PEDAGOGICAL NOTES 2

14/11/2018

Among children who have school difficulties, left-handed people are the ones who, in class and at home, suffer more injustices ... why? Because nobody suspects the cause of their slowness, their mistakes and their difficulty in doing things well . There are partial deficiencies, often imperceptible, especially in the knowledge of the body schema, which create base gaps and make the most laudable project difficult.
In the ignorance of its true origin, the generalized opinion attributed the lateralized dominance to a bad habit from which it is easy to get rid of the good or the bad. For years we have heard opinions such as: "the left-handedness happens over time"; thinking that it was a custom of the first years and for that reason it was affirmed that once spent the first childhood, the "problem" was corrected by itself.
Even today, without realizing it, we express through language the superiority of the right-handers, awakening vague feelings of shame and sadness in the left-handed child, who feels himself inferior in conditions. These feelings run the risk of acquiring a more concrete form in the school environment, where the child discovers that he does not do things like the others. Thus we usually hear the following expressions:
• "He has stood up with his left foot", referring to someone who has had a bad day.
• We call a person experienced in a certain field "right-handed in the subject".
• ...
The repressed left-handedness can give rise to disturbances at psychomotor and affective level, appearing its complications not at the moment when it is disturbed but several months or years later, presenting difficulty in everything typographical: writing, reading, construction of maps, calculation ... , being these children recriminated by their lack of will and little attention.
After knowing the universe in which the left-handed child is going to develop, the question that we will have to ask ourselves will be: How to act before the left-handed child?
First of all we must demystify all the negative that regarding the left, for years and years, has been transmitted to us. A left-handed child is a completely normal child, has an evolutionary development according to his age and we should not allow the left-handedness to be a problem for him.
We will try to answer from here to three questions that are frequently asked:
1. How to teach writing to a left-handed child?
2. How to overcome the first difficulties that arise?
3. How to solve the problems that the left-handedness has posed?