Remember that really scary show called "Watcher in the Woods" or something like that back in the 80's? Ya know, the one where the girl keeps writing "Karen" on the window and backwards it spelled the name of something scary, but I can't even remember who "Nerak" was or what it was. Anyway...that brings me to my hypothesis.
Mikayla is smart; I mean, she's not a genius, but she's smart. So, when she kept insisting on writing her name perfectly "alyakiM" I tried to not be concerned, but really I was. She started on the right and moved perfectly to the left. When she was little, she picked up a book and turned the pages backwards. When she pretends to read, she moves her finger from right to left. I knew it wasn't dyslexia because she doesn't mix up letters in the middle of the word, she just does it all backwards.
I started thinking about the little girl I have tutored for almost five years now. When she started with me, she was only in third grade and was learning cursive. I had to exercise true patience, because she is so smart, but she seriously could not move from left to right and make the curls and everything that cursive requires. Then I realized that she's left-handed and as she was writing, she was covering up what she had written and would have to pick up her hand to continue, which kind of defeats the purpose of cursive.
Fast forward four years: We have worked on some tough stuff, as a matter of fact, it came to a point with functions and probability that I really thought it might need to be my last year tutoring because her algebra was getting too hard. However, she is smart and I can always look back in her text to figure out how to do it before I teach her. THEN, we were solving inequalities with squared numbers. Ya know, the ones where you have to take the square root of both sides, flip the sign and do both the positive and negative on the other side? Well, she was so stuck on negative numbers, and that was the easiest part of the equation. So, I went back and drew a number line and had her practice adding super easy stuff like, -4 + 7. She would come up with 11, -11 or even -3. It was like her brain did not see that starting on the left of the zero and adding is still moving right up the line..and subtracting is still moving left.
There's a lot more to it than that, but I realized that it is A LEFTY THING. I really believe it. Her brain doesn't see numbers and letters in a left to right fashion like the rest of us righties do. To her, moving left is natural, so to throw negative numbers in there and tell her to move right is just a whole "brain=retrain" thing.
Does this make sense to anyone? Has anyone read anything professionally about this? Are any of you lefties that can understand any of this. Meanwhile, I have a lefty and I want to be prepared for all of this. I've already got the name straightened out, but I swear it was retraining her brain, and I think it's going to take her longer to read and do cursive and all the things that we righties take for granted. Do you agree or am I looking into this too much?
7 comments:
that is so interesting to me! i've always wondered why people "see" things differently. i'll have to ask david about your lefty theory. i don't think he was meant to be left-handed, so he can kind of see both sides.
I'll have to ask my dad b/c he's left handed. Very interesting. I'll also ask my school pychologist friend. Can I copy and paste your post to send to him?
I work with helping a lot of lefties, mostly on handwriting. I teach handwriting for a living (to kids and adults: doctors, for instance) ... and I have about 50% left-handed students (compared with just 10% - 15% of left-handers in the general population. If you want some help for lefties' writing, visit my Handwriting Repair web-site at http://www.learn.to/handwrite and especially its "Lefties' Lounge" area (dedicated to left-handed writing techniques/hints/etc.)
I have 2 lefty kids and Eric should have been a lefty but he grew up in the day where they forced you to switch. The only thing I have seen w/ the kids is that their reading took longer to catch on but I don't know if that had anything to do w/ being lefties. Richie use to write everything backwards but maybe that is what happened, he re-trained his brain. I'll have to ponder this more.
My youngest brother is a lefty and had a lot of problems in school because of his reading. My mom started taking him to a special class on the weekends that taught him to use the right and left sides of the brain together, it's referred to as 'cross patterning'.
Anyhow, it helped him create a learning pattern that worked for him and he did really well after that.
So, when Quin started having problems, I did the same thing. I took him to a class last year where he was taught to do silly things like hop on one leg across the length of a room (which when we started he could only do on his left leg, not his right, which I had never noticed before and didn't think much of), jumping jacks, juggling scarfs, marching while hitting the right knee with the left hand (and vise versa) and things of that nature. All of these things were really hard for him at first because his right and left brain halves weren't communicating properly.
Point being, your daughter could probably benefit a lot from simple activities that would encourage the right and left halves of her brain to work together. Playing memory games with her and simple 'patty cake' type games can help her create better networks.
I can't promise anything, but it has done wonders for Quin, and my brother, and worse case scenario she may come away being slightly more coordinated and a little smarter if nothing else!
Good luck, and feel free to email me if you have any questions.
I'm right handed and have a lot of weird things go through my mind as I write. Just the other day I was writing and I heard a voice in my head say: eat marijuana, eat marijuanna, over and over again. The voice said other things and I hear it a lot even when I don't write.
I sometimes wonder if I should have been left handed.
I remember watching Mikayla at GS while everyone was busy making a picture from recyle products she was busy writing a note. Her finished note looked like this:
elyk uoy era naem alyakim
nana
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