I don’t mean Ambidextrous!
Yesterday I tried cutting a vegetable with the knife in my non-dominant hand and it was a weird and uncomfortable thing. I wonder if there are people who have that distinct discomfort of using your “bad” hand, but on both hands?
I don’t think it would fall under ambidexterity, because that kinda implies someone is comfortable with either hand, but could someone be uncomfortable with both?
This practice was not exclusively Soviet. It happened in the rest of Europe too, even long before the Soviet Union, pupils were tought to use their fine hand, i.e. their right, for writing, while their left was bound to their chair.
However, as being left handed isn’t exclusively a matter training, this practice causes drawbacks in other fields.
Happened in the US too. I had teachers who were forced to use their right hand… With “mixed” results. And by mixed, I mean they switched to their dominant hand the moment it was acceptable, if not sooner
It’s so weird to me that there was once a “correct” hand for writing, people writing with their non-dominant hand would just be so messy. For some reason I have one really vivid memory of learning to write in school, it must have been the very first writing lesson we had. Everyone had a pencil on the desk in front of them then the teacher asked everyone to pick it up, then it was something along the lines of “the hand you just used to pick up the pencil is your writing hand, whenever you write you should use that hand”.
I remember being so anxious about that, what if I’d picked up the pencil with the wrong hand and I’m actually left-handed and forcing myself to write with the wrong hand? It definitely didn’t help that for the entirety of my school life after that my handwriting was awful, barely legible to me and completely incomprehensible to anyone else. In one maths lesson I was even shamed by the teacher in front of the entire class because my 4s and 9s looked too similar so she struggled to mark my work, that was very fun and definitely helped improve my handwriting (/s).
I really am right-handed, I’m just bad with a pencil. After school I went into software so I barely ever write on paper anyway.
I’m sure there was a point I was going to make with this story before I started writing it.
I like to say I’m ambidextrous, because I write equally badly with each hand. I can write like 3x faster with my dominant hand though, it just all looks terrible… My typing is good though, weirdly, so is my calligraphy
I remember my friend helping me find my dominant foot though, it was similar… He threw down a board and told me to jump on. I’m actually a switch with my feet though, the “right” way changes moment to moment but I can switch without relearning from scratch
One of my teachers was re-educated that way, from left handed to right handed and he hated it. But he could write mirrored with his left hand perfectly, which was an amazing feat. Sometimes he would write on the chalk board with both hands, the same word but mirrored, that was pretty cool.