room for improvement: selling out.

In the fifth grade, penmanship was still a school subject that you could get graded on. I would like to remark that I have exquisitely lovely handwriting - strangers compliment me on it. But it is not, shall we say, technically correct as defined by...whoever defines those things. It is stylistic. Over the years, I have strayed from the careful teachings of my penmanship teachers to develop my own style. And while the result is very pretty, it's not something you'd see on a bulletin board border in an elementary school.

I had already begun developing this style by the fifth grade, which was bad, because we were being graded on how well we stuck to the established method of writing proper cursive letters. We even had assignments where we had to write stories or a series of sentences that were alliteratively focused on specific letters. I received dismal marks on these assignments and a B on my report card. It pained me to stray from my developed style, but I wanted to get good grades, so I had to play by the rules. So I switched over to proper writing for these assignments. I began getting these papers back with A's instead of D's.

But I still made a B on my report card.

I realize now that I should have been making much lower than a B on my report card for the first go-round. My average on those handwriting assignments was easily a low C or a D. But I was otherwise a good student, a pleasant kid, and the teacher liked me. Besides, handwriting is a colossally stupid thing to be graded on. I understand that they probably do it to encourage students to write legibly, but in that case, make it a pass/fail situation. You could read my writing just fine; there was no need to go docking my GPA for it.

I am not bitter.

After I made the second B, I realized that my handwriting was not just being judged on the specific handwriting assignments - it was being graded all the time! Even when I was writing assignments for legitimate subjects like english and social studies and science, my penmanship was still being examined! So if I wanted to make that B go away, and I really, really did, I was going to have to play by the their silly handwriting rules all the time. I was going to have to reject my own developed personal style, the thing that separated me from the me that the state of North Carolina wanted me to be.

Of course I did it. And I magically got a neatly-written capital letter A for my next report card. At the end of the year, I got the most improved award for the remarkable turnaround in the quality of my handwriting. I realize now that my teacher most likely thought I had worked really hard all year to straighten my lines and smooth out my curves to earn my A grade, rather than my slow selling out to the system.

I look at my handwriting now, the smooth curves and soft lines, the letters that are drawn with influences from the cursive, print, and (in some cases) Greek alphabet, and I think, this is me. This is how Sandra writes, and it is gorgeous. But it would probably make me terrible handwriting grades in the fifth grade.