Left-handers and learning

Patricia M. Schwert (pschwert who-is-at schwert.ssb.rochester.edu)
Thu, 11 Feb 1999 10:29:17 -0500

More anecdotes on the intriquing subject of spatial manipulation by
left-handed children. One of my sons (now 9) is left-handed and ties his
shoes in the same "interesting" way already decscribed. But there are
other oddities as well. When learning to write he wanted to start on the
right side of a page and work his way to the left - thankfully he has
gotten over this but it took considerable effort on his part because it
does not seem natural to him to do it this way. He still writes on what
by convention we call the back side of a page - with the holes on a
piece of loose leaf paper on the right rather than the left - drives his
teachers crazy! He writes in sprial notebooks the same way - opening the
back cover and writing on the backs of pages. He automatically opens
books backwards too. For example, opening the back cover of the
dictionary and starting with the last Z word instead of the first A word
- unorthodox but it works. He instinctively opens literary books this
same way but this doesn't work and he has to flip them over to get to
the beginning - which clearly frustrates him. When he was younger I
would watch him play with puzzles and games (tangrams and the like)
where the goal is to reproduce geometric patterms with smaller pieces.
He sequenced through these kinds of tasks bottom to top and a mirror
image of the way I would do them.

Having watched him for years I am convinced that he truly orients
space differently than I, as a right-handed person, do. It clearly
frustrates him to have to adjust to a world with spatial conventions
that convenience the majority but are counterintuitive to him.

Another of my sons (now 12) was what his preschool teachers called
"profoundly left-handed" - he wrote, ate, reached for things,
exclusively with his left hand. The day after his fifth birthday he
literally switched to being exclusively right-handed - there was no
transition of being ambidextrous - it was as if a toggle switch in his
brain had literally been flipped. Surprisingly there was no degradation
in his dexterity or the legibility of his writng - he just no longer did
anything with his left hand. My first thought was that he had been
pressured to conform to a right-handed world in school but that did not
seem to be the case - there were other left-handed children in his class
and I think if this were the explanation he would have continued to
prefer doing some things left-handed especially at home. The switch
mystified his teachers, me, and his pediatrition! There clearly is a lot
we don't know about the mind!

A final thought. These posts have all been about males - do
left-handed girls show similar spatial behaviors? I ask because I have a
daughter who writes and eats left-handed but ties shoes the right-handed
way, cuts with scissors right-handed because they work better that way,
etc. Handedness has never been an issue for her.

--
Patricia M. Schwert
Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY  14627