Richard Bazeley, wood shop teacher in Australia offers the following comment:

My students have always been interested in the technique of using the hand and pencil as a marking gauge but few are able to copy it. One of the problems they have is the methods they use for holding a pencil to write. Many of them have never learnt how to hold a pencil properly. They hold the pencil with such an uncomfortable looking grip that I wonder how they can write at all. Ask your students to print the alphabet on a piece of paper. Observe how they hold their pencils and shape the letters. If they have been shown how to hold the pencil correctly then this is a simple task but if they haven’t then this simple task is quite a chore. How this affects the rest of their learning is a question I have asked the literacy teachers. I have yet to receive an answer.

Richard, I can remember being corrected as a 1st grader as I sat at my desk forming my letters. It seemed that I didn't have the "proper grip" and that began an early struggle that I finally abandoned. I'm not sure that the right grip is as important as finding ease and familiarity in the use of the pencil. In my first grade teacher's view, my grip has been wrong my whole life.

The thing that I suspect is happening is that simple writing tools are being abandoned as we peck our ways through life on the qwerty. Writing is not something that parents would allow school boards to invest class time towards. We think we have better things to do than provide time for children to become familiar and comfortable with technologies from the past. But today, the 5th and 6th grades class at Clear Spring will spend the morning with scissors and tomorrow the first and second grade students will each carve his or her own fountain pen with a knife. Richard, thank you for sharing your observations. I think your question for the literacy teachers is a good one. We have far too little information about learning and the way the hands grasp learning as we hurl our schools head-long into new technologies and continue to abandon familiarity of common tools and use of the hands.