All about perspective

Before i begin with my blog. Note that my son ‘J’ is called “trouble”.

Trouble brought home piles of paper work from school yesterday. One of them was a sheet that had people staring at a lake and the instructions were to draw a picture of a monster. Trouble had drawn a big monster with blood shooting everywhere. No big surprise there. And the monster was saying, “I hate you,” to the people. The unusual thing is that “I hate you” was written backwards, and when I say backwards, I mean written from right to left, each letter written backwards. It was an exact mirror image. I asked him why he had done that and he had no answer. Not only did he have no answer, he didn’t understand that he’d written it backwards.

This is not the first time he’s done something like this. We went to a family day when he was in pre-school and there was a teacher sitting across from him at a table and she asked him to write his name. He picked up the pencil and wrote his name upside down and backwards, so it read correctly to her sitting across from him, like it was the most natural thing in the world. She said she’d never seen a kid do that before.

Most of the time his writing is normal. Occasionally there’s a letter that’s backwards or something. His writing’s not that great and the spelling is still very imaginative. But every once in a while, I’ll see he’s written something completely mirror image. I don’t know quite what to make of it. I don’t think that’s dyslexia. My understanding is that would cause him to read and write with the letters randomly backwards and forwards, more jumbled. And that’s not what he’s doing. I wonder, if in drawing the picture, he was seeing the words from inside the picture, like from the monster’s perspective?

Trouble’s also a lefty, and I know that can be associated with different brain activity, different ways of thinking. Not sure if that might somehow be connected. We have several left-handed people in the family, and none of them seem to have done that.

Anyone else have a kid that does this? Is it as unusual as it seems to me? Trouble absolutely has his own ideas about things. He is undoubtedly wise beyond his years in many respects, but just making grade level in others. He’s a great critical and abstract thinker, he already has a shocking aptitude for negative numbers. His reading is on the higher range for his age. But this backwards writing thing. It’s just baffling. I’d have a problem doing it if someone asked me to, and he has trouble even comprehending that he’s done something strange.

P.S. – Amazing what you can find on Google. Suppose it can’t be that troubling when he’s in the company of da Vinci.

http://www.proteacher.net/discussions/showthread.php?t=6623

http://life.familyeducation.com/cognitive-development/early-learning/42297.html

http://handedness.org/action/leftwrite.html