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So my recovery from the accident back in January has been slow but steady, although I am still not released to drive or go back to work. Other than the sitting around bored, I haven't let this bother me too much. But today I found something that did bother me.
One thing the docs noticed when this happened was I was weak on my right side, I didn't lose any function but I lose all the fine control in my right hand for things such as writing. This did bother me a bit as I lost what anyone would say was great penmanship. It was so good that my teachers in school didn't believe any boy could write that well and used to send notes home to my mother stating that I had some girl writing the papers I would turn in. But I told myself not to worry, my penmanship was something that was trained, I could retrain it back to what it was.
Today my daughter decided she and I were going to practice music together. She went into the back room and brought out my Westwood "bottle-cap" banjo for me to play, then went back in and brought out the Fender banjo I bought for her to learn with. She prefers the Fender as it is a less expensive one and thus a lot lighter than a more expensive banjo. She hates how heavy my Westwood and my Bacon banjos are.
So we get tuned up and begin working on teaching her the notes to the old bluegrass song Fox on the Run, Everything was going fine until she asked me to play it through at full speed.
Any of you who play an instrument know that there is a lot of muscle memory involved. Playing Scruggs style 3 finger picking on a 5 string banjo (which is how I play) the right hand finger picking is almost all muscle memory. Guess what I found out my right hand also lost since the accident!
I guess that's one more thing I am going to have to set aside some time each day to relearn :(
Comments
I have been lucky. In my
I have been lucky. In my nearly 50 years I had never had a serious accident. The worse thing that happened to me was a broken foot 2 months ago. It surprised me how much it changed my life. My wife doesn't drive, so we were practically housebound. I wasn't allowed to drive for 6 weeks. I drove home on the broken foot ok though.
Don't know what happened to you, but it sounds like you have to give youself a little time. Hopefully you will be back to normal in a few months. Our bodies are remarkable things
"some girl writing the papers " What a sexist teacher!
Leeanna
Handwriting sexism
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0741088318788843
According to the study, girls have consistently better handwriting than boys do. Moreover, in another study over 90% of subjects could correctly guess the gender of the writer of a given sample of handwriting.
Not only is handwriting sexist, it's also a near perfect indicator of people who had higher than normal estrogen or testosterone levels prenatally. (that is, males who had higher estrogen exposure from their mother before birth invariably are the ones with better handwriting, whereas females with higher than normal testosterone exposure before birth had handwriting that was most often mistaken for male handwriting)
While the 'science' of graphology, the idea that a person's personality can be determined from a handwriting sample, was discredited long ago, the fact that handwriting quality is gendered is not only still around, but effectively proven science.
There's much disagreement about the causes... some claiming that it's entirely cultural... but that's difficult to support when the fact can be demonstrated across not only cultures, but across centuries of time. (people now can relatively accurately determine the gender of a writing sample from the 7th century... in spite of the lack of knowledge of the actual language used) The most plausible theory is that the nerve fibers that control fine motor skills in boys’ brains typically don't develop as quickly as in girls' brains. This delay in fine motor control leads to boys not writing as much, which becomes a lack of skill at fine writing... reinforcing the delay and ensuring that males will forever have worse handwriting than females will. (after all, why bother writing a lot if people will just yell at you for your poor penmanship?)
I had bad handwriting as a child, but that had more to do with having Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis than anything else. As I got older and learned to ignore the pain though, my handwriting became more elegant and feminine... looking more and more like the handwriting of the girls in my classes than the boys.
Sometimes it not sexism... it's just that boys and girls actually are different. After all, shouldn't we who got stuck on the wrong side of that difference be able to admit that there is a difference? (for if there is no difference, why do we hate being the wrong one so much?)
Nuuan: I feel your pain. My arthritis is now so bad I can't play the viola... which I excelled at for many years.
Hugs,
Roberta
Hi Roberta, last year I was
Hi Roberta, last year I was reading about why girls are doing better than boys in school now. They get better results and more go on to get degrees.
One woman who was in teaching said it starts very early. Girls tend to be "coddled" more than boys. So when they do something well at school they are praised more than a boy would be. This makes school a more positive experience for them.
(after all, why bother writing a lot if people will just yell at you for your poor penmanship?)
Boys get praise and kudos from their peers by playing up and joking, so they tend to be more boisterous. Girls seem to be able to sit quietly and learn.
There was a TV program in the UK I can't remember what it was called. They took no hope "naughty" boys and educated them in a more old fashioned disciplined way. Nearly all of them showed an improvement. I don't think modern methods suit boys. They find it boring.
Yet there is money spent on encouraging girls in this or that subject, but nothing on why boys are doing worse than girls now.
If we keep going the way we are we will end up in one of "female rule" stories. Where all the men are is dumb uneducated grunts , where women think men are incapable of anything but basic education. You know they way men treated women 100 years ago.
Leeanna
Boys playing up
It's cultural.
I grew up with a neighborhood gang of boys in New York city in the US in the sixties and despite being of Irish and Italian descent they were fairly decent kids with actually reasonable manners despite the occasional fight.
They did not play up as much as you might think. My mother certainly did not raise me that way and my teachers did not either and expected all the kids in grade school at least to not be hooligans and expected them to be able to learn.
Whether they learned or not was sometimes debatable being inner city schools but you can tell who at home has instilled the love of learning and who has not.
All who like to learn share the same attitude.
Good handwriting was encouraged back then and one was graded for it unlike today where cursive is not even taught in some places.
It was further enforced in the high school (upper forms?) where I took mechanical drafting where one had to letter correctly and to this day I still have some of the best lettering skill when I am not in a hurry.
It is suspected of course that transwomen are exposed to various levels of some kind of estrogen that results in our condition. It is interesting in my case that my hips are a bit wider in shape than the typical male due to it expanding pre-puberty during that estrogen surge.
There are differences between the gender that can't be merely ascribed to socialization which you seem to advocate for a lot but the influence of biology cannot be totally ignored. One is not necessarily better than another but denying there are things one gender does better than another, IN GENERAL, would be not relying on objective reason.
I know there are differences,
I know there are differences, but pre-puberty, children are treated differently. it's down to diffent expectation we have of boys and girls.
Here is an interesting article.
One study didn’t find any gender discrepancy in newborns’ eye contact, but when the experiment was repeated four months later with the same infants, girls had quadrupled their eye contact while boys had only slightly increased theirs. Ultrasounds during pregnancy show no gender differences in activity level before birth, and none of the motor milestones are different between boys and girls in the first two years. But from age 3 and up, the average boy is more active than about two thirds of girls. Research on toy preference and mental rotation skills tracks the same course, with a gender gap appearing only after several months of life.
Another body of research—in which adults are misled about diapered genitalia—proves that people treat children differently based on gender, starting at birth. One study involves parental estimation of babies’ crawling prowess. Mothers who were asked to set up the slope of a ramp on which their baby could crawl were nearly accurate in predicting boys’ ability but significantly underestimated girls’.
One study discovered that mothers speak to and interact more with infant and toddler girls, even though the boys are no less responsive. Other research has found that dads speak more openly with daughters about sad feelings while using more achievement-oriented words (such as proud, win, and top) with sons.
Dads also sing to girls more, and both moms and dads spend less time with their boys reading and storytelling, which are known to build empathy.
social norms—bolstered by distorted science—act as self-fulfilling prophecies, forcing our kids into pink and blue boxes.
https://www.parents.com/toddlers-preschoolers/development/be...
While I think there are differences.Which probably increease after the homones get to work in puberty .Scans of adult brains show this. Some of the differences may be learned by the different ways we treat boys and girls. This may influence brain development.
Leeanna
Slipped and fell on ice
Fractured my skull and had a couple places in my brain that was bleeding. I'm told brain injuries take time. It's been two month now and I have at the minimum another six weeks of staying home.
As for the teachers believing things I turned in were written by a girl. I found it funny as my mom would always go in and correct the teachers since she was the one who taught me to write the way I did. My mom had the most beautiful handwriting I have ever seen and mine was close but not quite as good.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
not able to drive
Not being able to drive does bug me when I look outside and see my car, 4x4 pickup truck and 4x4 Bronco (older full sized one, not the little put-put they just began making) sitting outside gathering dust. The wife hates driving my car, but drives it at least once a week to keep the battery charged.
I think not being able to drive has been bugging my younger daughter more than anyone else as her mom can't climb up in either of the 4x4s to drive them and my daughter loves riding around in the Bronco. I have a feeling when she gets her license in a couple years she is going to be doing her best to talk me into giving it to her.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Commiserations
I had a mild stroke back in 2020 that left me with fine motor problems. Most of the time this has no effect, and when it does it is an inconvenience (I count myself lucky). My handwriting went from dire to atrocious, and is still bad because I don't practice enough.
Keep practicing and re-build the skills.
The fact that you can play a
The fact that you can play a banjo is excellent. My handwriting has always been awful. Strangely enough my female teachers in junior school thought that meant I was an idiot.
3 female teachers. who thought that . The male teacher in my last year gave us exams. Strangely I went from a C grade to an A grade on my Annual school report. To men this proves boys are disadvantaged by having mostly female teachers in primary and junior schools.
All we ever did was copy what was on the board. How in the hell could you mark that? Boys tend to learn slightly differently from girls. When the male teacher taught history or geography he used props. Much better teacher, even if he did use corporal punishment. It was a while ago now.
Leeanna
musical instruments
My Uncle ran around with some pretty big names in bluegrass music. Sunday afternoons after church it was nothing to see his front porch filled with people playing music, so most of us kids were taught by some big names in bluegrass music how to play multiple instruments.
I ended up learning how to play the Guitar, Fiddle and 5 string banjo from just hanging out there with them on Sundays. Found out the Mandolin and the Irish 4 string banjo are set up and tuned exactly the same as the Violin, so bought those later on and self taught myself how to play those. Heard that the Mountain Dulcimer is one of the easiest stringed instruments to play so bought one of those and found out they really were.
We the willing, led by the unsure. Have been doing so much with so little for so long,
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Speaking from someone who has lived the dream,
Keep an eye on your blood pressure. It can always get worse, assuming you survive lose one side of your body.
some girl writing the papers
oops!
When i was small, the UK school system set great score with regard to 'penmanship' (more Ameri speak for something quite simple), writing we call it! From age 6 we'd spend hours each week practicing our letters, moving on to words, by eight/nine we were expected to write in straight lines and be legible. Some kids struggled, others excelled, most got by, i can't recall there being any particular gender variance in ability. Some of the girls added flourishes to their writing but most didn't, certainly not the more academic ones!
I had good skill, oh it could get sloppy if i was rushing to take notes but it was, still can be, neat and legible, on occasion it passed for my mothers hand (you don't want to know how i know, honest you don't!) My issue was miniaturism, whilst being neat and tidy i tend to write very small, i used to dread being told to 'write two sides', some of my contemporaries would get about six words to a line, me twenty - i got into conflict with my teachers over not doing enough regularly despite having the same or bigger word counts. Strangley the size or legibility was never brought into question.
Over the last 30 years, the number of male teachers, particularly in Infant & Junior schools has reduced dramatically, the profession has become very toxic for men which has had knock on effects. In particular, many women struggle to keep discipline over boys who, even in Junior school, can be as tall or taller than their female teachers. It is no surprise that as a result girls get more praise and attention, female teachers just relate to them better. It might not be very PC to say so but single sex schooling from 13 to 16 would help rebalance the failing standards of male education.
Brain injuries can result in many side effects, recovery can take a very long time, you may never get everything back as it was but be grateful for what you do have.
Mads
Madeline Anafrid Bell
My son works with younge
My son works with younge children at an educational center. he has lost count of the times he has been asked to consider going into primary teaching. The problem is guys teaching very young children are viewed with suspicion.
With the large amount of single parent families. Many boys and girls, don't have positive male role models. Such a shame. Even when I was at school 45 years ago I had one male teacher in the infant and junior school. He turned me around, by testing us, not just copy what was on the board. I always thought I was stupid as I had never been tested. The female teachers judged me entirely on my untidy work.
Many schools use laptops now, hopefully it isn't such a big thing now.
Sorry for hijacking your blog Nuuan , I hapoe all your neural connections mend back just the way they were.
Leeanna