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The first and most obvious problem is created by right-handed desks

I had a good laugh at your post thinking it was rather clever humor and was about to write something witty back about left handed shot glasses, nunchucks, and corkscrews, but then I Googled "left handed desk" just in case and.. crap, you're not kidding! What horrible bloody desks kids are subjected to in your country!

He was being dramatic when he said "every classroom in America." I never saw any serious deployment of asymmetric desks before college. Rather just a handful of them mixed in with a Frankenstein-like assortment of worn-out furniture spanning the 20th century. They were to be avoided.

Left handed Jewish scribes (they write with a quill and ink) have a great advantage because they don't move their hand over the fresh ink.

Right handed ones have to hold their hand in the air over the parchment, or use quicker drying ink.

I'm left handed and I remember in school always having a gray color to the bottom of my hand from the pencil graphite.

The first and most obvious problem is created by right-handed desks, forcing us lefties to reach across our bodies to write with no support for our arm. Now, granted, there are usually one or two desks in a classroom for left-handers, but with 8-10% of the population being lefties, that leaves a shortage of left-handed desks in every classroom in America.

Umm, given 20-30 people in a class, that comes out to 2-3 left handed desks...

Your points are valid, as he or she forgot to mention the following:

In most classrooms, not a day goes by without the teacher requesting students rearrange their desks to work in groups together, and that's all it takes for the desks to be in a different order for the next class.

Even if left-handed desks never moved, there are no rules that left-handed desks are actually for left-handers only. As a classroom fills up, it's hard to tell which remaining desks are left-handed. It's also hard for right-handers to remember to look for the same, and end up sitting wherever they were about to, along with left-handers.

Left-handed desks are worthless when there are no policies about actually using them. And half-desks are worse than full-desks, anyway.

http://handedness.org/action/fairdesks.html

Brilliant article! This takes it to the next level in discussing institutionalized discrimination. I never knew how hard I actually had it. :)

As a lefty, I hope that people don't read that website and think we're all melodramatic crybabies! Lots of things in life are a little bit harder when you're left handed, fortunately we were granted extra brains to help deal with it.

Three of the last four US presidents were left handed. Is that some kind of institutionalized discrimination against right-handed politicians?