speech and southpaws

Where did I get off trying to impress people with my writing? I'm an engineer after all. I took no English classes in college, but I sure did take 4 semesters of calculus. I have always seemed to struggle with the literacy side of things. I was in speech therapy the majority of elementary school. When my mom told me that I would have to start speech lessons, I cried pleading that it was just because I didn't have "my wo fwon eeth" (that's two front teeth). I eventually asked people to start calling me Kim instead of Kimberly because I couldn't say it ("Kimbawee"). Of course this made me a really cute little kid, but my family and friends could hardly understand me.

I am also a terribly slow reader. Later in high school, after I got the speaking thing cleared up, I spent a weekend at a Dallas clinic taking a comprehensive aptitude test that would tell you what you would be truly happy doing in life when I discovered that I'm cross dominant.

"Cross dominant," you might be thinking, "what the heck does that mean?" Well, I guess back in preschool when you get separated into left-handed and right-handed, I got put in the wrong group. So the aptitude guy revealed to me that my unbelievably slow reading speed, and maybe even speech problems, stems from the fact that I'm supposed to be left handed because I'm left eye dominant. Basically it all boils down to the fact that I read mostly with my left eye (and right side of my brain), but when I learned to write with my right hand, all my letters got stored in the left side of my brain, so my brain has to do all this cross talking to actually comprehend the material.

The aptitude guy said that I might be able to correct this by learning to write with my left hand. Have any of you ever tried this? I don't even know how I did it the first time around with my right hand.

After all my experiences with this, I would really like to teach my kids (in the very far future) to write with both hands. Now, THAT would handy.