One of the things that I think was insane was the total insistence of teachers that left-handers had to do everything exactly like right-handed people. In the past, left-handed people usually had terrible writing. This wasn't because they were not capable of nice writing it was usually because they were basically FORCED to do things in ways that made it hard to nearly impossible for them to write neatly.
It is better now thanks to the wonder of ball-pointed pens. Before ball-point pens, if you touched ink writing before it had a chance to dry, it smeared. If a left-hander was forced to write just like a right-hander they had two major problems.
First, before ball-point pens, when you wrote with an old type pen they were designed to be pulled across the paper. If a person tried to push them it causes blops and inconsistent width of the line.
Secondly was the issue of smearing the ink as your hand passed over the still-wet ink. I spent a couple of years with blue permanently stained on the side of my left hand. (I am preballpoint and fountain pen's ink takes a little time to dry!!!) Teachers don't seem to have any flexibility or understanding that everyone couldn't be righthanded and left-handers have different problems and ways to deal with those issues. My handwriting greatly improved once the teachers gave up on making me write as if I was right handed.
Being left handed prepared you for dealing with things that just are not as you would like them to be. You are forced to adapt to a lot of things. On a side note, there is actually one thing where a left handed person is at a bit of an advantage. When typewritters were cirst created they put most of the most oftenly used keys on the left side. They did this because with the early key typewriter if you wer too fast you would stack keys. The arangment that they chose was to intentianally slow typing down.
