Being Left-handed: True-life Stories
It was my last year at the University of Delaware, and I was at the Student Center buying my books. I had all small, ``seminar'' classes, not in lecture halls where the ends of rows had left-handed flip-up writing boards. Spending hours each day taking notes on right-hand side writing boards was twisting my back out of whack, and carrying books, I could feel it.
Feeling smart-alecky, I stopped in at the information booth to ask a question. ``How can I get left-handed desks on my classrooms?'' I asked. ``I don't know the answer to that one. Let me ask the Dean of Students,'' an especially caring work-study clerk said. Soon I was in the swanky third-floor office of the Dean of Students.
``Do you know that your kind represent 14 percent of the population, yet in my fourteen years here no one has ever made a request such as yours,'' he said. ``I wouldn't complain but . . .'' I said, ``this is the first semester where none of the classrooms I'm in have other than right-handed desks,'' I said demurely, shrinking from the smart-alecky feeling that put me on this quest.
``I'll have some chairs delivered by physical plant. Give me your class roster, and I'll have the desks delivered to each of your classrooms.'' The Dean got up and walked me out to the hall. ``Now,'' he said, ``I expect you'll get straight A's this term. . .'' he said to me.
``I'll try, sir,'' I said. Released to the hall I thought, ``yeah, straight A's, just like all the right-handed people...''
Within the next two weeks, a shrink-wrapped folding chair with a left-hand writing board showed up outside each of the classrooms. Feeling like a geek, I unwrapped and set up each desk as the rest of my classmates filed into each classroom. Now, where would I put the chair? I put each near the front, since in every case the professor (as well as everyone else) was eyeing me. I'd do what I could to dispose of the plastic wrap, and sit down. ``Okay, fuss over,'' I thought.
Little did I know. A few of the chairs disappeared right away. ``That's okay,'' I thought. It's only a few hours a week.''
In some classrooms, the chair was folded up by the door every time I came in, and I'd have to set it up again every class period. I was losing out on time to chat with classmates, setting up the chair each day, tending to my particular otherness while everyone else filed past. I wrote a note on one desk, ``[Please] stop moving this [#] desk.''
Soon, I found I'd have to retrieve desks from adjacent classrooms, and finally I figured it out: other left- handed people were moving the desk into adjacent classrooms so they could enjoy an hour of straight- spined note-taking.
I wrote more on the desks. ``Ask the Dean of Students for your own L-H desk.''
I have taken the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) three times (the scores really expire too quickly; how much dumber can you really get over the course of five years?). Each time I checked off the box for ``would prefer left-handed seating, if available.'' The results were ad-hoc at best, downright detrimental at worst.
The first time, the test was given in a large, flat-floored room with rows of desks. The left-handed people were seated two to a folding 8x3 table, in the back. These tables are rather tall, breast-height, so if you have breasts, you must decide whether to keep them on or beneath the table. I thought this treatment of the left-handed problem was all right, if it didn't really show much concession to southpaws.
The second time I took the GREs, they were in a huge lecture hall building on the University of Delaware campus, one containing four lecture halls, one on each cardinal point, with a large foyer suspended in the middle, which used to have a glassed-in computer center in the middle beneath the foyer, but I haven't been there in quite some time. For the sake of the GREs, the alphabet was quartered, and the first quarter would go into one lecture hall, the second into the next, etc. Some of these halls had been remodeled in the early eighties, and some had the original seating. All the ones I had ever been lectured in had left side writing boards along the left aisle seats. While it wasn't optimum seating, one could at least sit next to one friend while covertly enjoying the comfort of aligned note-taking. (Once I was taking an economics exam in such a hall, and the professor asked that everyone on the end of the row move in to make way for any latecomers. The proctor moved up the aisle as assertive left-handed people explained their choice of seating while non-assertive ones moved.)
For this second GRE, I was put in an unrenovated room, with all creaky, right-handed writing wings. I asked to be moved, explaining that there were left-handed seats in other lecture halls in the building, and I had truly requested left-handed seating, if it was available.
The proctors balked and treated me with open suspicion. Okay, okay, before deciding I was a cheat, they considered that I might be an imbecile, and explained to me several times over that I had to stay in that room, by dint of my last name beginning with such and such a letter. Alarms seemed to be going off. Under-proctors were calling over over-proctors, who were bringing in uber-proctors, and the party line was remaining the same. They were crowding me, stealing my oxygen and heating up the local climate around me. All eyes were turned, watching the commotion. I realized they were all upsetting me; I was nearly agitated to tears, and I had to take a test in minutes.
``Okay, just leave me alone,'' I said, ``I have to take a test and you're all bothering me. Let me compose myself.'' They all went away. I did some deep breathing, looked around, checked the leads on my pencils. Minutes passed. Suddenly, a parade of proctors came down the stairs that dropped into the hall from the hovering foyer above. They were carrying a litter, it seemed -- was someone injured? No, it was a folding left-handed desk. They set it down in the far aisle at the bottom of the stairs, and then paraded toward me. They were smiling in some way that suggested a relationship to me they didn't have. ``We found left-handed seating for you,'' one of them offered in a sing-song. ``We brought it down from upstairs!''
``I am going to take an exam in two minutes,'' I said, ``You have harassed me ever since I made my request. I told you I would like to be left alone. I won't sit over there. Now please leave me alone, and take that seat back to the room you found it in. I know why it was there.'' They didn't take the seat back as long as the test was in progress. I recalled that I had had a class in that building that semester, in one of the small classrooms in the mezzanine above the floating foyer, and the seat had been placed there because of me. I knew it wouldn't make it back to that room, and that someone would miss it, but would not ask for another.
The third time I took the GREs at Temple University. Again I requested left-handed seating, if avaiable. When I went to take the exam, I was hopeful when they called the left-handed people out of a line in the hallway of a large classroom building. We were led opposite most of the other people (there were very few of us, less than seven; as you may know, left-handed people are susceptible to early-deaths-by-accident, and most die before reaching graduate school), but then we were led into an ordinary, smallish classroom with all individual, right-winged chairs. The left-handed people were told to sit in the left-handed row, which was pushed practically into a grubby little coat cubby.
Now, when you sit in such a chair and write with your left hand in it, the gaze naturally falls to the left, (or is it to the right, so you always look like you're looking at someone else's exam) which in this case, was into the cubby. It was rather clastrophobic. I couldn't determine why anyone thought that ``available lefthanded seating'' would simply mean ``on the left side of the room,'' but that's how is was at Temple. I would also like to say that that might have been the most rankling place to take that exam, especially given the constant dumpster-hauling outside the tiny classroom's window.
So, if you're taking the exam, let me tell you, place matters! In addition, maybe you shouldn't bother with an institution that won't accept unofficial, old scores. And, well, complain about the treatment you're given as a left-handed person. Sometimes, it might work, although they'll expect much more from you if they fulfill your request than they do from fellow right-handers.
Go get'em, tiger!
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