[clown_strike]

They didn't say in what way the kid's handwriting is trash, but I've noticed that westerners who have spent time writing kanji end up with handwriting that looks like it was done by a machine.

Probably the same concept at play, but what helped me as a kid was getting one of those black Pentel 0.5mm engineering mechanical pencils (used to be $5 apiece or so at Staples) and using it to write everything as small as possible. On college-rule paper my lettering would occupy 25% of the vertical space while strictly adhering to the bottom line in neat rows.

Few teachers could read my writing without a magnifying glass, but they got their revenge by specifying essay lengths in number of pages. I had to do 75% more work to meet the page count.

I wasn't intentionally being an asshole with this-- in writing such tiny lettering it forced me to pay attention to clarity of my lettering to an autistic degree, otherwise my writing would be entirely illegible to the teacher and my work would be rejected.