Several years ago at College, my best friend Joseph Mayanja convinced me to attend a class with him to check out his teacher. Joseph knew I was not keenly interested in Geography but he tempted me, saying that I would miss great “optical nutrition” of watching his new teacher as he wrote on the blackboard. He refused to divulge details of the marvel about the teacher.
Mr. Denison
Obua his new teacher was only a week old at the school and he would not know
all the students in his class. I sneaked into the lecture theater with Joseph,
and we sat next to each other at the back row of the reclining hall.
Not long
after we had sat, Denison - about 32, walked into the room in haste and quickly
took his seat at the front while greeting the class – the cheerful baritone
rousing my unsuspecting heart to beat at the melodious concerto of his voice that
reverberated in my head and distracted my attention.
Then, a pestering
tap on my hand shook me out of my distant look through the window - It was Joseph
and his stern look said, “keep your eyes on the board!” I returned my eyes to
the front of the lecture theater. Denison had finished settling in at his desk
to start the lesson.
He stood up
and faced the blackboard - he was lanky, about 6ft tall, with long athletic
limbs, broad shoulders and small, round firm butt cheeks. His body silently
sought my attention, gently courting my heart to drift across the room to dance
a private tango with him and whisper into his ears.
At that
moment, I reckoned this was the motive of my bosom friend’s desire to taunt my
gullible queer heart by inviting me to this class. I turned to Joseph to
acknowledge the success of his naughty scheme - but he returned a sterner look that demanded me to focus on the board.
Queer shock
Confused, and
the fact that I detested Geography notwithstanding, I begrudgingly
obeyed his unspoken instruction and turned to look at the blackboard. Denison
had just started writing the topic of the day on the board and immediately, my
erotic fantasy was stabbed by what my eyes beheld!
With the
chalk stick peculiarly held between the thumb and his fingers of his left hand,
Denison’s posture looked very weird as he wrote on the blackboard, standing
mid-way the breadth of the two-and-a-half-meter board in a fixed midway
position. He wrote pretty fast, only his head following through the forward
slanting letters he was depositing on the board. This accentuated his queer
posture.
Then something
totally unexpected happened when the sentence was midway – Denison swiftly
switched the chalk stick to his right hand and continued while maintaining the
aesthetic calligraphic handwriting and maintaining the horizontal line of the
words.
At
the end of the sentence, he switched the chalk stick back to his left hand and
without moving from the mid-position he stretched his left hand and started to
underline the topic, then switching to the right hand again when he got to the
mid-position and finishing off the line without changing its course or his
position!
I was dumbfounded by the seamless transfer and consistent delivery of both his hands! A quick
scan of the room revealed that all the students seemed excited by their new
teacher’s blackboard antics and so I turned to Joseph to register my amazement
at Denison’s gift – Joseph was already watching me with a wry smile and a sense
of satisfaction. He replied my awe-struck face with an acknowledging wink.
The handicap of all right-handers
As the
squeaky sound of the chalk against the blackboard echoed in my ears, and the
image of the exhilarated students faded, Denison’s ambidextrous advantage
elicited a special sense of natural disability of my left-hand that saddened
me.
The largest
majority of people are right-handers and are disabled to the extent that if they
tried to use the left hand to write, the results will likely turn out to be
very laughable scribbling of a three-year old! Left-handers are disabled the
same way in their right hand.
It would
seem therefore that exclusive right-handedness or left-handedness are
disadvantaged handwriting orientations for people with writing disabilities in
the left and right hands respectively.
Society once
demonized left-handedness and the selfish right handers designed human
lifestyle and technology to fit their own majority orientation. Humans have
since changed their negative perceptions about lefties. What is also true is
that there is the increasing need to be very versatile with both hands and feet
be it sports, at home or at the work place.
The
distinctive excellence of greats like Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and Christiano
Ronaldo is attributed to this ability. Perhaps soon we shall reckon that the future belongs to the ambidextrous minority.
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| Ambidextrous Chemistry teacher: It doesn't mater which hand! |
