The Golden Rule 1
Image by Maria Lysenko
Way back in the 1950s (The 1950s?! OMG!) One of the popular songs began with the lyric, “Up in the morning and out to school, the teacher is teaching the golden rule.” The song was written, sung, and played by Chuck Barry in 1957, and was called School Days, and it was right on. Teachers were adults just like our parents who told us stuff we didn’t want to hear or couldn’t – our hormones were moaning too loudly for any of us to listen to anything else but those songs that were truer for us than what any teacher said and for sure our parents. Never would we be like them. That was the one Golden Rule we all understood.
Before the 50s, of course, were the 40s. And THAT was when I went to school! I didn’t go to elementary school – I went to grammar school. Grammar was important then, though most of us had no idea what it was. Some idiot savant had come up with the brilliant idea of diagramming sentences to show us where words went and why they went there. Brainy kids were really good at diagramming though they never seemed to speak or write any better than those of us who couldn’t diagram our way around the block much less a sentence.
We learned cursive handwriting, too, back then. Cursive is truly beautiful, especially for right-handed people but is not taught now, which probably accounts for all the abominable non-handwriting called printing (hand printing?) that’s out there today. None of it is worse than mine. Those of you who were students (stoods – “baboons!”) of mine know that, but you don’t know why. Mine is more than terrible because I’m left handed. Back in those days everyone was supposed to be right handed, and if you weren’t, too bad for you. They made you become right handed.
There were a few fiercely independent parents like mine who believed you were just fine the way you had been born, and if you were left handed, you were NOT to be changed. So, if you were left handed, your teachers did what they could to help you (at least the good ones did), but the pens they taught you with were these great big, sharp-pointed things with wood handles designed to imitate quill pens of the 18th century that had to be dipped into an ink well that was inserted into the side of your desk (the right side!), and so you had to reach all the way across to the right side and then move your hand back to the left side of your desk, dripping ink all over it and your paper before you even wrote anything.
When you tried to write cursive like everybody else, you found out how wrong you were because cursive is designed for right-handed people who write AWAY from their fingers toward the back of their hands because that’s the way handwriting is designed, but when you’re left handed and trying to use these pens too big for your hand, you write INTO your fingers, and since your pen is going the WRONG WAY (like driving the wrong way on a one-way street), your pen scratches the paper, making blots all over, and your hand gets all smudgy, and nobody can read what you were scratching including you, and that is why you feel all wrong (because everybody else was right.)
Of course, being children and far more innovative than most adults of that time gave us credit for, we kids, like Calvin and his Hobbes, found a whole new purpose for inkwells, and that was to dip the pigtails of the girl (ugh!) who sat in front of you into your ink well. Girls were ugh! then, and they dipped other girls’ pigtails into inkwells, too, but the difference between the boys and girls then at that age (and that was the only difference we knew) was that the boys dipped the pigtails of girls they both liked (oh, no!) and didn’t like, but the girls only dipped those of girls they didn’t like. It was an amazing introduction to gender difference, the girls being far ahead of us in that department, waiting for us to find out they weren’t ugh!