The Left-handed Armchair

ONE MORNING IN GRADE 1, section Kanda, the pupils were excited to see a new thing in their classroom.

 

Everyone was talking about it: we were looking at it, yes, marveling at it. After all, we’d never seen anything like it before.

 

A beautiful thing made of wood—sleek, polished and brown, smooth brown. Anyone who entered our small classroom couldn’t miss it. Because it was not like our desks.

 

It was an armchair. And it was left-handed. Made especially for Clara, our teacher’s daughter, who was also our classmate. Her father made it for her.

 

So on this particular day, Clara sat on her new, left-handed brown armchair near her mother’s table at the back of the rest of us facing the chalkboard. She attended our class in her new armchair while we sat and wrote in our desks.

 

At the time, I must have wondered why they had to make her own armchair when she could also have used the desk just like us. 

 

On one hand, the armchair must have given her space to work on—but I doubt it: that armchair was in fact smaller than our desk. And I remember it was more comfortable writing on our desks. 

Maybe Clara must not have been anymore distracted in her armchair; yet, I’m sure, sitting in that lone armchair away from us deprived her of the conversation with us, her classmates.

 

Clara was probably limited by the desk—so it wasn’t useful to her at the time. Probably her parents—our teacher—deemed it best that she learn to write properly by supporting her left hand—and that cannot be done other than providing her a left-handed armchair where she could write. 

 

But whether one wrote with his left hand or right hand, the desk I shared with my seatmate was big enough to accommodate both our hands. It also had drawers where we put our books and writing materials.

 

Why did she really have to have an armchair? Was she being distracted—or bullied—by her seatmate? Did we, her classmates, annoy her in any way that she had to be placed separately from us? Maybe. I cannot anymore remember—I was only 6-or-so.

 

So why did she need the armchair? Was she given it based on her whim? Was it the whim of her parents? Clara was a quiet one, but she was a regular kid like us—so why was there even a need for her to be distanced—as in displaced—from the rest of the class?

 

Years later, I would not see Clara sitting in that left-handed armchair—in Grade 2 or anytime later. In later grades, she sat in the two-pupil desk just like us. Did her mother request our next-grade teachers to accommodate her armchair and was refused? Or did she just outgrow (the size of) the armchair itself?

 

If any, my classmate Clara’s left-handed armchair story shows that the one-size-fits-all approach in education obviously did not work and this was in the early 1980s Philippines.

 

Isn’t this what the New Learning is talking about—that a traditional approach does not usually suit everyone? While intended to serve a purpose, the tool of education used at the time—the desk—did not particularly suit the individual needs of the pupils. So a different kind of a learning tool—an armchair—was considered the alternative.

 

For one, Clara was fortunate she had parents who thought of an alternative to whatever she needed at the time. They thought it better for her to use an armchair. And they had leeway because Clara’s teacher was her own mother—she could give anything she needed in her own class.

 

The armchair was intended to suit Clara’s need—but did she learn fast or better in it? If it did, it certainly represented the breaking away from the tradition and the norm of the desk—to fit the need of an individual. It literally did away with the traditional desk.

 

Did it then form part of the “conscious, well-thought-through aspect of learning” deemed necessary by Clara’s teacher who was her own mother? So did it really help her? 

 

Using the left-handed armchair must have helped her to write well or learn better, but was it, after all, just another tool of the traditional approach, another representation of the didactic pedagogy—because it also rather limited Clara’s social interaction and isolated her from us?