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Sunday, August 08, 2010

Be of Good Chirality!

Athena has a fun meditation on handed-ness or chirality posted up at HuffPo.

Like Athena (and President Obama, come to find out) I am a southpaw. Back in fourth grade I was in a bicycle accident that lost me the use of my left hand for nearly two months, and very much to my surprise I switched to writing and drawing (back then I was never without a sketchpad) comfortably and with no discernible diminishment of talent with my right hand in just over a day. When the cast and bandages came off I returned instantly to writing with my left hand again, and since then I've never gone back -- however, there are some things I still prefer to do with my right hand, swing a bat or a golf club, for instance, on those incredibly rare occasions -- usually connected to the presence of my athletic brother -- when I have been roped into doing such a time-wasting thing, and I also sometimes find it easier to switch the chalk from left hand to right when writing on the board and close quarters between desk and wall constrain my movements. So, I guess I'm a bit ambivalent in this as in so many things. I've sometimes thought about cultivating my right-handedness deliberately, to see if the sorts of comments on papers change at all in consequence, but I suspect that no experiment could make end-of-term paper grading provocative.

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