What's the proper way to handwrite a lowercase letter A?

Question

There were two ways of writing the letter A, as seen in figure 1 and figure 2. I'm a non-native English speaker and I was explicitly taught to write figure 2 by my Irish teacher. However, on computers and fonts, I've almost never seen figure 2 actually used. In real life I notice about 75% of people use figure 2.

I tried to google more on the subject, but google never understands my search properly, like "correct way of writing lowercase letter a"

So is there a correct way to write lowercase A? Which one is it? Which version do they teach in schools in English countries? What about non-English countries who teach English as a second language? How did such a large difference even develop?

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To answer your question simply: The proper (or at least normal) way to write "a" in handwriting is to write it "ɑ" without the arc above the loop.

The two ways to write lower-case a are called double-storey A (a) and single-storey A (ɑ). Single-storey is used for italics in most fonts. But why are there two different As?

Back in ye olde days there were many ways to write a lower-case A. (The same went for other letters, for example þ was later written "y", hence "ye olde days".) After a while there were two emerging winners: a and ɑ. One won the handwriting competition, and the other won the printing competition. And so it has been ever since.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A#Typographic_variants
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/a/42112
https://redditblog.com/2015/10/13/why-are-there-2-ways-to-write-the-lowercase-letter-a/

Note that all my sources are second-hand/Wikipedia, so take them with a grain of salt.

What's the proper way to handwrite a lowercase letter A?

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