Schooled by a preschooler

In the Great Order of Being, younger siblings are supposed to be, well, younger. But that Great Order doesn't take into account developmental delays or differences, and so it has already happened in our home that the three-year-old tells the eight-year-old How Things Are. Or, as my mother frequently says in her folksy, homespun way that does not quite mesh with her scholarly work as a medievalist and linguist, he told TH "how the cow ate the cabbage."

In this case, the cow was a writing implement. We've had an outbreak of eddymacationitis around here, with both Dubya and TH coming home from school, hell bent on schooling their baby brother. Little Da takes it in pretty good spirits, carefully answering all of Dubya's over-his-head math problems with a hopeful, "Two!" and applying himself diligently to the tracing of geometric shapes. I draw the line when Dubya tries to give me "homework" that I'm supposed to do with Little. I've got enough elementary-school work I'm repeating around here, thanks.

So, yesterday, a "day of rest" in which some of us did much resting, TH got the teaching bug, too. He rounded up Little and some paper and pens and got to work, trying to get him to write some letters. And that's when the teacher became the taught. TH still holds all writing implements in an impossible-seeming fisted grasp. We don't understand how he writes that way--it does not seem physically possible. Given that we have yet to break any laws of physics around here and that TH does, in fact, write (although almost completely illegibly), we must accept that it is.

Little is already engaged in the Handwriting without Tears program at his preschool. There are songs about how to hold a pencil. I don't know the song, but it involves the behavior of a thumb, an index finger, and a middle finger (not that kind of behavior). TH's grasp involves all five digits and a wrist perpendicular to the page. We've tried, for years, with all kinds of grips and shorty pencils and crayons and OT, all to no avail. In fact, he intellectually argues against changing his grip because to him, it's part of what makes him unique. He gets teary if we try to make him change it. That's kind of hard to resist, especially given that in a year or two, it's all gonna be keyboarding anyway. I happen to type at warp speed using two hands and six fingers (no thumbs, no pinkies! So overrated), so I feel that he's gonna be OK.

But Little Da lacks this foresight, and when his big brother and tutor TH started writing out the letters for his pupil to practice, the pupil had a little teaching of his own to do. He seized the pen from TH's fisted grasp and admonished, "THAT's not how we hold our pencil! We hold it like this!" And he executed a perfect tripod grasp.

TH was highly amused, as he is about most things. But I wonder if, with age, this amusement at their relative places on the developmental track, sometimes a reversal of the Great Order of Being, may not be quite so entertaining to him. We'll see.