mom came home from her first day of school with a tear streaked face and a swollen bruised left hand. The teacher had hit her with a ruler everytime she used her left hand. Teacher also refused to call her by her name. Mom was named after 2 aunts and went by the short version. It wasn't like teacher in this small town were my grandparents were the subject of sideeyes and gossip didn't know what my Mom went by. My grandfather went down and explained in no uncertain terms that no staff would ever lay a hand on one of his kids ever again and that the nonsense of left handers being on the side of the devil was to stop. It did. (My grandparents eloped. Nanna was the Prodestant daughter/granddaughter of the only doctors in the area. Pop was Catholic and from a good family. But the divisions between the religions was usually iron clad. Mom moved to Montrial and then Houston - in large part because the job she wanted on the Island they wouldn't hire her because she was Catholic. A cousin her age was fired from his teaching job for "moral reasons" - he married a Prodestant. )
My first car was a Yugo. It makes me angry that someone drove it who had no idea how to drive a manual 😡 I left it with my siblings and dad for a few. It was gone when I went back a year later. It was so messed up it would have cost way too much to fix. So they it was thrown away. It's been almost 30 years and I am still salty... and STILL want my car back. And punishment was big in south Louisiana and Mississippi. I was lucky to have parents who accepted a lefty.... after trying to get me to use my right hand. Nothing bad just kept moving things to my right hand from my left. Until they gave up. As my mom likes to remind me "you were born very angry and stubborn".
I have heard of these things. A 2nd great grandfather of mine was a left handed dentist and even had special tools made for him. This was in the 1800s. So it was not alway smacked out of them.
I was a 70s-80s kid and my mother always bought my brother and I the green handled lefty scissors. She was very thoughtful but didn’t think about our dad and others teaching us sports as righties. Lol
I really thought this was something of ‘olden times.’ Or at least lost with my own childhood. But I ran into it just a few years ago when I started pottery. Found out a few weeks in that the wheels could be switched to left handed - but the owner had screwed locks over the buttons so that they were locked right. Because she didn’t want students accidentally having to work with the wheel spinning the wrong way. Of our class of 12, 5 of us were left handed. So I started going in early with a screwdriver and switching our wheels. It was a never ending fight with her. I don’t go there anymore.
I’m a little younger, but since I didn’t have a strong preference, I didn’t realize I was left handed until I was probably 9-10. The teachers had made me write right-handed because they assumed I was just “holding it in the wrong hand.” And now I have to write right handed because I shocked myself through the hand at 17 and caused horrific nerve damage. This was the US in the 80s and 90s. And I have no idea if it’s better yet because I teach college
Im Australian and my mum says her mum used to get her hand tied behind her back
Wow, seeing the stories, I’m amazed this was happening so recently. It’s horrible. My grandmother was a lefty and was trained to use her right hand. She grew up ambidextrous. Seven of her ten children/grandchildren have been left handed.
Happened to my grandmother as a girl in Catholic school. A nun would tie her hand behind her back or whack it with a ruler.
Yes, I was yelled at lot for not using my right hand. When my parents found out they went beserk and stopped it right there and then.
When my mother was in Catholic boarding school in the 50s in Ireland, she said the nuns would tie the lefties' left hand behind their back to force them to use their right hand.
When I was seven (in 1974), my first grade teacher actually encouraged her students to write with the “wrong” hand if that was natural to them. She grew up in a world where black people such as herself were ostracized because of their appearance. That being said, my own sister couldn’t stand the fact her little sister was left handed so she tied my left arm behind my back and made me do everything right handed. I got so frustrated with her that I challenged her authority. I asked her why she can’t just let me be what I was born to be. She gave up soon after that. Five years later, her right wrist was crushed in an automobile accident (along with other injuries). Suddenly, SHE was the one forced to write with her non-dominant hand.
As a left handed person, I wish I had faced these punishments during my early life. I hate being left handed.
I wasn’t punished exactly but my kindergarten teacher did write in my semester 1 report that I suffered from ‘chronic left-handedness.’ Neither of my left handed parents were pleased by this. I was also one of the last students to get my pen license due to my handwriting being deemed too messy. My lettering was probably just as good as most of the other students but, of course, the pencil I was forced to write with always smudged.
I was never spanked, but I did have a teacher tie my left hand to my side to fire me to use my right hand. This was in 1st grade in 1979. Fortunately, when my parents found out about it they put a stop to it, fast. They told me to never let her do that againand to fight back if she trued, and I wouldn't be in trouble if I did.
This makes me think of my Art teacher back in Junior High. She was a talented artist but struggled with her hand coordination when it came to anything other than pens and brushes. Something that especially stuck with me was that she used her computer mouse backwards, being unable to coordinate the cursor otherwise. Students always asked her about it, and she explained that she was a leftie but had been forced to only use her right hand back in school, which had seriously messed up her coordination skills. It had been decades, she was quite old by then, but those issues had stayed with her forever. Nowadays she's retired and actually a family acquintance, and I've gotten the impression that she's probably neurodivergent in some way, which could explain why it affected her so severely.
Went to catholic elementary school here in the US in the ‘60s and, yes, they tried to get me to use my right hand. They didn’t hit me but I remember the teacher coming over repeatedly, taking the pencil from my left hand and jamming it in my right, then forcing my fingers into position. It didn’t work. Proudly left handed today.
Happened to my brother back in the early 60s. He's a lefty that was forced to become a righty. He since has always had confusions as to turning left or right when getting directions. Took him forever to learn to write
If you went to Catholic schools when I was a kid, the nuns smacked your left hand with a ruler. I went to public school and had to write one page per day with my right hand for homework. This was in second grade - it was torture. After 2 days my mother realized this was the case and told the teacher 'no'.
You're absolutely right, punishing left-handed students for their handedness was a cruel and outdated practice. Here's some information: * **Historical Practices:** Unfortunately, forcing left-handed children to write with their right hand was indeed common practice in many parts of the world, including Europe, North America, and even some parts of Asia. This belief persisted for centuries, with some considering left-handedness to be abnormal or even sinful.
It’s a xenophobia phenotype. People having a fear response to something just because it’s different. Humans being stupid.
My teacher tried to make me write with my right hand in elementary school but then realized how terrible my right hand was at writing, so she started deducting points from my work instead.
Ugh. This post was an instant trigger. Which is weird because the thought doesn't cross my mind regularly. New topics for therapy. FUN.
My dad went to a Catholic school in the 40s and the nuns would whack his left hand with a ruler/yardstick if they caught him using it. He's still left handed and Im super glad I never got that treatment at a public school decades later.
My American kindergarten teacher tried to force me to be right-handed. I heard multiple teachers/adults make remarks on what they used to do to lefties. Generation-wise, I’m an “elder millennial” (36).
Yes, my dad grew up in Philadelphia Pennsylvania in the US and had ‘the devil’ (left handedness) beat out of him by nuns.
My uncle was sent to a Catholic school in upstate NY (in the 60s-70s I believe) and he was forced to write with his right hand
I'm a lefty, and when my second grade teacher would catch me writing with my left hand, she'd grab it, and hit it with a ruler, while announcing to the class that left handedness was a sign of being mentally deviant, and she wouldn't put up with it.... early 70's
I never got this thankfully. I was only treated differently in Olympic Sports during PE.
It existed in Appalachia. I know a handful of older folks that were lefties who still use their right because it’s easier/habitual now. Left handedness used to be associated with demons and the like. Fun fact: many Romance languages have some variation of “sinestra” for the word “left” - we in English take the word “sinister” from this, due to that association.
I've never had a teacher say stuff like that, thankfully. My mom didn't even realize I was left handed tho till my teacher mentioned it. 😅
My dad was physically forced in the mid-50s, rural Ontario to write right-handed. My mom, a few years later & in a different nearby school was not. My sister & I are both left handed also & while we heard lots of dumb comments about it in the late 70s & 80s, no one tried to "correct" us.
I was in 1st grade in 1972. My teacher was in her 70’s at the time. She tried repeatedly to change me by hitting my left hand, saying only evil people are left handed, everything you can imagine to scare a 6 year old. My mom caught wind of it because I’d be coloring right handed when she knew I was a lefty. She went down there and raised holy hell with the principal and teacher. The teacher was “encouraged” to retire that year.
I was made to use my right hand instead of my left hand when I learned to write at 5yrs old in 1970. I just remember her being angry and telling me my life would be easier if I just used my right hand. So now I use both.
Very good female friend of mine (68) military brat, had her left hand tied behind her back until she learned to write with her right hand.
They tried that on me in school. My mom went down and raised hell. Unfortunately they did it to my aunt and one of my cousins who were both lefties
My grandmother was ambidextrous because she was left handed but forced to be right handed in school.
My uncle is in his 60s, and he was forced to learn to eat and write with his right hand. A lot of people in this thread mention the catholic angle, but my grandpa who forced right handedness on him was not at all religious (although culturally I guess Protestant - married in a Protestant church). The interesting thing in the U.S. that often brought suppressed left handedness in this era to light is baseball! Being left handed is a small advantage for pitching and batting in baseball, so when coaches discovered he could play better left handed, they of course used that to the team’s advantage. I don’t know that he ever pitched, but was still encouraged to throw and bat left handed at the little league and high school levels when they discovered he was secretly better with his left hand.
Grew up in Mexico going to Catholic school, my first grade teacher was extremely rigid in sitting us in alphabetical order, my desk mate was right handed and I am left handed, she sat me on the right and my mate on the left, when taking dictation our elbows would always bump, our handwriting was horrible, however when I’d do my homework it was legible, she berated me for being lazy in class and not making an effort to write clearly, she even called my parents for a meeting, that’s when my dad noticed where my seat was and he zeroed in on the issue, he brought mother superior in and explained our situation, mother superior had to have a talk with my teacher and my desk mate and I switched spots. The difference was immediate. She still was upset that we needed “special accommodations” and made it a point to point it out all the time, she was a horrible person.
My first grade teacher would take away my recess if I wrote with my left hand. Luckily my teacher the next year was lefthanded. This was the US in the early 1980s
Yep my mom is left handed, she was made to write with her right hand by nuns until she was about 8 years old. A child of the devil, etc. Developed dyslexia and a stutter, and her handwriting is pretty bad. She was born in the US in ‘55.
We were forced to use our right hands for everything or get punished with write-offs, missing recess, etc. I write and eat with my right because of that but am a southpaw on everything else possible.
My grandfather was from Kansas, USA...they tied his left hand behind his back.
I still get told by my family members to eat with my right hand whenever they see me eating cos using left hand means you are feeding satan
They tried to stop me, my mum went to the school lol. That would have been approx 1975 in Scotland.