“Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” we used to write in our handwriting class in school. Miss Lucy was our handwriting teacher, and she was very particular about it. I remember one day she taught us which alphabets have loops and which do not have (b, f, h, k, l were the looped ones, d, p, t the unlooped ones). We used to have that work book aptly called Cursive Foster, the beginning pages would have sentences whose words were dotted and we had to trace the dots, thus in a way learn cursive writing. As the class progressed and as we went deeper into the work book, the dots slowly disappeared so that by the time we reached the end of the book the dots were completely absent and we were supposed to be able to write perfectly in our own nice cursive handwriting. No wonder everyone had the same handwriting back then.
Then we went on to class 5, and Miss Sangte-liani was our Games teacher. We never actually played any games; she used to teach us old songs. Well, nowadays you can find almost everything on the internet, and I looked for two of those songs, the only two I can still remember, as of now. One of them was The Old Folks at Home, which I discovered is the official state song of Florida; you can read more about it here. And then there was Polly Wolly Doodle - here’s Shirley Temple singing it in the movie The Littlest Rebel.
Don’t have any money, you’ll still be bright and sunny, sing Polly Wolly Doodle all the day.
Cute Polly. Old Folks is such a nostalgic tune. You must be feeling nostalgic,bringing all this stuff out.
ReplyDeleteWay down the Swanee river far, far away.... I can't remember the rest of it 'cept for ...and for the olde folks at home We learned that in class 4. Lovely olde song. Can't look it up right now. Time for dinner.
ReplyDeleteAbout the handwriting, isn't it funny though how people quickly grow out of that cursive design and develop their own (and in the case of medicos) unreadable squiggles? heehee
mesjay - yeah the song itself is so sad. Remembering childhood days always maked me nostalgic.
ReplyDeleteJ- All the world am sad and dreary, evrywhere I roam. Oh dark is how my night grows weary, far from the old folks at home.Yeah even though we all sat in the same class everybody ended up with their own peculiar handwriting. Mine is also nothing to boast of, Miss Lucy would demote me to class 5 if she saw my handwriting now .
Ah the ever frustrating Cursive Foster textbooks, how i used to curse the Cursives!hehe not really
ReplyDelete@Calliopia - it actually takes a lot of work to have our handwriting illegibly calligraphed
My handwriting was heartbreakingly mocked at by a few teachers in Mt carmel...and that was the first of many a turning points
Young doctors nowadays have very good or at least normal handwriting. I think all it takes it an extra minute of your time not to write in "unreadable squiggles." So keep up that handiwork, OP.
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