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Laterality, Quackery, and Teacher Attitudes - or - The Sequel

Met with Bob's Mom after school yesterday.

Bob is a seventh grader in a 6/7 split class which includes five identified (‘special needs') students. Bob himself has not been identified or even IEP'd, though some school-level testing was done last year. Details are not at hand; file has not yet arrived at our school.

Bob has a history of underachieving, daydreaming, and not completing written tasks. "Bright enough, but lazy".

During the lunch-hour on Thursday, Bob came to me and said quietly "Mrs. Thompson, do you know that I can wiggle my eyeballs?"

How does one respond?

"No. Show me."

The first time I had trouble containing my wonder, hardly believing that I was seeing his eyeballs vibrate briefly in tandem. I asked him to do it again. Wow!

This is not a talent that Bob flaunts for attention. (He said the other kids don't know, but he has discussed it enough to know that there is a girl in another class who can do the same.) Perhaps his revelation to me stemmed from a discussion of my interest in neurological differences when we talked about ‘scientific inquiry' in class. I had asked the children also, to start paying attention to their own learning styles, to what helps them to remember, to what they perceive is different about what they can do, etc.

That evening, still heady with having witnessed another neurological anomaly in another child with learning difficulties, I e-mailed a friend whose son has learning difficulties and who tolerates my many diatribes about laterality anomalies and neurological implications. By lunch-time on Friday I had a response: "...my daughter can do that..." !!!

To my disappointment, I had not been able to find a laterality discrepancy in Bob; by his own assessment, he scopes (visually) right, listens right, writes right, throws right, and kicks right. Without his file I could not check for his ‘handedness' report at kindergarten level. So here, perhaps, was the young man who would finally challenge my observations on the link between laterality anomalies and ‘schooling' success. (See "Laterality, LD and Genius?", Jan 2003, at: ||ldrc.ca||>; go to articles)

And then the meeting with Mom. Bob had, in fact, had much difficulty establishing handedness in the early grades; he still holds a knife in left hand at table. Mom also reported her own her lateral asymmetry, her frustrations at school, and her eventual ‘dropping out' of high school. Most fascinating was that she reported the same ‘uneven pupil dilation' that I had noted in a senior International Baccalaureate Scholarship student at an International School in Europe.

Bob's eyes are so dark that it is not easy to discern pupil mismatch, although his left eye is, at times, off the mark. He reports that ‘wiggling' his pupils makes his vision blur, but that he can also achieve this blurriness by moving that left eye out of focus.

We discussed, with Bob's help, his difficulties. He is capable of writing his own ideas - albeit briefly - onto paper. He cannot copy other material; not from board, not from a book on his desk. Mom showed how painstakingly in the early grades she had to ‘carry' each letter from speller to Bob's page. Bob is adept at other fine-motor skills such a sewing and cutting; he produces immaculate results with three-dimensional materials. The problem is not fine-motor, but is, perhaps, related to what Feuerstein called ‘visual transport', and/or somehow related to his perception of two-dimensional representation.

Mom dropped out of High School. Will Bob? Probably. He is already sadly disenchanted with school, is easily distracted by our AD/HD student (also laterally ‘crossed'), frustrated with his inability to comply with written requirements; depressed at his own uniqueness. We can do all the keyboarding and a/v supporting we want, but the standard in assessment is still - unrealistically - what the child can produce on paper.

Change is coming slowly. Teachers are busy jumping through Ministry hoops and cannot be expected to stop and think about the messages that are coming through loud and clear to the children like Bob: "You are different", "You are lazy", "It's your fault". Those few who have some type of perspective on LD can, at best, muster the attitude "You are a problem, a pain, an extra responsibility."

Change will come too slowly for Bob. We will use all types of interventions to try to force him into someone's concept of an educational model. And eventually we will fail because all those band-aide solutions will only reinforce our alienating attitudes.

We need to start taking neurology seriously. And the easily observable indicator of neurological difference seems to be the laterality profile of the very young child. (Read the 3-D thinkers: Doman, Davis, Dennison; consider ‘ATNR' as noted by C. Guy, in infants as young as four months.)

This is not a new concept. It has been in educational literature for a hundred years. It has been bandied about, and kicked around, and finally kicked out, because we tried to prove that every child who has a laterality anomaly (a degree of ambidexterity) will have a learning problem. Instead of throwing out all that cumulative wisdom, we should have taken it a step further: laterality anomalies are NOT signs of LD; they are a sign of EXCEPTIONALITY. DaVinci, Michelangelo, Einstein, Gretzky, Mike Weir (to name just a very few) all share this trait.

We need to look again at multiple intelligences theory.

There may have to be revolutionary changes in our entrenched ideas about ‘education'. Do we really need to wait for neuro-imaging before we give credence to the evidence that sits right before our eyes? Do we not trust our own consistent observations until some PhD comes and smacks us across the head with scientific evidence? Do we run a risk of litigation if some parent beats us to those scientists or doctors?

Our system needs to look again at laterality anomalies in the very young; they are harder to spot as children age and their habits settle to one side or the other.

Consider the six most troublesome youngsters ‘flagged' by teachers in my small Ontario elementary school last year:

• one kindergarten boy was described as ‘very bright' but with ‘behavioural difficulties' and problems with fine-motor (cutting and printing tasks). When I was called in to observe, I immediately noted that he was drawing on the whiteboard with his left hand, yet the teacher reported that he consistently uses his right hand for pencil/paper tasks. Fine-motor/gross-motor cross-lateral anomaly evident. (See notes on the five-year old boy in the ‘ldrc'article)
• a second kindergarten boy had serious difficulties with speech articulation as well as fine/gross motor co-ordination problems. He had no lateral preference.
• a grade one boy who seemed "letter-blind" held my kaleidoscope to his left eye but did paperwork with his right hand. ("mixed dominance" - lateral cross noted) This young man was transferred back to kgn halfway through the year where he and his family were much happier. Problem solved? ( ‘Dominance' issues do not disappear, though many find means of coping.)
• a grade one boy who presented with a multiplicity of fine-motor and behavioural difficulties, also crossed the kaleidoscope to left eye with his right hand and found it easier to read by closing one eye (see Dr. Stein from Oxford U about ‘monocular occlusion' studies; this boy was doing this automatically!) The boy's father was extremely reluctant to have his son ‘identified' (aka: ‘labelled'); he is a highly articulate and intelligent man who is, in his own words both "ambidextrous and dyslexic".
• two grade one girls, one orally capable and ‘good in math', the other struggling in all areas, both crossed the kaleidoscope across the midline; both were ‘cross-lateral'.
• a terribly troubling/troubled boy in grade six was in the process of being psychologically assessed. When I noted informally to a group of teachers that this boy was clearly ambidextrous, and that this might account for some of his problems, given that ambidexterity and dyslexia are so often co-incident, his former year's teacher stalked off with the comment "He's just lazy and stupid!" (She was an exact echo of the teacher of the dyslexic-and-ambidextrous boy in a smaller town in the Ottawa valley just a year earlier:"These children just have to accept the fact that they are lazy and stupid!"). The resultant psych report made no mention of ambidexterity.

Amazingly, when I mention laterality anomalies to the teachers of all these children, they look at me blankly and say they've never heard of it. (In their next step, I think, they write me off as some old ‘quack' who got stuck somewhere in the seventies.) In fairness, none of these good people have the time or energy to do research or to read papers - especially if those papers are generated from ‘foreign' parts of the world, like England. (And there are those Ministry hoops...)

What on earth are we doing to children?

And what are we teaching our teachers?

Ann Jaansalu-Thompson