The whole “square dancing crush” idea is both hilarious and so relatable! Those elementary and high school memories of dancing with a partner, especially when it wasn’t your actual crush, must have been a blend of awkward and memorable moments. It’s funny how those things stick with us, and it’s even funnier that this thread on Facebook has brought out so many shared experiences from your classmates. I bet that comment section is pure gold!
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When I went to school, my mom put in my record not to try and force me to use either hand, I was ambidextrous and not to try and screw it up. I ended up where I write with my left hand, eat with my left hand, but do a lot of things with my right hand, like tools and such. I suspect that is because my older sister was left handed and taught me to write, and likely how to use utensils, while my dad was right handed as was my older brother.
Just as an interesting side note, my grandfather was sort of ambidextrous. He was from Italy and at 12 was apprenticed to a mason. He was left handed, which beside the timeframe (c1910), would not have worked well since apprentices worked side by side, so a left next to a rightie, not good:)
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One thing that surprised my son was that in school graduation they had us saying prayers (this was a public school, northern NJ burbs, late 70s/81). I didn’t, a Jewish friend and I refused, despite dirty looks. My son couldn’t believe they got away with it.
I also learned to use a slide rule in high school, even though calculators were already becoming common.
One big one, I used to walk to school from kindergarten on (it was like a couple of blocks from our house). Today, all the parents drive the kids there, you see very few kids walking.
The other one was that I learned to read formally in second grade, these days they are almost pushing it back into the womb, I swear (not a fan of early learning of that). In first grade we learned this alphabet called ITA (it is basically the international phonetic alphabet), they had books in it, etc.
The obvious one, no computers in school for most of it. In high school they had this TI computer, was a clunker.
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Your mention of ITA brought back memories. I did a term paper in English class my senior year in high school on the ITA. It was a fairly new concept then (1965-66) and I guess it was used for a while afterwards.
I agree with you about pushing reading so hard in kindergarten and 1st grade. My son (S15) was slow to decode. Fortunately, his kindergarten teacher believed that as long as he had good understanding of spoken language, reading would come in due time. He was in the lowest reading group in 1st and the start of 2nd grade. Something just clicked at about age 8, and by 4th grade he was in the highest reading group. He is to this day a prolific reader.
Several of my kids have cross dominance, very useful for sports. My oldest writes lefty, but kicks and throws righty. The next writes righty, but all sports are lefty. My youngest is mostly righty, but definitely kicks better lefty.
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My daughter is very close to a true ambidextrous. She is an art major and can draw with pencils in both hands, it’s very odd to watch. She eats with her left and writes with her right.
To bring it kind of back to the OP, a very smart preschool teacher told me to have her evaluated because handedness can actually be quite important. The teacher had noticed that she colored with a crayon in each hand. I ignored her until it became obvious later in elementary school that our daughter had some learning issues. Mistake on my part.
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I am true ambidextrous. I drove my teachers crazy when I was learning to write because I used my left hand until I got to the middle of the paper and then switched to my right hand. I had an ex-nun as a teacher in 6th grade who decided we would all have perfect cursive handwriting and she always accused me of “tracing” the exercises (continuous circles or wavy lines) because of the way it changed halfway through.
I now write on paper with my left hand (probably only because you start writing from the left so it made the most sense), but I use my right hand if writing on the white board. I can write backward, from the center out, upside down, or any way it could be done. The downside is that I struggled with any type of directionality and couldn’t tell my left from my right until middle school, many of my letters were backward, and I had no concept of the order of months of the year or days of the week.
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Without trying to stir controversy, but I recently read this book about boys growing up and the issues they are having, and the author makes the point that pushing early academics like reading is a bit unfair to boys, that girls tend to be able to learn to read earlier, and that the push for early learning to read works for girls but not necessarily for boys (he came up with an interesting stat. Finland, which scores very high on international tests, doesn’t start academics in school until 2nd grade).
Not surprised with your son. I learned to read in second grade, devoured books and increasingly at a high level, yet in reading groups I was never in the highest group. In middle school they tested my reading ability and in 7th grade I was reading at grad school level supposedly shrug.
Anyway was a wonderful book with a lot of food for thought.
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I remember the guy I wanted to dance with. Anthony. He was a farm boy, Polish, bigger than the average high school sophomore. He’d been to a LOT of weddings so he could really polka! (but no romantic interest, we just happened to be in the same gym class) For square dancing, there was one called “Swing like thunder”. The girls linked arms around the boys’ shoulder, boys turned and girls kicked their legs out. Well size really mattered as 4 big guys could hold 4 tiny girls; the rest of us ending up in a pile on the floor.
They only let us do that song once a year.
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Boy I hated square dancing. That was middle school.
I remember it being very difficult to get a decent grade in Middle school PE. I struggled to get a C most semesters. You had to make up every missed day even if you’d been terribly sick, and makeups involved showing up at 6am and running laps or doing sit-ups, all while recovering from whatever illness had kept you out in the first place. My spouse recalls almost being failed by the PE teachers after he injured his leg trying out for the track team and ended up on crutches. His parents and the principal had to intervene and make them give him reasonable activities to earn a passing grade.
Also I dissected a cat in high school physiology class. Eew.
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I remember dissecting a frog and a sheep’s eyeball. I clearly remember (look away now if squeamish) the banana-shaped yellow fat deposits in the frog and the rubbery cornea of the sheep. Pretty cool at the time, but now it seems disgusting. Do kids still dissect things in Bio?
Mine did dissections in bio.
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That reminds me. We also did dissections, but in AP Bio we raised chicks. But we gave half the chicks extra hormones or something to see how it affected their growth and other things. That is pretty horrible, no? And I have no recollection what happened to them after we were done.
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I’m pretty sure that at least all of the male chicks hatched in classrooms everywhere end up with a bad ending (I remember looking into it when my kids were little with chicks in the classroom).
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Oh yes. The cat. We had a choice of frog, cat or fetal pig! I chose frog.
My student was in an online high school and their AP Bio class sent lab kits to the house. He had to dissect a worm, a grasshopper and a frog at his desk!
We did the frog in biology. The cat was anatomy and physiology.
I remember looking through a microscope at a dissected worm in kindergarten. Vivid memory.
My husband dissected a fetal pig in college. They were allowed to bring it home and work on it.
My kids didn’t dissect anything in biology or in AP bio in school.
We had to make up every missed class also, but that just meant attending another PE class. I knew a guy who had a broken arm and missed many classes, returned to class and broke his arm in the first class. But you could pick any class as a make up. We got to choose the units we wanted to do, except one had to be swimming. Most were pretty fun like bowling, curling, archery, golf. Grades were based on attendance (I was very good at attendance), a written test of the rules (I was very good at written tests), and improvement (well I was usually so pathetic at the beginning there was no where to go but up). So I got As.
Toward the end of the semester, many kids spent hours in the gym making up all the missed classes. Really, like 4 hours per day making up classes for 3 weeks. The PE teachers were very strict about it.
Senior year my friend and I decided that since gym was right after lunch (we had open lunch), we’d spend a few weeks tanning by my pool instead of going to gym (5 minute walk from school). My mom said I hope you get in trouble. Well, we did, in order to graduate we had to attend gym during the week seniors had off for finals in gym class, all day until they were made up. My mom was happy.
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During elementary school, the only competitive sport was track, which was just a relay and a sprint. It was for 3-6 graders and we competed against the three other elementary schools in town. We ran barefooted at practices and meets. The final meet had all four schools competing and was held at night at the local college’s stadium. It was a big deal, and little medals were awarded to winners. Sadly, my mother wouldn’t let me compete at this meet in fifth grade bc it was cold and rainy, and she didn’t want me getting cold running around at night barefooted in the rain. 
. I got in trouble at school the next day when a boy was making fun of me for being afraid of getting sick, and I yelled at him saying that my mother wouldn’t let me go 
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Girls in my state also played half court six on six (really 3 on 3) basketball up until the ‘90s. You were either playing offense or defense while on court, with the defensive players bringing the ball to the half court line where their offensive players were waiting for the ball. Players on each half couldn’t cross the half court line. Most of the defensive players rarely got to switch to offense. I was a good shooter and could shoot jumpers with both hands, I think bc I also did gymnastics and we had to learn tumbling skills with both hands/feet (like we had to do cart wheels facing both right and left, and walkovers kicking over with both right and left legs). We shot mostly jumpers, layups, and hook shots which you don’t see a lot nowadays with women. My daughter was a bball player and she and her teammates never shot jumpers or hook shots. They didn’t know how. https://youtu.be/lZMCqEAxGrk?si=HA2hyp8a_WlDrPI0
We could dribble more than twice in OK.
I moved to a rural school the next year, and in 8th grade, the school allowed you to go on the school sponsored trip to the state fair in the capital city. We were just dropped off at the gate and told where to meet back up at the designated time. That ended after two young girls went missing at the fair one year and were never found. 1981 Fairground Kidnapping of Charlotte Kinsey and Cinda Pallett
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