Trouble in School: part 3

As I said before during my many years in the classroom, I got in trouble more than once. Elem – jr hi – hs – ba – ms, etc, and teaching. Well, I finally started fourth grade when I was nine in Van Hook, North Dakota. So, I must have not been in school when we were in Kansas. But I was not only older than my most of my classroom peers, but I had missed much more school time getting to that level.

My school trouble in Van Hook was long lasting but not debilitating.

I was born left-handed and am still left eye dominant. In my generation, in rural North Dakota, being left-handed was not socially acceptable. (There’s more to that, but it’s not the point of this post.)

My memory does not include how I got along in my first three partial years of school, but when I entered fourth grade, I couldn’t write cursive like most who had completed the Palmer Penmanship training in third grade. I’m making a big assumption here – I must have been printing left-handed at the time.

My teacher, Miss. Y, smacked my hand with a ruler every time she saw me using my left hand. ¹I actually do remember her family name, but to protect the guilty or innocent as the case may be … And she didn’t use the flat of the ruler – she used the edge and at least once the edge with the brass insert!

I didn’t tell my mother, not that she could have done anything about it. Even female teachers were somewhere on the top three or four rungs of social authority over kids and had absolute authority at school.

I became right-handed, but my handwriting became nearly illegible which impacted me for several years leading to, “Can’t read this, Benson, do it over,” by more than one junior high teacher and at least one high school teacher.