JAUNDICED EYE
It was the terror of every schoolboy. Schoolgirls, it seemed, coped far better with its rigours.
It was called the Cursive Handwriting Chart. And an official in the Early Childhood Education section of the Eastern Cape Education Department assures me in an interview that it is remains in use throughout the land, still striking fear and despair into the hearts of the young.
Every class in the numerous junior schools I attended — in Zambia, Australia and South Africa; in English, Afrikaans and dual medium — had in common this single teaching aid. It was a large, laminated wall display chart that showed how each letter of the alphabet ideally should be written, in both lowercase and capital, as well as having a sentence to illustrate how the letters joined to form words.
The Afrikaans sentence, engraved on my normally flibbertigibbet mind, was; “Ons gee altyd net ons aller beste.” Which translates, equally dauntingly in English, to: “We always give only our very best.”
I knew this not be true of me. However dutiful my intentions, my cursive never progressed beyond a Jackson Pollack-like rendition, albeit in monochrome, of swirls and whirls, blobs and smears and smudges. This was to the despair of my long-suffering primary school teachers, all kind and patient women.