Proud to be sinister

sinister - (a) of, relating to, or situated to the left or on the left side of something especially being or relating to the side of a heraldic shield at the left of the person bearing it (b) of ill omen by reason of being on the left

I’m left handed. Have been so for as long as I can remember.

Prevention of left handedness.jpg

But what I also remember is that when I was about in grade 1 or 2, my teachers in my primary school in Malaysia tried to force me to be right handed. I do recall the raps across the knuckles and the teacher standing over me while I did my writing practice to ensure I kept using my right hand.

It was at this point that my maths grades started to suffer. I was getting 0% on tests, and all my teachers were baffled, as were my parents. No one could explain why I went from a fairly average to good student, to a poor one at this one particular subject.

And it would have remained that way if not for my habit of drawing on everything with chalk, as I loved to do around the house. One day, I used chalk to number all the stairs going up to the second floor of our home. My mum noticed this when she was carrying a basket of clean laundry upstairs, and her annoyance at me on the first flight of stairs turned to concern and realisation by the time she reached the second flight.

You see, I had numbered everything from stair 1 to 11 perfectly fine, but after that, instead of 12, 13, 14,1 5… etc., they were written as 21, 31, 41, 51 and onwards.

The forced transposition from one hand to another also resulted in a transposition of the placement of those numbers, and I was unconsciously writing the numbers back to front.

A quick check of my old maths tests from class showed the same thing. I actually had got the sums correct, however my answers were written back to front, resulting in a cross instead of a tick. To this day I am alarmed that no teacher ever looked deeper at my answers and realised what was happening. Had I not numbered our house stairs with chalk that day, who knows how long this would have gone on, and what impact this would have had on my learning to date.

Conversely, many years later in flying school, one of my proudest moments was when I scored 99.9% on a fiendishly difficult navigation examination. Only three of us in the class (of 12 students) passed that exam and I was chuffed to be one of them.

What makes this even more special is that when I asked my instructor where I had lost the 0.1%, he said that is was because I had copied down one of the numbers from the original question sheet onto my working sheet wrong. But I had come up with the right answer at the end using that wrong initial figure. That was where I had lost the 0.1%!

But the fact that my instructor didn’t just mark my answer wrong because the end result wasn’t what he expected, like my grade 2 teachers did, but instead went through the effort of completing the 2 pages of calculations with my input figures and see that I understood the problem and could come up with a solution - well, that meant so much to me, and showed me the difference between a good teacher and a bad one.

Addendum: I am actually not a strict left hander per se. I do a lot of one handed things (writing, bowling at cricket, playing tennis, eating with a spoon) left handed, but two handed things (playing guitar, batting at cricket, playing golf etc.) right handed.

Actually, I think in guitar playing especially, it helps to have my most dexterous hand doing all the hard fiddly bits on the neck and not just holding the pick and moving it up and down!