I can remember when I was a little girl and first beginning to write. My older brother, my mom, and later, my teachers, all told me, “Hold the pencil this way,” and so I did. I only varied slightly from their initial demonstrations, continuing to develop a second grip when I started to write in cursive. I eventually went on to use both, alternating between the two when it seemed appropriate. But I knew which grip was the “gold standard.” They both, in fact, produced completely legible, (even beautiful by many standards) handwriting without any hand soreness or tiring, but it was that first “best practice” of pencil grips that was ingrained into me as a novice writer.
Fast forward to when I became a mom and my daughter was beginning to write. Which pencil grip do you suppose I taught her? This time it was out of my mouth that the words “Hold the pencil this way” came, as my fingers gently guided hers into that familiar tripod position.
We were off to a smooth start. She loved practicing her letters and numbers with all kinds of writing tools. So imagine my horror when slowly, stealthily, she developed a more personalized grip that completely derailed all of my hard work and good intentions. Everyone said it would be harder to correct a poor grip later on, so I patiently, diligently made correction after correction and tried my best to win a battle I never wished to engage in. But at some point along the way, I gave up. I was tired. I decided to wave my white flag and go pick a different hill to die on.
Now let’s fast forward again to adolescence. My daughter is an artist and over the years, she has added to the collection of art mediums she is passionate about. From sculpting to drawing, to painting, and photography, she is drawn to many types of expression. I will never forget the day after an intense week of dabbling with paints, colored pencils, and clay when she began complaining of hand pain. This type of complaining after long work sessions went on for quite some time. Then one morning, she came downstairs smiling. “What?!” I asked, smiling too. “Well,” she said. “I decided I’m using a poor pencil grip and it’s affecting my art. So I’m changing it.”
I’m pretty sure my mouth dropped open to the floor. We joked about it for a bit and she admitted the irony of the whole situation. But sure enough, just like that, she changed the way she was holding pencils, pens, and paintbrushes, and she never went back to the old grip again. I learned a lot that day.
Since many children begin writing at a young age and the coordinated effort takes a good amount of practice, it makes sense that those of us concerned with child development would want to encourage efficient hand muscle use early on. I can see how we would want to support children in using the small muscles of their hand with control, especially knowing how weakness with fine motor skills can impact other motor activities or how they sometimes co-occur with other learning and thinking differences.
But believe it or not, this post isn’t truly about the importance of developing a good pencil grip. You see, what my daughter showed me that day is the true meaning of learning or knowing.
The thing is, we change our thinking and our behaviors when it matters to us. It usually matters to us when we are personally connected or invested. Or when we have personal experiences that are meaningful for whatever information we’re connecting to those experiences. Or when we apply our knowledge to new experiences. As parents, we are often looking for all kinds of evidence of how much our children have learned. But we often forget exactly how things are learned to the point that they become habitual, and how adaptations to what was learned reveal a new level of the process altogether.
So if personal experience matters so much, does that mean that we shouldn’t bother at all with direct instruction, or bother to teach anything explicitly? While some do believe that, that’s not what I’m saying at all. What I’m advocating for, is that we factor in the element of time.
Sometimes, we need to encounter something many times in different contexts and have many experiences with it, before we can say that we’ve gained understanding, become proficient, or grasped it fully. If we begin to see learning as a series of intricately layered processes, we might also allow more time for that learning to unfold. The path toward deep understanding is not always linear. When we expect children to demonstrate their knowledge quickly without opportunities for that knowledge to grow, be extended, tested, or adapted, we risk misinterpreting their successes and failures along the meandering path toward fluency, mastery, or just simply, more. It all counts. It’s all meaningful. And as much as we like to try, we can’t control when and how learning happens.
