One of the Three R's

[pshaw_raven]

The cats woke me up earlier than normal this morning, I assume because the sounds of high winds are bothering them. There's a line of fairly gnarly storms on the way, though by mid-afternoon we ought to be out of the worst of it. I may skip running today and just lift. Since the weather's getting warmer I'll need to begin adjusting my schedule to get up earlier so I can run before it gets too hot, and perhaps have a nap in the afternoons. I've never exactly learned to nap properly and tend to sleep for a couple of hours, rather than thirty minutes to one hour, then I can't sleep that night.

Handwriting Reconsidered - Can a step backward carry us forward? I normally don't weigh in on this stuff. I don't have kids and generally don't care about education - I hated school. But I'm interested in handwriting.

We didn't officially learn cursive until sixth grade, when we were taught the Zane-Bloser Method. I got very poor marks, and the teacher constantly criticized my work, causing my mother to start hounding me about my "sloppy" and "terrible" handwriting. Here's the thing, though.

Four years earlier, with my mom's blessing and encouragement, I started learning cursive from our next door neighbor, Mrs. Lemons, a retired school teacher. Each week I'd head to her house with a pad of lined paper, pencils, and my practice sheets, and she taught me to write cursive by the Palmer Method. Mom cautioned me not to use it on school work since I wasn't supposed to know this yet, but I used it at home to write in my diary, write stories, letters, etc. By the time sixth grade came around, it was difficult for me to change my writing style enough to conform to what that teacher wanted, and the result was my "awful" handwriting.

A few years ago, because I'm nothing if not perverse, I bought myself a set of Palmer copybooks and worked to restore my handwriting to its original Palmer style. I still occasionally have people mention what elegant writing I have. So :P~~~~~~~~~ Mrs Dixon, you old harpy.

It may also have something to do with the fact that I'm hyperlexic, aka "precocious reading." I didn't get the number part and numbers still sometimes baffle me, and I have almost no mathematical ability. When I have to get six-digit login codes I prefer to copy and paste them, and if I have to manually type the code in, it's best I read it aloud to make sure I'm getting the numbers right. I have no idea why my brain does this shit to me.

You'd think that would make language learning easier, and to some extent it does. I recognize lots of kanji, but can't string a sentence together in Japanese to save my life. God help me if I have to ask where the train station is, but I can read the ingredients on a package of food.

Anyway, I'm not putting my bird feeders out or anything until this rain passes through. I shouldn't need to water the garden either, but we recently bought a soil moisture meter than connects to our Ambient Weather station, and I'm curious to compare the rainfall amount to the reported soil moisture. The garden's going well right now, and I even finally have pumpkins sprouting up, so we're going to pick up some stuff at Tractor Supply this weekend and try building a trellis for them.

Comments

[theradicalchild]

I didn't like grade school, either (largely due to the harassment I was subjected to, and apathetic parents didn't help at all), but I pretty much handwrote whatever notes I ever took, even during college (though I was born in 1984), even though I couldn't always read what I wrote. I was fortunate to learn cursive in school. And I had studied Japanese on-and-off for over a decade freelance, but am still barely fluent in the language (though I can read hiragana, katakana, and some kanji).

[pshaw_raven]

School was torture - and it never stopped until I was able to go to college and get away from everyone I'd grown up around. What a relief! But yeah, I hand wrote everything as well. I was in college in the early 90s, and when I wrote my senior thesis, I had to do it on a computer. So this was early WordPerfect, I think, I don't remember now the exact program they had us using. Up to that point everything was written longhand, no matter how many pages.

I've found I can recognize some words when they're spoken in Japanese, but I have a hard time getting my brain and mouth to cooperate enough to talk. My auditory processing is also slow, so sometimes people speak to me in regular English and I have to ask them to repeat themselves a few times. I can hear just fine, but it's like the words are just garbled.

[expandranon]

You mean there's some off chance I could learn proper handwriting!?

[pshaw_raven]

You might have an easier time of it as an adult since you wouldn't have some judgy teacher bugging you about it. I think there's even a sub-reddit for adults improving their writing, and it's not like people go from total chicken scratch to perfect copperplate, but just having that internal motivation to do it can be helpful. :)

[cdayzee]

I can't nap at all. The closest I get is nodding off while I'm watching something on tv.

I struggle with remembering login codes also & I have to keep reciting them. This comes into play also when transcribing my cycle & run data from one app into the health app since it doesn't sync. I also have several scratch pieces of paper on my desk to jot down things, including when I've left the tv on a certain channel & someone else interrupts my routine, I write down what channel I was on lol.

[pshaw_raven]

Notepads still save my bacon on a regular basis. I used to get reporter's notebooks at Staples and write in those, but I think I'm down to one pad of sticky notes right now.

That's making me a bit nostalgic for this catalog we used to get when I was little. It had TONS of stationary, pens, letter sets, stickers. I'll see if my Google skills can find out anything about it.