Lefty

​My oldest grandson is in kindergarten this year.  He had his first parent/teacher several weeks ago.  I didn’t know that they had parent/teacher conferences for kindergarten.  In my day kindergarten was a half day in a local church and my fondest memory was quiet time on a piece of carpet.  Today is a very different world.  My grandson has already been tested on how many numbers he knows, how many colors, both upper and lower case letters and a host of other things.  It’s fully fledged school.
His teacher has identified my grandson as left handed one of six in his class of 26.  A whopping 23% of the class is left handed.  We (I am a confessed left hander) make up only about 10% of the general population.  In my immediate family my Mom and Dad and three kids, two of us – the boys – are left handed.  In my world growing up I was in the majority and knew nothing else.
One of my most traumatic memories in when my 5th grade teacher insisted I wasn’t normal and insisted I should be converted to right handedness.  When I went home after school and explained my sin to parents my Dad had one of the most memorable responses.  He looked right at me and said:  “Rex, no one is going to change you from being left handed.”  The next day both my parents were in the Principal’s office demanding that my 5th grade teacher is instructed to back off.  The Principal agreed – she did – but she got even.  I received poor grades on my penmanship because I forced my hand across the page rather than dragging it and some letters were just backward for me.  One day the teacher called me to the front blackboard to demonstrate to the class how to write the letter “r”.  I wrote and everyone laughed, including the teacher.  She then asked another student to join me at the blackboard to show me how to write the letter “r”.  I was then instructed to fill the entire blackboard with “r’s”.
For my grandson it’s very different.  His teacher asked if someone in the family was left handed that my grandson could work with to show him how a left handed person writes.  I gladly accepted that assignment.  We bought a tablet that has the letters and numbers on the inside cover and then the paper with the big lines.  My grandson and I practice writing every time he visits.  He holds his pencil between his second and fourth finger which looks painful.  I tried to show him the “correct” way to hold the pencil and decided that was silly.  His way is the correct way.  Now we have fun together on projects that require writing.  This weekend he made a birthday card for his cousin.       
I’m so happy that my grandson won’t ever experience trauma at school because he’s left handed.