Being born left-handed in a world built for right-handed people can be quite frustrating. Functioning in an educational institution where everything is standardized to accommodate the 90 percent, according to Huffington Post, righty majority can be especially frustrating.
Furiously taking notes by hand can render your study tools useless when your hand smears the ink or graphite as you write. Efforts to at least be able to use proper hand posture to increase comfort and what little legibility you may have are highly important.
If you are right-handed you have probably taken for granted how even the tiny, auditorium-style desks allow you to rest your arm and your wrist, preventing cramps and other repetitive stress injuries, which TIFAQ.com says can be caused by poor writing posture. If there are any left-handed desks at all, there are very few of them. If desks can be freely moved around they will be the first to be pushed around to the most inconvenient spots in the classroom, such as behind a part of the wall that juts out, which makes it difficult to see the front of the classroom.
On top of all this, once you scour the classroom to find one of the few left-handed desks, you may find a classmate who you know to be right-handed is sitting in your desk.
Yes, I know we are in college and do not typically have assigned seating, but if I have spent the entire semester in that desk and unless you have some disability that would make your use of that particular desk more beneficial than mine, for all intents and purposes that desk is mine for that class period and you need to find your own.
While the above statement may initially sound a tad petty, think about it like this: the desk my classmate has commandeered is more academically and medically beneficial to me. In addition to it being difficult for them to use left-handed desks, it also makes no logical sense for them to be in that particular desk.
Please, avoid lefty desks if at all possible. Although you may believe that you would switch desks without conflict if asked, some left-handed people are too timid or anxious to approach someone like that. In order to avoid their discomfort and your own, simply avoid left-handed desks if you are not left-handed.
Why, you may ask, are only a minority of people left-handed? Humans have two hands, so the odds of favoring one over the other should be about 50/50, right? This is not the case, according to livescience.com. Handedness has everything to do with how social a species is. As humans are mostly, but not entirely, social and cooperative, 90 percent of us are right-handed. If we were a more competitive species, the ratio would be closer to 1:1. This is also why highly competitive environments such as some sports or professions statistically have a disproportionately high number of left-handed people.
Now that you know your likelihood of being right-handed was dictated by your species’ general willingness to cooperate with each other, cooperate with your fellow students and stay out of the left-handed desks.
