Forever cursed by cursive

I never imagined that failing penmanship in primary school would come back to haunt me.

But alas, life is full of surprises.

Well, it turns out that the French are really big on handwriting and penmanship plays a big part of the primary school curriculum. The kids are banned from writing in script and all of the teachers here have really nice calligraphy-esque handwriting.

My 'crapaud foot' handwriting, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired. If my memory serves me right, I got the impressively low grade of  'E-'  in penmanship class when I was in primary school and was the only kid to be banned from writing in cursive. I remember my report card said something like, "Paul tries. Poor handwriting may be due to muscular problems in the wrist. Please see a doctor."

Anyways here are some pics from my first day of school:

This is what the teacher wrote on the board while I was introducing myself to the class. There was just  one little thing that I had to write myself cause she didn't know how to spell it. Think that you can figure out which one it was?

The weird part is that every single one of the kids copied Diego Martin EXACTLY how I had written it. I couldn't figure out if they were trying to mock me or if they really thought that this is how it was written. Silly kids.